If you asked a committed bear what’s priced into equities in terms of risks, he (or she) would invariably say “nothing.” Or “not much.”

Maybe the Fed’s not pondering another hike, but the first cut’s months away at the earliest, “long and variable lags” will eventually exact their revenge, market concentration’s as extreme as it’s ever been, inflation’s not whipped, valuations are too rich and have you heard about the wars?!

That’s the bear narrative. Or the gist of it anyway. It’s not “wrong,” exactly. Bear narratives rarely are. Wrong, I mean, in a strict sense of the word. There’s no such thing as a riskless investment landscape, after all, and as the ~45% drawdown in longer-term US Treasurys over the last four years can attest, there’s no such thing as a riskless investment either, outside of T-bills.

The problem with macro doom narratives is that nine times out of 10, you’re not an investor when you read them. You’re a consumer. Fear sells and everybody from mainstream media outlets to Substack entrepreneurs to the tabloid barons of the financial blogosphere which grew up from the ashes of the financial crisis, is vying for your clicks.

Too often, you’re not reading analysis these days. Nor articles. You’re gorging on whatever narratives are deemed maximally monetizable. And the people penning them could give a sh-t if you mistake those narratives for investment advice on the way to losing everything, including your mind. They’ll gladly sacrifice your well-being, financial and mental, for their bottom lines.

Not everyone peddling doom narratives needs money, of course, but they do need some kind of affirmation, humans being the social, pitiably insecure animals that they are. Keep that in mind when you subject yourself to finance- and macro-focused social media, where that means the motley constellation of Twitter accounts blasting out charts and trafficking in the cheap memes that pass for humor in a world where satire’s dead and nuance is a French restaurant you won’t try because the xenophobic blog you follow told you to hate “frog-eaters.”

What you’re seeing in your finance Twitter timeline are adults (and I can’t emphasize that word enough), many of whom are supposed to be managing other people’s money, penning serious strategy notes for paying clients or enjoying a well-funded retirement, instead trading petulant barbs and snickering at bathroom humor in a never-ending quest to discover in retweets and likes the approbation they apparently forget how to extract from the real world. The result: A deafening cacophony of nonsense, most of which skews inescapably bearish and ineluctably rightward politically.

At the risk of (further) alienating myself from a club of people which (still, and despite my best efforts to communicate otherwise) thinks I’m a card-carrying member, let me just say, as we all languish in this week’s data void, that I hate ’em. I do, folks. I despise all of those people, especially to the extent they’ve led you to believe things that aren’t true about markets, macro, geopolitics and, importantly, about themselves.

On that latter point, the high-pitched tenor of the macroeconomic debate is disconnected from the reality of the personalities doing the shrieking. The vigor implied by the vitriol in most cases doesn’t translate into any headlong, after-hours immersion in the subject matter. Let’s face it: Almost nobody’s burning the candle at both ends. Rather, this is a play and when the curtain closes (when the laptops are shut, and the devices tabled), the actors go back to being the mild-mannered suburbanites that they are, comfortably removed from the socioeconomic fracas they (inadvertently or not) facilitate and inflame during “business” hours.

I was reminded of my righteous disdain for the teeming macro Twitter masses and the financial media — mainstream, fringe and everything in-between including the overwhelming majority of finance- and macro-focused Substack letters — over the weekend, as I put the finishing touches on “Progressive History X,” the latest Monthly Letter.

The shoddiness, mendacity and generalized tawdriness on display across pretty much everything that gets marketed, sold and passed off to you as analysis by all of the parties mentioned above, is an egregious affront to everything I’ve come to expect from myself and, more importantly, for my readership.

What goes unrecognized is that my unflinching commitment to rigor applies not merely to the production of content, but in fact to a parallel effort aimed at achieving nothing less than complete alignment between the man and the mythos I (somewhat inadvertently) created eight years ago. There’s no “character” here. There’s just me.

“I see hypocrisy everywhere. In everybody. And in everything,” I complained, while chatting with a confrère of sorts last week. “I can’t abide it.”

She’d heard that gripe before. And countless remonstrances similar. She’s someone famous which means she always has something better to do than listen to me explain what’s wrong with the world.

We’re acquaintances, not fast friends. We’ve never met in person and probably never will. Our life trajectories could scarcely be any different. In common we have nothing outside of an interest in the dismal science and a steadfast commitment to never suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.

That shared commitment accounts for our rapport, which manifests in impromptu, infrequent politico-economic gossip. I find my way inevitably to a lament about this or that injustice, grave or petty. Or a complaint about some absurdity, egregious or trifling. She humors me.

“What counts as ‘hypocrisy?'” she asked.

“You gotta understand what you’re conveying about yourself and then you gotta epitomize it. Right?”

“I mean, yes. Ideally. But –”

I cut in. “No caveats. You gotta be a paragon.”

“Is that realistic, though?”

“It is with me,” I typed back, brusquely. “The person matches the persona.”

She asked a good question: “What if your readers have misconceptions about the persona? What if they don’t understand what you’re conveying about yourself?”

I thought about that for a minute. “Then they haven’t been reading closely enough.”