I just tasked Claude Opus 4.8 to extend a chart, first drawn by Axios, to show the comparative performance of US presidents in their term up to the equivalent of the end of May in their second year, as we have just passed that point for Trump II. The longer I looked at it the more it bothered me.
The original tracked the S&P 500 through each president’s first year, indexed to the day before inauguration. Obama up 35%. Trump’s first term up 24%. Biden up 19%. George W. Bush down 16%. Trump’s second term, the red line, finishing year one up 15.7% after a near 17% faceplant during the April tariff panic.
I pushed every line out to 16 months to see who was still standing. Trump’s second term is the only one still climbing. It has now passed +26%, behind Obama and nobody else.
So Wall Street is fine. That is the part everyone can see.
Then there is the part nobody puts on a chart.
The other economy
US consumer debt just hit a record $18.8 trillion. Delinquencies are at 4.8%, the highest since 2017. Subprime auto loans 60 days past due are running at 6.65%, the worst in the 30-plus years anyone has been counting. Auto loans 90 days delinquent sit at a 15-year high. Personal and business bankruptcy filings rose 10.6% in the year to September.
The auto number is the one that should make you sit up. For decades Americans paid the car loan first, before the credit card, before almost anything, because losing the car meant losing the job. That hierarchy has broken. People are now defaulting on the thing they need to get to work. That is not belt-tightening. That is the belt snapping.
Same economy. The S&P at record highs and the repo man at record activity, same country, same month.
Corrupt but uber-capitalist
Here is the take I keep coming back to: the Trump regime is corrupt but uber-capitalist. They are not going to consciously do anything that harms wealth creation. They will damage plenty of other things - institutions, alliances, the rule of law, people - but not pure capitalism. Asset prices are the one scoreboard they actually respect.
You can see it in the behaviour. Every time the market votes no, Trump steps back. The April tariff rout became the April tariff pause. The red line on my chart is the track record of a man who will burn almost anything except the portfolio of the people who own shares.
What makes this stranger is that the US is absorbing genuinely large shocks - tariffs, mass deportations, a scrambled labour market - and still pulling away from its developed peers.
Look at the cars. Volkswagen just shut a German factory for the first time in its 88-year history, the Dresden plant, killed off by Chinese competition and a stalled EV transition. Meanwhile BMW’s single largest plant on the planet is not in Bavaria. It is in Spartanburg, South Carolina, building more than 1,500 vehicles a day and exporting over $10 billion worth a year. A German carmaker’s biggest bet is American soil. That is not an accident of tariffs. That is structural - cheaper energy, deeper capital markets, a flexible workforce and a domestic market that still spends.
The catch is in the last word
A domestic market that still spends.
The affluent who own shares are doing well, and they keep the consumption numbers afloat. The bottom half is funding its slice of that spending with subprime car paper and student loans it cannot service. You can run an economy like that for a while. The question is what happens when the consumer at the bottom finally stops, or gets stopped.
The regime will protect Wall Street on reflex. It has shown it will reverse course the moment the market frowns. Nobody is reversing course for the household 90 days late on a $600 car payment, because that household does not move the index.
The risk was never that these people would consciously crash capitalism. They worship it. The risk is that they break the consumer underneath it through sheer over-reach, and only notice when the damage finally shows up in a chart they care about. By then the red line is doing something very different.
I love a good chart. This one is quietly confronting. It tells you exactly who this economy is being run for, and it is honest enough to leave everyone else off the axis entirely.
Sources:
- Household Debt and Credit Report, Q1 2026 (newyorkfed.org)
- Car loan delinquencies hit record high (money.com)
- Bankruptcy filings increase 10.6 percent (uscourts.gov)
- Volkswagen closes a German plant for the first time (bbc.com)
- S&P 500 during presidents' first year (axios.com)