Oh You Pretty Things, Don’t you know you’re driving your Mamas and Papas insane?
Let me make it plain: Gotta make way for the Homo Superior
— Bowie
With the first half of Terrible ’22 in the books, I’d like nothing better than to offer some hope for a brighter conclusion to the year’s proceedings.
But – not gonna lie – I’m having a very difficult time doing so. Equity indices closed out the first six months with the worst ytd performance since 1970 – the year the Beatles broke up. The year that both Jimi and Janis died.
Further, until an improbable, quarter-capping rally, Treasuries came in with the biggest losses since 1844, a year which featured the founding of the University of Notre Dame, Smiling Sam Morse’s first telegraphed message: “what hath God wrought?” (what indeed?), and the formation of the (immortalized five generations later by the Village People) YMCA.
It also marked the election James K Polk as the 11th President of the United States, who, among other achievements, brought The Republic of Texas into the fold.
Has anything remotely so cool happened in ’22? I’m waiting…
But a couple of late breaking news items captured, for me, the truly gruesome vibe that prevails.
First, as no one paying attention could have missed, the Big 10 Conference (B1G) announced the addition of two Angelino schools – UCLA and USC – to its numbers, bringing its tally of higher learning institutions (which for nearly a century was actually 10), to a tidy 16. Its reach now extends from Rutgers on the Atlantic all the way to Westwood, on the shores of the Pacific. I personally would’ve preferred the addition of Pepperdine, if for no other reason than that it’s in Malibu, but I reckon the Conference Brain Trust — in highly unfashionable Rosemont, IL, know what they’re doing.
When the B1G first expanded, it split into two divisions — along geographic lines, but with the dubious nomenclature of Leaders and Legends. The construct remains, but now under the more intuitive and utilitarian monikers of East and West.
In these troubled times, a new set of pairings comes to my mind. Though the breakdown is less than perfect (after all, every major university currently considers itself obliged to dictate our mores and modes of living), I recommend that we separate the college by ideological branding. One, in tribute to our newest arrivals, would be named the LaLa Land Division, and would be made up of urban and urban wanna-be institutions, with pretensions to paradigm-shifting global thought leadership. Its roster would include:
- UCLA (Natch)
- USC (Natch again)
- Michigan
- Northwestern
- Wisconsin
- Rutgers
- Maryland
- Minnesota
The other cluster, which I propose to call the Landlocked Division, is comprised of schools that more exclusively concern themselves with the task of educating and training their attendees, and sending them out into the world as competent, contributing adults:
- Michigan State
- Illinois
- Iowa
- Nebraska
- Indiana
- Purdue
- Penn State
- The Ohio State University
And, just for the record, I checked my maps, and the Landlocked Division is indeed landlocked. The most respectable body of water adjacent to any of these campuses is the Wabash River, near Purdue (Please).
By contrast, my LaLa Land Division abuts, respectively, the Pacific Ocean (UCLA and USC), Lake Michigan (Northwestern), Fabulous Lake Erie (Michigan) the Atlantic (Maryland and Rutgers) and the Mighty Missisip (Minnesota). Finally, my beloved Badgers (which I must depressingly consign to LaLaLand) are on lesser watery bodies (regional lakes). But there are five of them within city limits. So, there’s that.
However, a couple of points before I move on. Of course, the main impetus for B1G expansion is money, and there’ll be plenty of that to go around. The TV advertising implications are themselves delectable. And those legacy, zaftig Midwestern alums travel better than any such group anywhere. I suspect they will be more than happy to make their way to the coast and spend their hard-earned pay at cheesy Los Angeles tourist traps each November.
But in terms of which division is likely to contribute more to GDP growth over, say, the next generation, my money is on the Land-lockers.
The other recent development which renders me more certain than ever we are staring into the abyss is the latest Bowie version of Mattel’s iconic Barbie Doll. It’s not their first rendering of a bad idea, but the arrow is clearly pointing in the wrong direction.
Yes indeed, she’s hot. But I find her offensive to the point where words fail me. And Bowie, having died in 2016, is not here to defend himself. That his estate agreed to such corrupting of his image is beyond me.
But the rendering on the left is no more Ziggy, no more Aladdin Sane, no more “Thin White Duke” than Purdue is known for its School of Film Studies.
I’m gonna stop short of calling for an all-out boycott of Mattel. But please – in the name of all that is holy, do not enable this nonsense by allowing one these monstrosities into your homes.
And, as we enter H2/22, the big question is – can we endure these indignities, rise above them to regain the best in ourselves? I’ve gotta say, at times like these, I have my doubts.
The next few weeks should be very informative in this sense. The rollout of quarterly earnings and macro data will commence, and then crescendo.
With respect to the former, there’s a more worrying ambiance emerging with each passing moment. I’m particularly concerned about critical signals deriving from the land of micro-chips. Even on Friday, as the broader-based indices were gathering themselves for a rally, two industry leaders – Micron and Advanced Micro, pre-announced weak demand for the back half of the year, rendering the sector SOX index perhaps the biggest heap of smoldering metal in this market pileup:
Nobody should be surprised here; we literally gorged ourselves on semis — all during the lockdown and beyond. The re-emergence of computationally intensive, chip comping crypto – now in a form of free fall — only added to the bloat.
At some point, we were bound to push away from the chip table. But declining semi demand is a very bad omen of what awaits us this earnings season, and woe betide us if this is an indicator of CEO tidings when they next take their walks (of shame?) to the podium.
And this is to say nothing of the Scary Monster (and Super Freak) Macro environment. In a breath of good news, many commodities have backed off and others have, for the moment, stabilized. But the June CPI estimates (release date 7/13) still clock in at 8.8%. Crude remains well-above $100/bbl, and: a) when the President informs us of our need to hunker down to preserve a “liberal world order”, only to be: b) slapped down by none other than Bezos, well, you can draw your own conclusions.
And as for GDP, if those krazy kids at the Atlanta Fed are right about their latest Q2 estimates, following on the Q1/now -1.6% tape bomb, we’re already in recession:
Yes, you read that right – they now are prognosticating a > 2% contraction. And if that weren’t bad enough, just take a read of the accompanying note:
After this morning’s Manufacturing ISM Report On Business from the Institute for Supply Management and the construction report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcasts of secondquarter real personal consumption expenditures growth and real gross private domestic investment growth decreased from 1.7 percent and -13.2 percent, respectively, to 0.8 percent and -15.2 percent, respectively.
Heck, I don’t even know what the bolded phrase means. But it don’t sound good.
I reckon we’ll survive, though. Just as we did 1970. The quality of music started to deteriorate after the breakup of the Beatles, the demise of Jimi and Janis. But it did so in gradual fashion. Pretty much all of Bowie’s best stuff, for instance, came after.
The post-1844 tidings are arguably a bit more problematic. Polk died in ’49 – barely six months after leaving office. His replacement, that crazy mofo Zack Taylor, is best known for having issued a beat down of a badass bunch of Mexicans. Which catalyzed, for better or for worse, the addition of California into the Stars and Stripes (1850). He didn’t live to see it. Sixteen months into his term, he met his maker, with the official cause of death listed as an overdose of cherries (fact).
After that, Millard Filmore was foisted upon us, followed by Franklin Pierce and then the singularly misanthropic James Buchanan.
Lincoln came next, and, while he wasn’t fighting of Rebels and getting himself assassinated, he signed the Land Grants that funded the creation of most of the founding Midwestern universities that formed the B1G Conference, now a nationwide conglomerate.
All of which gives me a change of heart. Go ahead and buy that Bowie Barbie if you must.
She’s a pretty thing, after all, but homo superior she ain’t.
And I don’t think she will help much in beating back the bears in the second half of Terrible ’22.
TIMSHEL