Donald Trump picks winners and losers in corporate America now. This opens up thrilling new opportunities for anyone who feels confident in predicting the president’s next steps and potentially alarming risks for everyone else.
The past couple of weeks have brought some extraordinary scenes. It becomes clearer every day that it is no longer left to the invisible hand of capitalism to figure out who will win in the money game. Instead, the Trump administration is setting entirely new rules, and is proud of it.
Last week it said it would grant newfangled export licences to chips monster Nvidia and to AMD, enabling them to send certain products to China. The government will get a 15 per cent cut of the revenues. Set aside for a moment the security concerns here. “What’s next — letting Lockheed Martin sell F-35s to China for a 15 per cent commission?” as one expert put it to us this week. Instead, focus on the seemingly unprecedented nature of these licence deals, and think about how the Trump administration might award them in future.