Call it pessimism. Or gloom. Or a feeling of being dispossessed. Or as Churchill labelled his periods of depression, Black Dog. Or, to be more modern, cognitive dissonance. It’s palpable. Many businessmen here are peering into their always-clouded crystal balls and seeing a bleak future for America. They have lost the Republican party to a hostile takeover by a man who muses about giving holders of U.S. government bonds a haircut, interrupting markets and disrupting supply chains by erecting tariff walls against countries he doesn’t like and corporations that invest overseas, decides increases in the minimum wages are a good idea after attacking them as job killers, and rampages across their television screens displaying his talent to abuse. For them, the political situation trumps all good economic news, and the game they are playing is “Yes, but.”

-Yes, car sales continue to move along at a near-record clip, but that’s only because dealers and manufacturers are offering credit terms much like those that banks were making available before the housing bubble burst.