Here’s A Thought: What If (Almost) Everybody Is Wrong?
"[It's] the hope that a COVID 'new normal' may not materialize."
That's how JonesTrading's Mike O'Rourke summed up the mood after a rousing start to the new week for US equities, which rallied in delirious fashion on a combination of vaccine news, surging crude and a possible game-changing step towards a fiscal union in virus-ravaged Europe.
Even if Monday's euphoria quickly evaporates under the heat of some new negative development on the virus front or further signs that relations between th
Anecdotally, my savings hasn’t picked up, my spending has just shifted from away from restaurants/bars to buying more stuff for around the house. Around the house stuff obviously requires more manufacturing. If there’s enough people like me, inflation could be real possibility
Accept most of the millennium generation have already declared the virus done (regardless of the real situation). Only in America:)
I must say H, the following is
well above ordinary prose:
“…overstimulated this sleeping beast, and that once it wakes up, it will rip out the IVs, eat the nearest nurse and run snarling through the hospital lobby and out the front door.”
I laughed. Yet I think this is very likely the truth. There is a definite sense of that sleeping beast.
Living out here in the suburbs of a southern city life in this “lock-down” has been peaceful – less traffic, more neighbors out walking. Even as one who has stuck to the mask wearing and social distancing guidelines, I find myself tired of them and more sympathetic to the 50% that aren’t wearing masks at the grocery stores.
Also I agree that science will astound us with a vaccine or at least a mostly effective treatment sooner than expected. The advances in therapies based on gene editing have been insane the past few years.
I am as aghast as the next guy, but as the cycle guy out here in a world of blythely ignorant non-believers, I have to report what I see poking out of the trees in the forest. What is the Fed doing? it is acting like Zimbabwe or Argentina. To be blunt, it is scared of its public – they don’t like the medicine so I won’t give it. You don’t have to be Austrian to see that the Fed has gone amuck. Telescoping history, it looks like the Reichsbank but without the collapsing political structure of Germany in 1919. Since 2010 and for 10 years since, the Fed have been pussies to use a Boomer term and now they have tigers around them. That’s a long way to say that they are worse than Argentina and Zimbabwe. Our cycles say it is payback, that the dollar will be crushed in the next few years, The dollar is garbage but we don’t know it yet. The cycles are so strong in this direction that our first letter of the year started off saying “Welcome to January 1973, the maket has it totally wrong” Well, we weren’t quite that ballsy but we said that 2020 would be very down – not up. August has been our favorite low, but March 20 (or 23) with a Zimbabwe printing effort might shorten the drop. Has anyone talked to Zimbabwe ? I have – and they weren’t dummies! There are slippery slopes out there.
John,
I wonder if you are making an assumption about our political structure being not as close to collapse as 1919 Deutschland. Collapses are always evident in hindsight. Just a thought…
The Smart Anonymous
Here on H’s platform we’ve gone from the risk of front end negative rates to backend upside surprise – not faulting H here as he describes fairly what he sees and hears … but I propose too many are looking at a very opaque environment and making inferences like the 9 blind folks and elephant, patience will be rewarded, or punished … maybe the question is – is there some middle ground?
Thinking is important. The monetary coin has two sides.