Meanwhile, In A Parallel Universe

It’s that time of the week.

Friday is the day when we take a moment to marvel at large numbers and pretend we weren’t aware of them previously.

In “better” times, this was an exercise I’d conduct while letting the first few sips of something dark and expensive loiter briefly on my lips.

Long before I wrote about markets for the public, I was a consumer of other people’s macro musings. If I wasn’t two drinks and $50 into a large bar tab by noon on a Friday, I was late.

Back then, I could tolerate what I later came to call “financial agitprop.” Around 2009, it became fashionable for the media to turn cherry-picked quotes from sell-side notes into “news.” I’d scroll through the detritus with my right thumb, stirring ice around scotch (or scotch around ice) with my left forefinger.

A lot of people still had their BlackBerrys. I bought the first iPhone. I was out of town, in what I’d describe as a third-tier US city. I’ve mentioned it here before. There was an Italian place I liked, since closed. I knew the owners. Their daughter was a friend. Behind the server alley (where waiters congregate and gossip about you while waiting on the kitchen to finish making your meal) there was a cramped, makeshift office with a safe and a computer. I used that computer to set up the iPhone. The owners and a few of the servers competed for space to watch me activate what, at the time, was a truly magical device. Between us, we managed to get it working. Within a half hour, I was too inebriated to use it, unaccustomed to the various taps, touches and swipes which, a dozen years on, our fingers do instinctually.

If I could somehow edit out a single Saturday in 2014 from my life sequence, I’d have likely spent this Friday perched at a bar top. Maybe raising and lowering a surgical mask between sips. I’d likely be scrolling on a device named for, but bearing almost no resemblance to, the one I activated on Bob and Becky’s office computer what seems like a lifetime ago. And I might very well be reading someone else’s take on the latest edition of BofA’s popular “Flow Show” series, as opposed to writing my own.

What would someone else’s take sound like? Well, it would probably be an exercise in feigned incredulity, befitting of the note itself.

The journalists (or bloggers) would tell me that inflows into global equities are still annualizing more than $1 trillion. $1.48 trillion, to be exact. They’d show me the chart on the left (below) and tell me that central banks have finally achieved “TINA” perfection, with the implication being it’s a dubious feat guaranteed to end in tears.

Then, they’d point me to the chart on the right, and ask (rhetorically) what will happen to equities as the liquidity impulse wanes. They’d say something like: “How will the bagholders who plowed their stimulus checks into equities at dot-com multiples feel when the marginal, price-insensitive buyer steps away and we derate just as profit growth slows?”

After that (or maybe before that), they’d quote BofA’s Michael Hartnett, who wrote that “September’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package plus the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better reconciliation [bill] equals $4.5 trillion, or >20% GDP.”

They’d quote Hartnett again: “The epic US fiscal stimulus follow[s] three COVID packages equal to $5 trillion [and] September’s stimulus would arrive with 12% GDP growth, 5% inflation and a 33% deficit.”

Then, they’d point me to the chart (above, from Hartnett), mention something about inflation and close with an ostensibly clever quip about things “not ending well.”

I’d chuckle through my mask at the predictably unoriginal punchline and finish my second drink.

Jeff, the bartender, would point at the glass: “You ready? Same ice?”

“Sure.” (Always use the same ice when it’s expensive.)

As he free-poured another $25, I’d needle him with the same joke.

“You’re no better than me, you know.”

And he’d deliver his standard rejoinder.

“I wish I made as much as you do serving poison disguised as hope.”