ORBVEST'S OUTLOOK ON THE US ELECTIONS

Orbvest CEO Martin Freeman talks to Alec Hogg from BizNews about OrbVest and the US Election:

"Martin Freeman is the chief executive of OrbVest – and he lives in New York. On a day when the world is looking at you in the United States, what an incredible election this has been.

Thanks for having me on your show today. It’s certainly been a wild ride. 

Does it do much, though, to investments? We’re seeing the investment markets, for instance, waking up this morning and seeing NASDAQ futures and the S&P futures up very strongly. It seems strange because we don’t have a result. There’s no certainty as we’re talking.

So I think what I’d like to do is certainly just give my perspective on things. I’m not a political expert, but from an economic perspective, one thing I want to draw everyone’s attention to is the fact that America is built on the principle of checks and balances. In the US, the decision making process is made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate, and they essentially are the final decision makers in every initiative.

So what you’ve seen over the past four years, is a Republican president and a Republican Senate, and the Democrats were pretty convinced that they would sweep both. So America’s waking up to the fact that even if Biden does win, he won’t have the Senate – which means that many of his campaign initiatives around taxation and other aspects will probably be either blocked or watered down. 

That’s obviously good news from an economic perspective. So he certainly may struggle to get extreme initiatives through. 

That’s a good thing, as you say, with the checks and balances. But talking about OrbVest itself. We know that OrbVest invests only in medical properties in the United States. How would this impact your business?

Well, I think the thing to consider is the two candidates. I must just tell you, that even 20 minutes ago, I was flicking between the various channels. It’s been exhausting spending most of the night – as most of America – staying up and watching and seeing it move from, certainly in the early stage Biden and then to the Republicans and Trump, now it looks like it’s swinging back towards Biden.

To answer your question directly, in the economic circumstances around OrbVest, if it was a Trump victory, it would be much the same and it would be almost a V-shaped recovery and economy. That’s what most people were predicting. Biden, it may be a little bit slower, such as they saw after the GFC. 

In terms of OrbVest right now, we are suddenly seeing a flood of potential deals onto the market, but with the proviso that people are wanting to close these deals by December so they can bank their capital gains. Because Biden has obviously spoken about increasing capital gains tax and 1031 programmes, which we don’t use anyway."