A bet against volatility has room to get pricier and more painful.
The political consensus is changing.
About 41 per cent of G20 countries' economic output (plus Spain) is governed by populists, up from about 4 per cent in 2007, according to Bloomberg Economics.
Defining populism is obviously tricky - the US under Trump is classed as populist while the UK isn't - but there have been some sensible appraisals of what the common economic thread might be.
Allianz Global Investors has predicted more protectionism, more inflation, a higher cost of borrowing and divergence between national "winners" and "losers" in a beggar-thy-neighbor world of protectionism.
This tendency towards short-termism is eroding investor confidence and pushing up volatility in markets already at risk from rising interest rates and the withdrawal of U.S. dollar liquidity.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has fanned the flames of his country's overheating economy by opposing rate hikes and deepened a diplomatic spat with Trump by calling for a boycott of US goods.
In Italy, the shock collapse of a highway bridge that cost the lives of at least 43 people has been cheaply politicized by the government in its budget talks with the European Union.
Sentiment is febrile.
In this Darwinian world, where the dollar rules the roost and top central banks are desperate to preserve stability, volatility in relative safe havens like the US is likely to be lower than at the periphery.
Investors are less jumpy when Trump tweets than they used to be. As unwelcome as his scattershot tweet-storms might be, there is confidence the technocrats are still in charge. Currency volatility in emerging markets is far outpacing that in the G7.
Still, it's likely that this uncertainty will seep into the core eventually. We are on a long journey towards higher volatility globally, as Miton Group portfolio manager David Jane puts it, and the conditions that led to February's spike in the VIX - rising rates, retrenched liquidity and hedge funds betting against price swings - are still there.
Political risk is hard to quantify, but Trump's bite has plenty of time to get worse than his bark.
Look how his offhand tweet about South Africa's land reform plans still sent the rand tumbling on Thursday. As the policy script gets torn up and rewritten, investors need to brace for more turbulence.