In the Age of Big Players, $100,000 buys you a head start on Trump’s mood

If you want a peek into Donald Trump’s mercurial soul, pay up. By subscribing to “Truth PSI” for a mere $100,000 a month, you can obtain his posts a few milliseconds ahead of the crowd. That head start matters because Trump’s posts move markets. When he announced a tariff “pause” on April 9th last year, the S&P 500 jumped by 9.52% and the NASDAQ jumped by 12.16%. Running a few milliseconds ahead of such market skinny is money in the bank. Selling that slender head start is all part of Trump Media’s attempt to monetize proprietary assets.

The sketchy ethics of Trump’s move to monetize his own unpredictability are as plain as the nose on your face. But it is harder to see that his moves reflect a shift in global economics away from market fundamentals towards a politicized world. While markets have always been troubled by political influences, the politicization of economic and social life has recently increased dramatically.

We have entered the age of Big Players. In this brave new world, once mighty market forces have been washed away in a flood of personal political influence. Today, Big Players like Trump or Xi or Modi move markets, not the demand-supply basics that economists call “underlying fundamentals.”

What Makes a Big Player?

In economic theory, a “Big Player” is “anyone who habitually exercises discretionary power to influence the market while himself remaining wholly or largely immune from the discipline of profit and........

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