Confusing Times And The ‘Incomprehensibly Incompatible’

It's a confusing time to be alive. In general, I mean. But also in the more narrow context of the economy and capital markets, where it's increasingly unclear whether the most basic concepts still apply. Last week, Morgan Stanley's Andrew Sheets attempted to square the circle by artfully presenting cycles as a kind of paradox. Most "normal" cycles are in fact unusual, he said. But their peculiarities notwithstanding, cycles exhibit patterns, many of which were readily observable just prior to

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One thought on “Confusing Times And The ‘Incomprehensibly Incompatible’”

Remember Calvin and Hobbes, that wonderfully insightful comic strip? Come next year, I suspect we’ll realize that, all this time, with all that money, we thought the Fed was playing “business cycle”, but they knew they were really playing “Calvinball”. “It’s almost…”, huffs Babysitter Girl running madly around the house, “…as if there weren’t any rules to this game!” My $7 trillion and platinum QE chip parked in the Zone of Wishfulness says, to paraphrase another of Hobbe’s best lines, “Macroeconomic analysis goes ‘Boink’?”