“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
George Eliot
Allow me, while the world still reels from the aftershocks of C. McVie’s death (and my stirring tribute to same), with time-honored self-indulgence, to take this moment to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of my stepfather: Stanley Maurice Warsaw.
He shed his mortal coil late in 2006, and little has been heard of him since. Still and all, I think of him often, and always with fond remembrance.
Whatever else may be said of him (and of this there is a great deal), perhaps on this we can all agree:
He takes a nice snapshot.
But I can hardly rest my keyboard there. This cat was born in ’22, right in the heart of the Greatest Generation. Played Centerfield for the Chi-U Maroons, a project rudely interrupted by Pearl Harbor. He enlisted that day, and spent the next 4+ years fighting, as a Non-Commissioned Officer, through North Africa and Italy – under the generalship of Mark Clark.
To be sure, there were worse WWII theaters of engagement to be dispatched (Stalingrad comes to mind), but Stan came back to the States covered in shrapnel, and with a deep aversion to speaking of his war experience. Nay, he’d rather discuss his exploits on the Hyde Park diamonds, and who could blame him for this preference?
He went on to live the prototype existence of a successful urban Jewish man of his time. Had a great run as a stockbroker. Married and divorced two wives, giving off progeny in each. His third spouse – my mother, however, got her hooks into him pretty good, and they remained together for the last 30+ years of his life.
He had a big, bellowing voice, sang in the shower, drank, smoked, played tennis, attended ballet recitals and sporting events. Laughed a good deal, cried only in private, dutifully called his mother (who lived to be 100 but shaved 5 years off her age to the very end) every day. And came home every night. Which my bio dad never did.
He had his faults, but gosh oh mighty, he was good to me. Took a great interest in me – at a time when I had almost none in myself.
When he bounced and the battles for his assets commenced, I only asked for one thing – his first print copy of Winston Churchill’s WWII Memoirs and two-volume treatise “The History of the English- Speaking Peoples”.
I carried those off these books and still have them. They give the room an unmistakable Stan-vibe.
But I digress. Going back to our titular theme, the following image struck me:
Someone help me out here. I mean, why cage a tree? I don’t think it was transported illegally across the southern border by mules.
And, come what may, it’s not likely to be going – very far, or anywhere, anytime, soon.
Mostly, of course, I wonder what Stanley would’ve thought of it all.
I have indicated above that Stanley was a broker, and it is easy to slip into the temptation of marveling at how quaint the markets were during his innings at the bourse. 50s/60s – buy IBM; 70s/80s – buy Cisco and Microsoft. But he did endure a couple of nasty recessions, and through 20% interest rates in the early ‘80s.
In fact, across my undergrad years (an enterprise he, at minimum, subsidized) Inflation rose to beyond 13%, and, during my Freshman, Sophomore and Senior years, the U.S. economy was actually in Recession.
The specter of our ignominious defeat in Vietnam and of the Watergate debacle were omnipresent. Geopolitical tensions wreaked havoc on the Energy Complex, and, for the first time in anyone’s existence, Americans became vulnerable to Fundamentalist terrorism.
Just as we were emerging from all these niceties, a heretofore non-existent virus began killing off people by the thousands.
My memories of Stan’s professional experience through these times, for a variety of reasons, are both incomplete and clouded. But it couldn’t have been terribly easy to provide financial advice to his well-heeled tennis buddies, nor to articulate bad tidings to them as they unfolded. Mostly what I remember is that Sgt. Warsaw soldiered on.
Perhaps more pertinently, it strikes me that many of the challenges he faced stand in eerie verisimilitude to our current situation. There was no internet, no FTX, no Bitcoin. Derivatives were but a blot on the financial horizon.
Other than that, though, the financial challenges we confronted were about the same 40 years ago as they are today. Most prominently in my mind, there is a diminished faith in the future that is reminiscent of that time, long past.
It feels, walking around some of these days, like we’re all a caged tree.
But like Stanley, we will soldier on as best we can, and perhaps it’s a perverse pity that we do so without the benefit of the training and intestinal fortitude that developed during the Greatest Generation, and was essential to the survival of a society that was forced to endure the hardships of two world wars, with the Great Depression daintily sandwiched in between.
But that all began more than a century ago. As of now, there’s three weeks remaining to Terrible (on a relative basis) ’22, with the one immediately upon us being perhaps the most interesting. After last week’s equity drubbing, capped off so appropriately by a disappointing PPI print, we’re staring down the face of CPI on Tuesday and the FOMC on Wednesday.
I’d suggest close adherence to both. A bad CPI result will certainly inform the Fed’s behavior, and – not gonna lie – the upside PPI surprise was particularly noteworthy to me, considering that Crude Oil hit its lowest level all year on Friday.
One can certainly take this as good news, but if last week be any indication, investors did not – perhaps in particular because they didn’t appear to kill the PPI pop. My concern is that if Oil Vs (as it very well could), Inflation could, er, re-energize, in a land of higher interest rates, slower growth (pointing towards Recession).
In an environment of geopolitical discord, menacing viruses, and, perhaps most importantly, one where confidence, determination, vigor, and clear-sightedness seem to be in short supply.
Returns, as such, may be hard to come by, and explanations to becalm investors perhaps even more so.
We could certainly use a Man like Stan again. But Stan’s gone. And mostly forgotten. Certainly, though, things are not so ill with me as they might have been without his faithfully lived, partially hidden life.
Maybe it’s time for me to visit his unvisited tomb. If only, that is, I can liberate myself from this godforsaken caged tree.
TIMSHEL