If you were looking to cash in on Donald Trump’s election, you may have already missed out on one opportunity. Private prison giants GEO Group and CoreCivic and have seen their stocks soar astronomically since Election Day. As of this writing, GEO Group is up 82 percent over the last month, and CoreCivic is up 68 percent. Those prices might be too expensive at this point to win you a windfall.
Still, investors are betting heavily that the Trump administration will sign major contracts with these companies to erect concentration camps for the millions of people they’ve promised to deport.
In an earnings call Thursday, GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoleysaid the company “was built for this unique moment in our company’s — country’s history and the opportunity that it will bring.”
Brian Evans, GEO Group’s chief executive officer, said on the call, “We’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services.”
Now, maybe you’re not the type of person to seek personal profit from a mass deportation program, or maybe you would never invest in an industry of for-profit incarceration even if it wasn’t giddily gearing up to enable a white nationalist wet dream. If so, I get it. You’re not going to cry about being too late to the party.
But there’s a lot of money being made suddenly since bets on Trump paid off. Dogecoin cryptocurrency is up 14 percent over the last month, in part because the DOGE stock symbol is shared with the new Department of Government Efficiency that Trump just announced, which will be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. If Elon Musk now virtually owns the presidency, J.D. Vance super-patron Peter Thiel owns the vice-presidency. He recently sold over $1 billion worth of his Palantir stock, but that was premature. It has risen a further 44 percent since his sale and is up 264 percent year-to-date.
The stock market is booming in general, which was the case even before Trump’s victory, so a correction is surely coming. I think the irrational exuberance may last a while longer, however, at least until Trump is inaugurated and reality begins to set in. His tariff ideas have a real potential to send stocks plummeting. Beyond that, once his deportation program gets up and running, it will create some real turbulence in the economy that could easily spook investors into a big sell-off.
I think a lot of people are getting rich and more will get rich in this narrow window between the excitement over promises of tax breaks and lax regulation and the reality that the stock market is already too high and Trump is going to fuck things up.
So, get in now while the going is good, and then get out quick!
I’m not sure that tax cuts and loose regulation have anything to do with the crypto bump or the prison bump.
Prisons are based on the expectation that Trump is going to put millions in camps. That has nothing to do with taxes or regulation.
Crypto is based on the expectation that the US economy will be destroyed along with a portion of the global economy. The goal here is to have crypto replace various national currencies in a sort of global backup. Crypto has always been a weapon with the goal of taking down dollar as the worlds reserve company and replacing it.
Trump does not know that side of crypto. To him it’s just a Ponzi scheme and a grift where he can make some side money. Thiel and Musk and the tech elite out of California fully want to control the entire global economy and that takes bringing down the entire US.
I agree that private prison stocks and crypto prices have little to do with the overall price of the stock market, but what they share in common is that they’re overpriced.
We had a meeting last week with our financial adviser, and I expressed my concerns about the fallout from this whole tariff plan. Fact is, we really don’t have any real world experience, in modern times, for what Trump is proposing. But we know the general effects that tariffs have, and I don’t believe there will much in the way of positive effects. I think people are going to find out that this big wet dream they have about making America great again is going to bump up against the reality of higher prices and a renewal of inflation. And it this whole deportation thing comes off as all of MAGA hopes, you can probably add persistently high food prices to the list of things that are not so great for the MAGA faithful. We’ll certainly get a chance to see what happens when you have totally unfettered MAGA economic policy being implemented. Regardless, I don’t expect his cult to accept the negative fallout as actually being related to anything Trump does. They will believe, evidence be damned, that anything bad is someone else’s fault. If shit does get bad, economically, I am certainly going to take some modicum of pleasure shoving it in the face of all the MAGAs in my world.
They don’t care. The well off ones will benefit from it. The working class ones are screwed anyways and as largely non college educated and male they are outcasts and the “scum” of our society. They have nothing to vote for other than getting even with the educated so they can go away with a shred of dignity and a grin.
If I didn’t make six figures heck I’d debate joining them just because holy shit team blue in my income range really does need to be crushed and ruined.
I was chatting with some coworkers (all super smart liberals) and the consensus was that Trump would not do either mass deportations or implement across the board tariffs. Their view was he’d make some token gestures at these things, maybe choose a city for some raids and say he solved the problem. Similarly he’d just implement some China tariffs and that would be of minimal impact. I dunno if I agree, he seemed to really believe in both of those things but Trump is such a serial liar you can never be sure.
Yeah, I’ve heard the same thing – it’s not just possible. This is “it can’t happen here” thinking. And maybe in this instance they’re right! If Republicans know what’s good for them, crashing the economy won’t be top priority. But you never know. These people are great at propaganda, but otherwise aren’t that bright.