Kevin O’Leary , Shark Tank ‘s Mr. Wonderful, apparently thinks Donald Trump will be wonderful for the stock market as president of the United States.
He claims that stocks will “go straight up” when (and not if, in O’Leary’s prediction) Trump, the current GOP front-runner, wins the White House in November 2016.
In an interview today on financial network CNBC , O’Leary offered this prediction for election 2016.
“The old, crusty brands aren’t going to work. Bush brand. Gone. Clinton’s not going to work…I think what we’re going to see happen — although it’s so remarkable and I’m not endorsing his candidacy — is Trump is going to ride his way into the White House on a populist wave of anger at our government.”
Not a member of either political party, Kevin O’Leary claims that Donald Trump will reform the tax code, which will then allow companies to expand and create more jobs. He insists, however, that Trump will never build the wall at the Mexican border after his presidential advisers talk him out of it.
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Kevin O’Leary starred in Shark Tank ‘s Canadian precursor, Dragon’s Den , and was also a familiar presence on Canadian TV discussing politics and finance.
He also praised Trump as a businessman who can get action. “This guy gets deals done,” O’Leary declared.”Let this guy do some business. Let him start solving things that we care about as investors.”
As far as Hillary Clinton is concerned, O’Leary is out because she is hostile to business. “I have nothing against her. She’s a fine woman. I respect her, but she has hurt me as an investor in biotech and pharma. These are great companies in America.”
O’Leary is contemplating a political career of his own to make government more business and taxpayer friendly. He may be positioning himself to run for prime minister of Canada by seeking the Conservative Party leadership there. O’Leary has lived in the Boston area for 20 years, but is still a Canadian citizen. In the alternative, he might seek the leadership of the Liberal Party, because in his view, new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is going to be a disaster.
“I don’t think the old political brands will matter in the next election,” O’Leary told the CBC, remarks similar to what he articulated on TV about Trump. “I can choose which party to actually run in because I think there will be a leadership race in the Liberal Party.”
As the Inquisitr previously reported , former Prime Minister Stephen Harper led the Conservative Party while it was in power from 2006 to 2015. Harper resigned as leader (but still retained his seat in parliament) after his party’s defeat in the October 2015 Canadian election that resulted in the Liberals, led by legacy candidate Trudeau, forming the current government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drlcDyyyd0g
Although it is not mandatory, Canada’s prime minister traditionally is an elected member of in the country’s parliament, the House of Commons. Whether O’Leary — assuming he actually runs for the Tory leadership, which is far from clear and may be just a publicity stunt — would break that mold is pure speculation at this point.
The Shark Tank cast member and mutual fund chairman has an estimated net worth of $300 million and continues to describe himself as “agnostic” as to party affiliation.
The Conservative (a.k.a. Tory) leadership election won’t occur until Mary 27, 2017; it’s too early to tell if conservative voters in Canada will decide if the millionaire businessman and brash TV personality is actually Mr. Wonderful in the political sense. O’Leary leads or ties the other potential candidate in one recent poll, so it remains to be seen if he can make Canada great again, so to speak.
O’Leary spoke at an influential conservative conference on Friday in Ottawa apparently as part of his attempt to burnish his political credentials. “What I’m going to be doing with this platform and why I’m here today is I’ve decided that in every government policy or government spending from now on, I’m going to spend a tremendous amount of energy exposing it to the public and showing them where it’s broken. I hope to make this a nightmare for politicians that think they can continue wastefully spending our money,” he asserted at the conference.
The Shark Tank star is investing, as it were, little hope in the liberal Trudeau administration, he explained to Huffington Post Canada .
“The Trudeau mandate is going to end in economic catastrophe. The budget I see coming is going to be between $40 and $45 billion deficit. A third of that is going to be wasted because the government can’t spend that much money — never could regardless of which party. I’ve watched him in his first 60 days spend $4 billion and not create one Canadian job. If that’s how the rest of his mandate is going to go, it will end very badly. Not only for him but for all Canadians.”
He has also continued to blast Alberta Premier Rachel Notley who, in his opinion, is “completely incompetent” because of her mishandling of the economy in that Canadian province.
Although they are both reality show stars, the TV Shark says that that’s where the comparison with Donald Trump ends. Trump is running as a populist, a movement that Kevin O’Leary argues doesn’t exist in Canada.
[AP Photo by Richard Drew/AP]