Retirement investors should beware of our volatile ‘Marie Antoinette’ market

Beware our “Marie Antoinette” market.

Poor Marie Antoinette. The precocious French queen is champion known for her supposedly callous, clueless, privileged proposition that if the peasants couldn’t get capable bread, they should devour barroom instead.

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• ‘He has go hostile’: My ma is successful her 80s and has dementia. My member is blocking access.

• ‘I person definite issues with their mathematics skills’: Social Security gave maine excessively overmuch subsister benefit. Who’s wrong?

• ‘We ne'er privation to deliberation our children would portion america of each our money’: Is it harmless to springiness my kids my Social Security number?

Actually, she astir apt ne'er said it. But truthful often, it’s not what you said — it’s what radical deliberation you said that gets you into trouble.

And astatine the commencement of a caller year, arsenic U.S. investors eagerly instrumentality connected precocious levels of hazard successful their status portfolios, it’s worthy pointing out: This is simply a Marie Antoinette market.

Last April, erstwhile President Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement shook up the banal market, the president himself called American investors “weak” and “stupid” for panicking and bailing retired of the market.

Erstwhile MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called radical who were panicking “losers” and “failures.”

And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said radical reasoning astir status weren’t disquieted astir “day-today fluctuations” successful the marketplace — specified as, oh, a 4,000-point plunge successful the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA successful a mates of days.

Trump, of course, is worthy billions of dollars. Ditto Scott Bessent. Even Taylor Greene is worthy astir $25 million, mostly from inheritance.

For radical who are rich, their comments — oregon astatine slightest their implied proposal — is perfectly right. Someone with $25 million, oregon $1 billion, has nary peculiar crushed to interest unduly astir regular fluctuations successful the banal market, oregon to panic. Actually, if you’re rich, volatility is your friend, not your enemy: It lets you bargain up much stocks connected the cheap. Taylor Greene, presumably without immoderate wrong accusation whatsoever, did conscionable that successful the days earlier President Trump abruptly reversed his crayon-based trade-policy plan. Good for her.

These comments, incidentally, aren’t isolated. Who tin hide Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s remark that it would beryllium nary biggie if they conscionable stopped sending retired Social Security checks for a month? Only fraudsters would complain, helium said, portion honorable retirees would conscionable motion disconnected a month’s hold successful their checks. His evidence: His mother-in-law. To enactment it different way, Lutnick’s grounds — anecdotal, astatine that — consisted of a pistillate with a billionaire hedge-fund manager for a son-in-law. If she tin header without a Social Security cheque for 1 month, who can’t?