Ken has been offering his thoughts on global markets, events, and trends on a weekly basis since early 2006. His rational perspective, based on decades of experience in risk management and analytics, provides all readers with helpful insights, commentary, and context. Both informative and entertaining, the posts offer clarity and simplicity, often using inspiration from his favorite artists and musicians.
Ken also authored Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability through Risk Control (Wiley 2004), which challenged the traditional focus of risk management on loss avoidance. The book introduced a new risk management program that can help both money managers and individual traders evaluate which elements in a portfolio are working efficiently and which aren’t using an extremely simple set of statistical and arithmetic tools.
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- Sufficient to the Day is the Evil Thereof Monday, April 29, 2024
Then we heard the Sermon on the Mount, but I knew it was too complex,
It didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects.Bob (who else?)
Mind if I lay a little of the Gospel on y’all? Didn’t think so. Having, after all, just laid to rest Bagan, Gabe and Dickie, it would seem the proper occasion for doing so.
Our title comes from that all-time-great biblical passage known as the Sermon on the Mount. Those looking for the specific citation need search no further than Matthew 6:34.
I would view the Sermon as the biblical equivalent of something like “Abbey Road”. Some clunkers in there, but also some, well, divine moments. Such as the “blessed are the meek” bit. The totality of the piece has rendered it timeless. Just like “Abbey Road”.
I also learned, only by researching this note, that it is the SotM that contains The Lord’s Prayer.
So, mad props to Matthew, who, as an apostle, kept a fairly low profile – certainly more so than, say, Peter or John. Perhaps this is because, apart from being an apostle and all, his side gig was as a tax collector — a profession which, presumably back in them days, demanded its practitioners to keep it on the DL.
Shame, though, because he takes a nice snapshot:
Eventually (or so I read), he dropped his tax collecting ways and took to apostling full-time – a job which, among other obligations, featured an extensive travel schedule.
Unfortunately, on a trip to Ethiopia, he got into a beef with a local king – named Hirtacus – of course over a chick. Seems the king wished to wed an indigenous beauty who Matthew had previously consigned to a nunnery. King H asked for dispensation, and when Apostle A refused this accommodation, the latter got his-self martyred.
Meantime, we have his Gospel to remember him by, including the singular Sermon on the Mount.
Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof, sayeth Jesus. And he had reason to know, because his evil hour was, at that point, not far off in the offing.
But I digress.
Still and all, I am somewhat puzzled by this theme, as it runs in direct contrast — if not to the word of Christ, then at minimum to its application over the past > 20 centuries – much of which involves eating one’s vegetables, abstaining from the pleasures of the flesh, and awaiting one’s reward in the hereafter.
It devolves to me to report that humanity has only imperfectly adhered to these interpreted teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Often as not, it has adopted the more direct construction of the “sufficient to the day….” vibe – letting it all hang out and deferring any thought of attendant consequence.
This, of course, as much as anywhere else in these earthly realms, applies to the Capital Economy. Particularly since the pseudo-biblical Plague of ’20, we been printin’ and spendin’ and taxin’ and regulatin’ and redistributin’ and otherwise transgressin’ to beat the band. And bidding up risk assets like bargain hunters at the Temple of Jerusalem. Nowhere in the text of either testament, to the best of my knowledge, does it suggest that that this is the way to prosperity. But as Saint Matt tells us Jesus said: “sufficient to the day”.
And, after a rollicking time of it over the past several quarters, one wonders if “the day” might not be hard upon us. GDP slowing. Inflation on the rise. Treasury Department issuing astonishing amounts of paper. To a lukewarm reception, causing interest rates to continue their biblical ascent.
It is of course, impossible to determine what all this portends. The economy has, in an Old Testament sense, been asking for a bout of stagnation for God knows how long, and last week’s data trended in that direction. The high priests (and rabbis) of economic orthodoxy are wagging a figurative finger in our faces, admonishing us to repent. But all may be rendered moot, because either we have entered a phase of where the wages of such sin are nil, or we have already brought the economic flames of hell down upon ourselves sufficiently to obviate any benefit of correcting the error of our ways.
I suspect that we’re still in a state of financial grace. We can certainly absorb an economic slowing and/or a gentle upward drift in pricing trajectories. Elevated interest rates have not thus far, and are not likely in the immediate future, to do much more than annoy us.
We’ve an election coming up, with every likelihood that the prevailing powers will goose the energy and treasury markets — so as to create better optics entering into the final autumn stretch. We probably pay for such manipulation down the road, but (everyone say it with me) sufficient to the day…
Other pandering political bennies include the unilateral negation, by unelected bureaucrats at the FTC, of Non-Compete Agreements embedded in certain employment agreements. Not gonna lie – this one hacks me off. Nobody likes to sign Non-Competes, but they are nothing more than a clause in a private contract between employer and employee, within which the Government has no standing. No one is impelled to sign on to them. I am hardly a corporate shill, but it strikes me that even The Man is entitled to protect himself from mercenary employees seeking to absorb proprietary information and then sell it to the highest bidder. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, absent such protection, there is every likelihood that The Man will hire fewer innovators, and, hiring fewer innovators, will innovate less.
What is this? Russia?
Additional sops take the form of proposals for an impressive 44.6% federal tax on Capital Gains, up from the current threshold of less than half of this amount. All done in the righteous name of “ensuring the rich pay their “fair share” (precisely what this amounts to never specified). If y’all want an example of Big Government and Big Biz colluding to our detriment, here it is. The Fed prints ~$10T in the wake of the covid plague. Most of this finds its way to the market, which is a 2-3 bagger since the lockdowns.
Now’s time for the kickback to the folks in Washington. It’s a square deal for the swamp and the titans of Silicon Valley, but the shame of it all is this. It will now become that much harder for anyone with a new idea to risk their capital and substance to grab for the brass ring of commercial success, knowing, as they will, that if it somehow comes, and after those avaricious state revenuers grab their share, less than half of the spoils will remain to these visionaries. Seems like a dirty deal to me…Aside from all this aggravation, I have been forced to set aside time to knock heads together at my second alma mater: Columbia University. Located a short mile north of my Manhattan digs. I do not wish to enter into a debate as to who is the sponsor of the evil thereof in these here proceedings.
Further, I have no doubt that those forced to contend with the IDF often have a bad time of it. But FFS! When one considers the genocidal brutality that traverses the globe – From Cuba to the Congo, from (Omar’s beloved) Somalia to the Sudan, it both frightens and astonishes me that it is Israel’s behavior that causes the world to unite in outrage.Probably, this all peters out eventually, and certainly will when the cameras and other gear are sent away from 116th and Broadway. But the bad feeling will remain, the lingering odor of a world that will pick and choose its outrage based upon what will sustain the attention of the tele-connected world. And let me state one final beef. Let’s say all those righteous freedom fighters in Morningside Heights manage to eliminate Israel from “the river to the sea”. What happens then? Well, it’s my guess that this is the moment when the REAL violence in the Middle East commences. Sunni v. Shia v Houthis.
Meantime, one of the world’s leading centers of capitalist democracy, with all its culture, technological innovation and history, will become a minimally lamented memory.
Sufficient to the day…
But in the end, who cares? We’re in the middle of an Earnings Calendar which has brought more delight than despair. We’re off our highs; Bitcoin is halving. There is, in short, every piece of the puzzle required to abide by the literal musings of the Sermon on the Mount — and buy risk assets ere someone else hoovers ‘em up.
However, if we simply follow the train of our time-honored Dylan quote, the next lines are as follows:
“When you bit off more than you can chew, you gotta pay the penalty. Someone’s gonna have to tell the tale, I guess it’s up to me”.
This I have tried my best to do. I may indeed have bitten off more than I can chew and have cause to regret it down the road. But, returning to our titular theme “sufficient to the day…”.
TIMSHEL