Antecedent: A vignette

12 years ago next month, I saw Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar at the Showcase Cinema de Lux in Ridge Hill, a pseudo-upscale development which, from the time it was built, clashed with the surrounding Yonkers like a Fendi pillow on a futon.

Across the street is a bluish residential building called Monarch. Most of the apartments, condos and suites have floor-to-ceiling windows in the living rooms.

Those windows are also doors — they slide all the way open, which counts as a luxury feature if you’re a resident, but it’s a bit disconcerting if you’re a visitor. There are rails, of course, but in some units the rails are attached directly to the side of the building. And there are no ledges. (“It’s a little stuffy if here. Let me open the, um, the wall.”)

After the show, I stopped for drinks at Little Buddha. If you look at a map, Little Buddha is (or was) right next door to the theater. I was fond of the bartender, an engaging late-twentysomething with a wry smile the other patrons either didn’t catch or didn’t understand. Outwardly, she was accommodating. As all good bartenders are. Inwardly, she was mocking us.

The majority of humanity isn’t in on the joke that is our lives. To be that self-aware is to be miserable, but it’s also to be enlightened. I laughed with her at me, which kept me in her good graces. Or maybe it was the generous tips.

Either way, my drinks were free-poured. Everyone else got the jigger. In that regard at least, the last laugh was mine.

God’s work and the gin pen

Goldman’s David Kostin is retiring at the end of this year. Maybe you heard.

He’s been doing “God’s work” (to quote Lloyd Blankfein) at the firm since 1994. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know how anyone does it, anywhere.

I tried punching the proverbial clock — running the rat race — in Manhattan for 14 months. It might’ve been 15 months, or maybe even 16. I genuinely can’t remember, and there’s no way for me to date it precisely. The circumstances of my exit from that role were such that there are no extant records of my departure other than a smattering of emails related to some stock options I sorted out with the company’s VC backers.

The latter part of that exceedingly surreal period is a total blur thanks in no small part to a strikingly beautiful young woman with an giant Afro — think Foxxy Cleopatra. She worked at a little boutique shop in Grand Central peddling craft beer and spirits. She got me hooked on small-batch gin, which I enjoyed far too much. So much, in fact, that I missed two dates with her because I drank the whole bottle on the Metro North commute, leaving me too incapacitated to meet her halfway for dinner in Tuckahoe later in the evening.

That story, like most of my stories, is completely true. I wonder, occasionally, how life might’ve been different if I’d made it to either one of those dinners. Or even just stayed a semblance of sober during that period as opposed to what I actually did: Found a new occupation outside the rat race that allowed me to hibernate drunk in a second-story apartment (technically third-story, but that’s another discussion) at the Monarch which, whatever it is today, was new and quite nice at the time.

There, I wrote furiously and watched it snow, surviving on gin, vodka, spiked seltzer and Whole Foods, which is right across the street in the semi-upscale shopping complex. If you go to Monarch’s website, you’ll find the picture shown on the left, below. I’ve added a helpful annotation.

The picture on the right is the view from that window on a particularly snowy evening. That was a ~seven-foot drift. And Lord knows I saw larger.

If you were among the countless gullible traders, economists, macro watchers, hedgies and Wall Streeters who read content published on the internet’s most infamous (and most popular) independent macro-market web portal during 2015, a lot of it was written right there. In that room. And it was ginned up. Or “gin”ned up. Both. Definitely both.

A1 entertainment here, folks. Critically-acclaimed documentaries. Real stories. Intoxicating nostalgia. It’s literature. It’s art. It’s culture. It’s Heisenberg Report. Tell a friend.

Aaaaanyway, Kostin — who almost surely read something gin wrote during that period, and if he didn’t, a lot of people in the building with him did — is done with what he described in a Bloomberg interview as a “super fast-paced culture where you work with a lot of extraordinary people.” “There are high standards,” he said, referring to Goldman.

Ol’ David’s going out with a bullish call. In his latest, he rolled forward the bank’s three-, six- and 12-month S&P return forecasts (+2%, +5% and +8%). The figure on the right, below, gives you a sense of the trajectory Goldman expects.

We should see SPX 6800 by New Year’s and 7200 by the close of 2026, when Kostin’s a year into what I can only assume will be a very, very comfortable retirement.

The figure on the left, above, is yet another version of a chart most of you have seen over and over again by now: It shows you the trajectory of US equities around the resumption of Fed easing following a pause, broken down by how the economy subsequently developed.

“Our forecast for further equity market upside would be consistent with the historical pattern during rate cut cycles,” Kostin went on. “During the past 40 years, the S&P 500 has generated a 15% median 12-month return when the Fed resumed cutting rates against a backdrop of continued economic growth.”

Best of luck to you in retirement, David. Seriously. Anyone disciplined enough to put up with corporate culture for that long is, in many respects, a better man than me.