Wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did, I got what I paid for now,
See ya tomorrow, hey Frank can I borrow,
A couple of bucks from you?
To go waltzing Mathilda, waltzing Mathilda, you’ll go waltzing, Mathilda with me
— Tom Traubert’s Blues
Hi y’all. It’s been a minute, right?
FWIW, I hate that phrase, which (or so I’m given to understand) was brought forward into the modern lexicon by my co-religionist, Drake. And, on a related note, I just found out (by picking up his just-dropped memoir) that criminally underrated Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger is also a tribesman.
Not gonna lie: across the singularly impressive span of Sabbatarian musicians, I prefer Krieger to Drake. But this, as with so much else we encounter, is a matter of taste.
Besides, it’s been more like a week, or just over ten thousand minutes. To put this in financial terms, one minute is the equivalent of 0.01%, or 1 basis point, of a seven-day span.
It doesn’t sound like a lot, does it? But sometimes, a minute is, as Rudyard Kipling famously wrote, everlasting. For example (and here my curiosity leads me to ask for reader input), when staring, at a phone that reads 10:59, and waiting to sign into one of those soul-sapping Zoom meetings, several lifetimes seem to pass ere the clock rolls. Right?
By contrast, for those using the free version of this wretched app, Minute 40 flies by. And then the screen goes dark.
There’s a lot that can be accomplished in a single sixty second sequence – if one adopts the proper mindset. For instance, Frederick Chopin (who lies in eternal repose at Pere Lachaise — just under a rise where one will find Krieger’s slumbering bandmate: Jim Morrison) wrote perhaps the best known waltz in music history, which, if the title can be trusted, begins, and ends, within a single rotation of a second hand.
For the truly obtuse among you, I am referring to the “Minute Waltz”, the title of which, in addition to its temporal description, indicates that it unfolds in 3/4 time (one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three). Some of my best-loved tunes adopt this beat: “My Favorite Things” for example. Or “Manic Depression” by Hendrix.
Also “Tom Traubert’s Blues”, by Tom Waits, which is this week’s theme song.
3/4 is the time signature of waltzes, like the ones played by Victorian orchestras in 19th century rave ups, with fiddling fiddlers fiddling and twirling ladies twirling. But lots of stuff in our world pulses forward in waltz cadence, offering up, as it does, a more circular trajectory than, say, the hard-driving, unidirectional 4/4 beat that is nearly ubiquitous to rock and roll.
And yes, we can extrapolate this to the markets.
For instance, if one is looking to binge on straight up, 4/4 rock and roll, one might very well consider taking a spin with Crude Oil:
Just one look at this chart brings the guitar riff of “Radar Love” to the ears inside my mind.
If, by contrast, one is thinking more of a minuet vibe, perhaps a little VIX is in order:
However, whatever the time signature, the markets ended Friday’s session in full crescendo. It was a welcome jolt from the repetitive pirouettes of the last several weeks. The question is: why?
Well, the bank earnings, or, say, 3/4ths of them at any rate (Wells continues to screw the pooch) were OK. Retail Sales blew out.
Inflation of both genres soared like Baryshnikov, while measures of confidence (consumer and business) took menacing, banana peel knee bends.
The Fed, however, unleashed nearly $1T of reserves it had hanging around into the dance hall, and, while I won’t pretend to possess the chops to track the precise journey of these boppin’ Benjaminz, I suspect that many of them found their way into the capital markets:
See Ya Tomorrow, Hey FED Can I Borrow, A Couple of Bucks from You?
Clearly, there’s a lot of wallflower cash out there – arguably too much – to swap it, with cost and time efficiency — for various units of value — ranging from semiconductors, copper, petrol, efficient restaurant service, or – investible securities.
This is why, in my judgment, no matter how bleak conditions appear in this wasteland of a capital economy, nothing remotely resembling a respectable correction can truly materialize. Investors were slogging their asses across the floor until Wednesday afternoon, but then, in a stroke of a clock, gathered themselves to gin up a high-stepping rally that places our equity indices proximate to all-time highs.
So, yes, a minute matters, and I implore you to use those allotted to you wisely. When Zooming, for instance, remain advised that this unicorn stock took a mad digger at the end of the last quarter, when a longanticipated acquisition of a cloud service provider fell apart.
Perhaps this is because its target was an outfit called Five9, and, though I’ve researched it, I cannot find a single musical piece that uses that time signature. So, presumably, the folks at Zoom decided it wasn’t worth the “Money”. As everyone knows, there’s a Pink Floyd song of the same name, which begins in 7/4, but then kicks into straight 4/4 for the Gilmour solo.
So, time signatures can change. And often do.
A minute thus lasts as long as one chooses to make it, and consider, as a closing example, that Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” is actually 140 measures, or two minutes, long. That’s OK, though; it’s worth the ride.
So please do waltz, Mathilda, with me, But know that particularly now, we will choose our steps with care.
TIMSHEL