Great news! I’m vaccinated! Upon my immortal soul, this time it’s true.
Well, OK. So, I’ve only had one of the two requisite doses; the other one is set for the end of the month.
Does this count?
At the moment, I’m halfway home, so we can call it a half-truth.
Only now I hear tell that a third jab may be necessary. In which case I ask: does my opening amount to a third truth?
I’m gonna give myself a break and mark it at 50%. A half-truth.
Was it painful? Well, yes and no. Couldn’t even feel the shot. No soreness in my victimized arm. I did, however, feel unpleasantly, nauseously high, for about thirty hours after the procedure.
I know I should have taken care of this earlier, instead of lying about it like I did to y’all last spring. The (full) truth is I really don’t understand any of this, not the virus, not the variant, not the vaccine, none of it.
But doesn’t appear that them little covid buggers are preparing to beg off anytime soon. Winter’s coming, and, with it, virus season. I belong to a susceptible (if obnoxiously privileged) demographic. In my unending interactions with the masses, I certainly could catch, or (worse) spread, the germ. And, when wise men like De Blasio and Garcetti start shutting down my access to all my bi-coastal bling, there’s only one thing to do – go out and get dosed.
Which is what I did. But to say I’m vaccinated is a half-truth, nonetheless.
On this much we can perhaps agree: half-truths are dangerous. And painful.
In fact, I’d venture that anything short of 100% truths are probably worse than 0% truths. But they are pervasive. At least in some elements of our existence. Like the economy and the markets. Which, as you know, are the exclusive focus of this publication.
So, let’s talk about financial half-truths. I’ll start with a narrow example and perhaps expand out from there.
By all accounts, we are either face – or don’t face – an existential climate crisis. It is either (as recently reported by the never-perfidious United Nations) entirely caused by human activities/carbon emissions. Or it isn’t. The prescribed remedy, though, is clear. Eliminate fossil fuels. Comprehensively and quickly.
And we’re making, er, progress here. We’ve shut down pipelines. Cancelled drilling licenses. Imposed new regulations. Spun up wind farms and solar panels.
And we’ve paid a price for all of this, as perhaps most clearly evidenced by the soaring cost of Natural Gas we’ve experienced over the last few months:
OK, so Nat Gas backed off a bit this week.
But it’s still at the highest summertime level in a generation.
We can only close our eyes and try to block out images of the potential trajectory of this graph in the winter. Particularly if there is any form of lockdown, and folks is forced to spend nearly all they time indoors.
But why on earth, under the circumstances, is the Department of Defense publicly calling for OPEC to increase production? In half-truth space, the answer takes the following form: politicians wishing to show that they are bringing the hammer down on the domestic fossil fuel production, while avoiding the political fallout of unaffordable energy prices when the weather turns cold (news flash: it still does and probably always will get a bit nippy from time to time).
But politicians are born and bred to speak out of both sides of their mouths; otherwise, they wouldn’t be politicians. As a case and point, I recently read that the Washington Post identified >30,000 Trump lies during his storied tenure. If we assume that there is a mix of full-on whoppers and half-truths in this tally, we can round up the number of fibs up to a tidy 50,000. Which breaks down to about 34 lies a day, or three an hour, every day, for a 12-hour shift, across his entire four years at the helm.
That’s a lot of tall tales. Even for the Trumpster, no slouch in the “pants on fire” department. But are we wrong to wonder if the fact checkers themselves might not be engaging is some of their own half truthing?
Economic statistics also tend to reside in those murky realms between truth and engineered fiction. We just completed Pi (Inflation) Week, and the numbers were pretty alarming. July CPI annualized at 5.4%, and PPI at 7.8%. These figures either underestimate, or overestimate, price changes. Or both. The sponsors of our fiscal and monetary policy assure us that the trends, while discouraging, are transient. And that even if they aren’t, the folks at the Fed and Treasury say they are on the case/have the appropriate tools to fix everything.
I find these assertions partially dubious, particularly given the unprecedented trillions in new money created, and an incremental government expenditure roadmap that may exceed $10,000,000,000,000.00 by this fall. Yeah, maybe they got this, but do they even themselves know? If so, how?
All of which leads us to the big focus of a confused investment community (with little else at present to draw their attention): the Jerome Powell “will he or won’t he taper” star turn at Jackson Hole later this month. He is currently on record as identifying two consecutive months of >800K job growth as his marker. Well, he’s got them – even if the jobs numbers emanating out of the BLS are probably half-truths in and of themselves.
The half-accurate Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) Survey informs us that: a) unfilled gigs passed the 10 million threshold last month; meaning that: b) there are now more “Help Wanted” signs across the Lower 48 than there are citizens on the unemployment rolls.
Is that an environment where Powell wants to take the training wheels off the Treasury Funding/Fed Money Printing/Fed Security Purchase tricycle?
My guess is that he will talk tough and do nothing. Particularly if, as is certainly possible, we face a post- Labor Day environment of a virally impaired economy, tax increases, aggressive regulation, and continued flow of funds to both the unemployed and those who will form a marvelous new army of Federal workers. All paid for by borrowings and tax dollars, mostly to ensure that the masses remain in straight and narrow adherence to the current Gospel of Moral Imperative in our newly woken society.
If my conjecture is accurate, Powell will have certainly engaged in yet another half-truth. He’ll tell us that the taper scissors are there at the ready, but, given all the hardship and injustice in our midst that just won’t banish itself, he’s gonna wait a spell before he applies the sheers to his hairy, money-printing beast.
However, if I’m wrong about this, and he starts clipping away, the markets will respond as though he’s cutting into flesh as opposed to fleecy follicles. And, boy, won’t that be interesting, evoking a plausible scenario under which investors and other economic agents emerge from this long, hot summer, to face the challenges of inflation, higher taxes, delta variant lockdowns, labor shortages, supply chain and logistics frustrations, and higher interest rates.
Investors don’t seem to be picking up what he’s laying down, though, at least not entirely (maybe they buy into half). Our equity indices rallied all week, to another sequence of all-time highs. But the market strength, given that virtually all the valuation gains are concentrated in a handful of names, while the rest of the complex either languishes or ossifies, is arguably yet another fact that falls short of full veracity.
Finally, I read that Wall Street has embraced its bovine vibe at levels not seen for nearly twenty years:
Yup, those privileged but woke prognosticators of valuation, if I read this chart correctly, are calling for the Gallant 500 to approach the exalted threshold of 5,000 – which of course is ten times the number of soldiers in its host. They could be right. But do I believe them? Do they believe this themselves?
It may very well be another example of half truthing. If so, it is the worst form of this counterproductive behavior: the half-truths we tell ourselves.
We’ve got to stop this sh!t while we still can. Before it’s too late. I hope I’ve set an example by owning my own statements of partial veracity. A half dose is just that: a half dose. It is not, by any stretch, a full vax.
And that’s the full truth. In so disclosing my status, I feel liberated and unburdened.
It’ll do you no harm to follow my lead in this respect. But meantime, I’d remain cautious in taking actions or decisions based upon information you receive, which, while perhaps bearing elements of accuracy, are also sprinkled with the unavoidable folly of human fancy.
TIMSHEL