London calling, yes, I was there, too
And you know what they said? Well, some of it was true
London calling at the top of the dial
And after all this, won’t you give me a smile?
Joe Strummer
Yes, my loves, the sad anniversary is yet again upon us. It thus devolves on me to give a shout out to those gone but not yet completely forgotten. To Goldflam. To Crotty. To Fitzy. And, of course, to Morty and Zep (the latter of which was disputing a trade with us when his phone line went dead).
I will resist the temptation to add to the galaxy of faux profundity as to the meaning of it all. Save this. For most under the age of senility, 9/11 is when it all began. By which I mean our insecurities, our lack of confidence in our surroundings. In our ability, with the tools at our disposal, to meet the challenges which forever plague us.
Oh, sure, we’d moved with wary step in earlier eras. The interval after the Kennedy Assassination/Vietnam/Watergate/Iranian Hostage Crisis was a weak one. But as the ‘80s unfolded into the ‘90s, it seemed we could hardly do wrong.
Then those planes hit the towers, and we have scarcely had the ability to move assertively forward since. We fought a couple of pointless, futile wars. The markets crashed. We lived off helicopter money until a powerful but hardly historically menacing virus sent us down a rabbit hole. We hoovered up the funny money again, and it worked for a while. But we overdid it by any standard. The amount of cash now in circulation is now 10 times what it was before the crash and more than quadruple its level prior to the lockdowns:
But we also face another sad anniversary. On September 10, 1983 – forty years ago Sunday, Joe Strummer fired Mick Jones from The Clash – which called itself as “the only band that matters”. And, at least in the post Beatles/Woodstock era, it nearly lived up to this billing. This wasn’t quite as ballsy as Mike Love handing Brian Wilson his walking papers. But it was close.
A few months earlier, Joe had fired drummer Topper Headon, but at least he had an excuse, as old Top was mainlining heroin. Jones, on the other hand, was released due to his increasing infatuation with such techniques as looping and sampling. Please understand, I agree with Joe that these things are better left to the posers. But (FFS!) Jones wrote most of the band’s most magnificent licks. And he deserved better.
A little over two years later – in fact on my 26th birthday – the reconstituted Clash released its final studio album – ironically named Cut the Crap — because the material was positively scatological compared with its earlier output.
And that’s where I believe we are now in the markets. It’s our Cut the Crap moment.
After an impressive year-to-date run that extended, more or less, until Labor Day, the tape has since felt decidedly weighty. Much of the burden has been born by the TMT complex, which ended the summer season in less than heroic fashion. The much-dreaded (celebrated?) AI takeover of all human endeavor appears less imminent. Our arch chipmaking enemy Huawei – banned from these shores since 2020 – has made some breakthroughs. Contemporaneously, those meanies that run the CCP have prohibited the use of foreign electronics products, including those supplied by that mighty orb Apple.
Other markets are feeling the impacts as well. Small caps are under enormous pressure. Crude Oil is at 18-month highs. The Saudis appear to be dug in on an extension of their production cuts, which project out to ~2M barrel/day shortfall in Q4:
The USD is up an astonishing (for the typically somnolent FX market) 5% in the last two months.
For all the above, it feels like market factors are fixin’ to make their move over the next little while.
So, are they gonna cut the crap? Well, it’s hard to say.
I reckon will get minor glimpses into our future this week, what, with the CPI/PPI numbers dropping and all. Probably nothing on the order of revelation is on the menu, but, particularly with energy prices again on the rise, an upside Inflation surprise might be – shall we say – unpleasant. The United Auto Workers is fixing to vote on the first industry-wide strike in two generations, and if they go, it just might exceed the galactic impact of that Hollywood job action.
The Fed weighs in about a fortnight from now, and we can probably expect them to cut all this rateraising crap. But what of it?
At some point we’re going to have to figure out where we are, whether we’re in the sewer and need to swim our way out, or whether, the hint of noxious gasses notwithstanding, our surroundings are, if not Eden-like, then at minimum endurable.
I’m leaning toward the latter, though it goes against every codger-like cell in my body. I am, after all, a child of the Strummer era, where, to the accompaniment of raging guitars, angry young men exhorted us to, well, to cut the crap.
It worked back then. Is it necessary now, and, if so, will it work a second time? I’m not sure. But I’m old now, so there’s that.
But business profits have been amazingly stalwart, the consumer shockingly resilient. Despite everyone from Beijing to Pyongyang to Tehran to Moscow to Washington seeking to take us down, we remain substantially upright.
Heck, even them little covid buggers are gathering themselves for a counteroffensive, but my guess is that unless they reach such force as to cause folks to drop on the street, they will not keep us at home.
On the other hand, this much is true. The WSJ published a college ranking that placed University of Chicago at a putrid 37. Less dramatically, Birmingham – not the greatest city in Alabam but the second largest town in the United Kingdom – declared itself insolvent last week – in part, so the reports tell us, because it owes its female civil servants some bonuses they missed out on a few years back, and it ain’t got the scratch to pay for it.
Birmingham, however, is not London, so I wasn’t there (too). But The Clash were, and for a brief period, burned the place down.
Strummer has been dead these 20 years, almost as long as my boys Morty and Zep.
Mick Jones is still around, and, when asked, expresses nothing but love and admiration for Joe Strum.
He never Cut the Crap. But then neither, thus far, have the rest of us. Whether we do so — now or in the future — remains to be seen.
Again, I’m on the fence about this. And, moreover, whether we do or not, we will presumably abide.
I remain on the optimistic side, at least in the short term, but less so than I once might have been, as has been the case for nearly all of us since September 11, 2001.
Thus, in conclusion, and on this sad day of remembrance, it only remains to ask:
After all this, won’t you give me a smile?
TIMSHEL