Life had lost its fun
There was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the GI bill
For a flag-draped casket on a local hero’s hill
There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes,
And Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose,
Little pitchers have big ears,
Don’t stop to count the years,
And sweet songs never last too long on broken radios,
John Prine
Every now and then, it pays to apportion our world between its two primal forces – Pathos and Bathos. It’s been a few years since I done this, and the present day strikes me as being an appropriate point for updating the comparison.
I’m not gonna bother to define Pathos. It’s one of those things that you know when you see, and presumably, y’all have both observed and experienced significant doses of it across the coursings of your existence.
If one cares to look, it can be found everywhere. In them Maui fires for example. In crumbling urban landscapes. With the about-to-be-liberated Miami Zoo orca dying before ever swimming out to sea.
Truth is, should we so choose, we can always wallow in Pathos – both personal and general. It is part of the human condition, but, in these waning days of a summer, draining with pathetic celerity, I will neither enable nor empower this exercise.
So, let’s move on to Bathos, shall we? There are myriad definitions of the term, but for our purposes, we will designate it as situations within our actions or range of awareness, wherein superficially dramatic sequences devolve into the comic — due to irony, hubris, and/or any combination of unforced errors that litter the landscape of our experience.
I took a notion to devote space to this concept after reading about a recent Hollywood controversy, concerning a soon-to-be-released Leonard Bernstein biopic, in which Producer/Director/Lead Actor (and apparent scab) Bradley Cooper dons a prosthetic nose to achieve, er, a more Semite-like appearance, evoking criticisms of implied ethnic stereotyping.
Now, as I seek unadorned honesty in these pages, y’all should know that I have a connection to Cooper – namely, that once, out of sheer boredom, I took a Buzzfeed quiz to determine who would be my ideal Hollywood boyfriend, and got matched with Coop.
This, combined with me coming up as a Jan (instead of a Marcia) in a similar, Brady-based quiz, could cause you to draw certain erroneous conclusions about me. In reality, I am both cis and straight, but I won’t insult your collective intelligence by trying to convince you of same.
Besides, it would crowd out other essential examples of Bathos which obliterate the landscape. For example, with the recent admission of the Universities of Washington and Oregon to the Big 10, the membership tally now reaches 18 – nearly double its name-based allocation. Moreover, a conference once Midwestern to its core, confining its perimeter to the area stretching from Iowa City, IA to Columbus, OH, from St. Paul, MN to Bloomington, IN, now stretches from the Columbia Gorge to the Jersey Shore. Finally, there’s the small problem that the State of California, featuring newly minted Big 10 members UCLA and USC, is too moral to subsidize the patronage of anything residing in jurisdictions of iniquity such as Iowa and Nebraska – including their football stadiums and adjacent hotel facilities.
I’m sure they’ll figure that one out. And we should hope they do, because, as the university presidents hasten to remind us, these moves are all about enhancing and enriching the student athlete experience. We knew that, of course, but it’s nice to be reminded of it when they grab the cash.
While potentially bleeding back into Pathos, as of this past week, the former President/current frontrunner for the Republican nomination is now charged with a dainty, subtle, nuanced 91 felonies – – across 4 jurisdictions. One of these, designated, under the criminal code, as the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute, includes a co-defendant that is the original author of the law. This individual, once a 9/11 hero, is now a MAGA goat, but, as they say at (my alma mater) Wisconsin, that’s life in the Big 10.
The primary target is, of course, sporting a giant lead in the polls – of magnitude so galactic that he (never to be mistaken for a Shrinking Violet) is skipping this week’s debate – an event that promises to be uber-bathetic whether or not he yields to temptation and demands the podium at the last minute.
On the other side of the ledger, the Incumbent, unambiguously descending both mentally and physically, is at the center of an influence peddling investigation which his own Justice Department is either slow walking or ignoring, the testimony of witnesses under affidavit and the identification of at least $20M in surreptitious payments – to shell companies and various family members — notwithstanding.
These two are the odds-on likely combatants in the pending electoral equivalent of the Zuck/Musk cage match. And no one seems to want either of them.
I’d now turn my attention to market matters, and, ideally, to some thoughts on the wind-down of the earnings season. I am hampered here a bit, though, because a critical source of information for me – Factset – has taken most of August, you know, the key weeks in the Q2 reporting cycle, off.
Oh well, we’re down to the dregs of the season anyway. There’s almost nothing of import on the economic reporting docket, and, by next week at the latest, it will be time for the Labor Day get-outof- Dodge ritual.
There are, however, a couple of matters with which to attend. The first is the tardily scheduled NVDA earnings release, the most recent of which arguably catalyzed the whole summer rally. The shares are ~10% off their all-time highs, but still a respectable 3-bagger in ’23. I don’t know how this plays out after Wednesday’s close, but it is apparent to me that anything issuing forth either Pathetic or Pathetic spells major trouble for the markets.
Then, by Friday, we can turn our attentions to that fabulous Labor Day bash known as the Jackson Hole Economic Forum – sponsored, in time-honored fashion, by those fine folks at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (does the KC Fed do anything else?).
Historically, along with Davos, it is the most Bathetic event on the market calendar. But it nonetheless requires our attention. It was, after all, the venue wherein both QE2 and QE3 (the latter of which, in my judgement, giftwrapped the 2012 election for Barack Obama) were announced.
Is QE4 on the docket this year? I rather doubt it. Our snowboards are instead pointed in the opposite direction, up the Pathetic, Bathetic hill of Quantitative Tightening. Meantime, Treasury is issuing paper to beat the band, China is divesting, as, perhaps, is Japan.
Mortgage rates, in result and as has been widely reported, are at a 20-year high:
No matter, because who wants to buy a home now anyway? And even if you do, as far as I aware, there’s no GI Bill to speak of at the moment.
On a happier note, there are fewer holes in daddies’ arms these days. Because the smack of choice is now Fentanyl. Which no one save the patently suicidal would ever dream of injecting. There is a hole, however, in Jackson, WY, into which many an investor’s money has gone. So, take care.
For now, and as always, the world and the markets are both Pathetic and Bathetic. I don’t expect much, this side of a major surprise from NVDA, in the way of factor movement between now and Labor Day Tuesday.
The last trimester is bound to be wild and wooly; hopefully with a minimal dose of Pathos.
Meantime, if we so choose, we can embrace the Bathos all around us, letting it waft, serenely and ironically, on the breezes of this waning summer season.
TIMSHEL