Dope’ll get you through times of no money better’n money will get you through times of no dope.
— Fat Freddy Freak
I begin with two observations respecting this week’s theme. First, our title is based upon logic so acute that it pushes to the threshold of redundancy. I mean, what else ya gonna do with ‘em? Drink ‘em? Leave ‘em on the coffee table to mold or rot?
No y’all. You gonna smoke em. Yet, somehow, not everyone gets it. Hence the need for the slogan.
Secondly, I am aware that over the decades since this wisdom first reached my consciousness, the phrase has been contorted into the less elegant “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” – in my judgment a pale substitute for the original. There is, for instance, a song bearing the latter title (with which I am not familiar) — recorded by an outfit called Parkway Drive. There is also movie of the same name. Which I haven’t seen. Both works emanate from Australia, which ought to tell you something.
(Maybe this is because Australia looks like a smaller version of the United States turned upside down? It’s a little fatter than us on the ocean fronts, but other than that… …oh, never mind).
But I learned this phrase in its original form, back in my days of surreptitiously consuming underground comix. Most prominently The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, pictured in all their glory, below:
Presumably, it is not difficult – even for the uninitiated – to identify Fat Freddy (whose life motto is immortalized as this week’s quote). He’s in the one in middle, flanked by Freewheeling Frank (flipping the bird on the left), and Phineas on the right.
Freddy’s ubiquitous, precocious, perpetually intoxicated and never-named cat is depicted in the lower left-hand corner.
The Brothers led the kind of life that represented the totality of my own ambition, back in, say, ’73. But things change. Oh Lord how they change.
Case and point: for most of my young adult life, not only were you not encouraged to smoke ‘em but having even gotten ‘em was deeply frowned upon as well. At some point (contemporaneous, of course to the moment where getting ‘em and smoking ‘em became a lesser priority for me), we did a 180, and now our titular phrase is taken as a universal given.
And of course, IYGE/SE has recently risen to the dignity of defining much broader swaths of our existence than ever it did — even in the early seventies.
Take me, for example. I don’t remember getting ‘em or smoking ‘em lately, but I must’ve, because – entering my 17th year of pumping out this nonsense – week in and week out – I find that the content has devolved — from probing insights into money flows, earnings, macro trends, investor risk appetite, etc. — into tributes to Fabulous, Furry Freak Brothers.
But whatever I got (and smoked) appears to have been available in abundance, because the market simply no longer cares about the niceties set forth immediately above. Time-honored valuation protocols have been rendered disremembered like high school algebra lessons. Instead, investors are looking at risk assets like a newly baked stoner gazes at a couple of quarts of ice cream staring back at them in the freezer; they hoover them up, wonder where they went, and then wants more.
The whole show, of course, is run out of Washington, D.C., where copping and distributing has transformed from a religion into a cult. Down in those parts, whatever they don’t got, they simply make. All the green that money can buy. All the money that green can conjure up. They don’t live by Fat Freddy’s motto, because they never run out of either (money or dope).
As we trailed off from Friday’s action, with our equity indices still in kite-flying ascendancy to all-time highs, investors were lounging about — waiting for the Congressional delivery guys to show up with ~$900B in reinforcing refreshments. While they were a bit tardy in their arrival, it now appears that it is imminent. Hopefully, it will tide us over through the holidays, because the promised big shipment is almost certain to arrive in the first part of next year.
Meantime, everyone still appears to be holding. A pertinent, recent example is the crew at Tesla, which is scheduled, on Monday, to be the object of the biggest welcoming into the exalted host of the Gallant 500, in, well, in like, forever. Investors get particularly wigged on this sort of thing, which involves adding the new unit, while unceremoniously dumping the disgraced, forsaken company whose spot it’s taking (in this case the ubiquitously fabulous but currently pressed upon Apartment Investment and Management Co.). Really smart guys often judge that, post-add, the new component is a raging short, and from what I am able to discern, this stratagem is indeed at play, in certain quarters, with respect to Monday’s sequence.
Well, you wouldn’t know it from last week’s price action, which sent TSLA shares soaring, and increased stoner Musk’s fortune by about $9B on Friday alone. At its current valuation levels, and by my own back-of-the-envelope calculations, investors deem it to be worth more than the entire rest of the global auto industry, combined. Yes, mes amigos, it could currently buy out all of those Japanese, German, Korean, Italian and Slavic outfits in one shot – and still have enough jack left over to acquire all of that newly-introduced and still-high-flying Airbnb outfit everyone is raging about.
And why not go for it? Because, after you’ve acquired the entire world’s rides (except for yours, because I am your ride), you might want to take a spin. After which, it would certainly be handy to have the keys to cool your heels at every available dwelling on the face of the planet.
Right?
Like the man said: if you got ‘em, smoke ‘em. And as for Elon, well, check and check.
Of course, the biggest buzz kill region on the planet remains in the realms of the Dead Prez. As I’m wearying to point out, not only is the USD continuing to get crushed against its fellow fiats, it is pancaking with respect to just about everything it can be used to purchase, including equities, debt, real estate, commodities, crypto and (from what my sources tell me) cannibas.
It’s not easy being a Dead Prez these days. Particularly in jurisdictions such as San Francisco. Where the current focus of righteous governance is fixed on removing names such as Washington and Lincoln from the front of school buildings. Not to worry, though. Substantially all the schools in the city are closed, so the kids are stuck at home, and thus rendered oblivious to modified academic nomenclature. There, as pointed out a couple of weeks ago, if they got ‘em, they are free to smoke ‘em with impunity from local authorities.
But hey, it’s Christmas, and shame on me for failing to acknowledge the season. Next week features a holiday-shortened schedule, during which, apart from the TSLA add and the extended drama about the lame duck money drop, not much is likely to transpire.
We’re now down to eight skinny trading sessions in the acid trip of the 2020 markets, but my guess is that we’ll still feel the effects well after the calendar turns. The New Year arrives with in much the same condition that the old one will bequeath it. And even though there’s a valid school of thought that the transition between years is no different from any other earthly spin on its axis, I hasten to remind you that every year tells its own market story. 2020 was certainly different from 2019, etc. I suspect, a year from now, that ‘21 will have had its own, unique stamp to place on the world – one that has yet to even begin to have been formed. So, let’s not be too quick to jump into the sack with any specific narratives, alright?
And I reckon that’s about it. I won’t be reasoning with you again until after Christmas. I hope it’s a joyful one for you and yours. Next year, I plan on us celebrating together. In fact, I’m rolling up a few fatties right now — in anticipation of these divine tidings.
My guess is that Fat Freddy, Phineas and Free-wheeling Frank are where we last encountered them – chilled, oblivious, well-nourished and (of course) joyfully stoned. And god bless them for that. Because, we need some things, no matter how transient they be, to provide us with the illusion of permanence.
I hear tell that Musk, though, is on the move. Rolled up his battery powered fleet and pointed it towards Texas. Presumably, the Lone Star State still enforces its narcotics possession laws, but I’m guessing that they may just look the other way if (when) Elon decides it’s time to pull out his glass two-footer and light it up. I feel it’s the least they can do by way of welcome
And as for the rest of us, I revert to our title. “If you got ‘em, smoke ‘em”. This may not always be true, but it certainly appears to be the right course of action for the moment.
I suggest you apply this to your investment strategies.
And, because it is Christmas, I’ll even throw in a heartfelt “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”, as they say Down Under.
Because at this point, I’m really too wasted to care.
TIMSHEL