Late last month, in “Plane English,” I expressed something akin to exhaustion with market participants’ never-ending allusions to aeronautics in the context of the macro-policy discussion.

At the time, Christopher Waller had just wrapped up a speech describing the evolution of the Fed’s tightening cycle from the perspective of a pilot. “The view from the cockpit is very different at 30,000 feet than it is close to the ground,” he mused, in remarks prepared for an event in New York.

I thought we’d seen “peak planes,” if not peak rates, but that very same week, “no landing” crashed onto the scene. By mid-February, it was the consensus macro narrative.

Ostensibly, it’s easy enough to define. “No landing” is a plane that keeps on flying which, in the macro context, means an economy that continues to run hot, with robust spending and hiring and re-accelerating growth, Fed hikes be damned. The narrative picked up adherents this month thanks a spate of strong US data.

But when you step back and think about it, it’s not obvious we’re making any sense, something SPI Asset Management’s Stephen Innes obliquely suggested last week. “This is a market that constantly asks different questions at different prices and on different days, and of course, there is no shortage of different answers,” he wrote, describing the “forever swinging pendulum from hard to soft to any ‘landing.'”

On Monday, while channeling Jon Krakauer to assess the suggestion that an upturn in global liquidity is a factor in explaining equities’ refusal to selloff in the face of higher rates, Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson characterized the “no landing” narrative as the product of delirious, oxygen-deprived mountaineers in the “death zone.”

As a reminder, Wilson correctly timed Q4’s rally, nearly to the day. It was a crowning achievement of sorts, capping a year of highly prescient market calls in a very difficult environment. Wilson took profits on his tactical bullish call in December. That too looked prescient, until 2023’s rally, which he’s spent the last several weeks warning is built on a shaky foundation.

“This most recent ascent began in October from a much safer place of lower valuations — 15x P/E and an equity risk premium of 270bps,” he said, on the way to fully immersing readers in the Everest analogy. “By December, the air started to get thin again with the P/E back to 18x and the ERP down to 225bps, so we decided to head back to base camp alone,” he wrote, lamenting “many” climbers “lost” to the death zone in December’s selloff.

Not everyone who stayed up on the mountain died, though, and as the calendar flipped, survivors “decided to make another summit attempt, this time taking an even more dangerous route with the most speculative stocks leading the way,” Wilson went on.

That part is true. The rally from the beginning of the year through early this month was a decidedly speculative affair, led at times by “junk,” exemplified by a sharp re-rating in big-cap US tech and punctuated by meme-like moves in AI-related names.

Participants justified the run higher by Fed pivot hope and the prospect (however far-fetched) for rate cuts commencing in the back half of the year. Wilson described that as “like a shot of oxygen” which made “the death zone felt like base camp.”

But the run of hot US data killed that narrative. At the extremes late last week, terminal rate pricing was almost 50bps higher from this year’s lows, and traders aggressively faded the cuts they previously hedged.

The figure above is familiar, but it’s important, so I wanted to highlight it again as you steel yourself for the FOMC minutes due Wednesday and Friday’s data, which includes personal spending for January and PCE prices.

With the Fed pivot narrative seemingly lost, investors needed a new reason to keep the faith. As I wrote over the weekend, the new story was that economic resilience could facilitate a soft landing, even if a robust economy reduced the odds of a dovish Fed turn.

“Investors began to move faster and more energetically, talking more confidently about a soft landing for the US economy [and] as they have reached even higher levels, there is now talk of a ‘no landing’ scenario — whatever that means,” Wilson said, his derision scarcely veiled.

Of course, the bearish version of the “no landing” debate entails positing an eventual hard landing, something BofA’s Michael Hartnett tried to explain late last week. But coming full circle, our efforts to determine the flight path of the economy and particularly our tedious attempts to fit today’s data and price action into an aeronautical framework, feel increasingly frivolous.

We’ll be forgiven though. After all, we’re short of oxygen up here. “Such are the tricks the death zone plays on the mind,” Wilson said, of the “no landing” meme. “One starts to see and believe in things that don’t exist.”