East is East and West is West (well, you know the rest)
An o’er-used passage to be sure, but how many of you knew that it draws from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Battle of East and West”?
Glad to enlighten you.
I got to thinking about this, of course, upon learning of the passage of Jerry West: League Logo, Zeke from Cabin Creek, last week. ‘Tis indeed a sad milestone, but Mr. Clutch was the bane of my existence back in the early ‘70s, wherein, year in and year out, he and his annoying Lakers would dispatch what was a pretty good Chicago Bulls squad in the Conference Finals.
West being West, he crushed us. We’d go on a tear, claw our way to a 4th Quarter lead, and bam! JW would hit three impossible corner shots with Jerry Sloan in his face. And, in so doing, break our hearts.
So, when I think of West, it is Jerry, who played at both West Virginia, and, professionally, in the West Coast Mecca of Los Angeles, that comes to mind. I don’t give a thought to Yeezy. Or the dude that played Batman on TV. Or James: the main character from the Wild, Wild West franchise.
But who is East? Not a lot of chappies with that surname. Eastman (Paul McCartney’s Father-In-Law)? Yes. Eastwood? (Blondie in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)? Uh huh. But Google “East” as a handle. and all you come up with is a few footballers, cellists and businessmen (all of whom seem, for some reason, to hail from the U.K.).
So, we must improvise, and I note with interest that Zeke died only a couple of days after the demise of Chet (the Jet) Walker – perhaps the most prominent of that era’s also-ran Bulls. But Chicago isn’t really East. In fact, at the time, it resided in the NBA’s Western Conference. So, we move further from the direction of the sun’s trajectory, and find ourselves in Boston, whose NBA team (the Celtics, Naismith Trophy winners yet again) routinely beat up on West’s Lakers in the finals. And I’m not sure if this counts, but Boston is, by a considerable distance, the eastern-most locus of any NBA franchise.
The twain thus met innumerable times on the hardwood of the NBA finals, with Cowens/White/Havlicek squaring off against Kareem and any handy mirror-foggers that the Lakers threw out there in the latter part of the ‘70s, and then, of course, those classic Bird/Magic showdowns a decade hence.
Wither and how, though, shall the twain meet in the present day? The Celtics remain the Celtics, but the Lakers are stuck in the early stages of creating a post-LeBron identity, and LeBron ain’t even left the building (Staples Center) yet.
We thus must look beyond the realms of ironed rims and hooped twine.
Tupac and Biggie? Only as an object lesson. Them cats were never going to get together, and, as history shows, their eternal fissure didn’t end well for either.
We do have the example of the B1G, which now spans the continent – from L.A./Seattle/Eugene to New Brunswick/College Park. But – NGL – the subject annoys me.
And maybe the meeting of the twain ain’t such a good idea after all. I’m on the East Coast, and this Cali stuff drives me crazier by the day. The geniuses there have destroyed ten thousand fast food jobs this quarter alone – due to the imposition of that $20/hour minimum wage. Meantime, median prices at these culinary establishments (which, whatever one might think of the fare, are a major source of foodstuffs for the disadvantaged masses they purport to assist) are up ~8%.
Now I read, in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, that Central Valley farmers – hard pressed for so long due to drought conditions – are, post-draught – only receiving 40% of their promised water allocations, though the needed water is both proximate and available in abundance. Their viability is thus rendered dubious. The reason? Normalized water flows are still deemed to interfere with the migratory habits of the region’s smelt population. The latter is protected under typically loony Golden State regulations, so, farmers and those that consume their products (All God’s Children) be damned.
It’ll only get worse from here. CA faces a 10% (and growing) housing deficiency. Within at most a decade, the state will have rid itself – again by regulation — of large diesel trucks, allowing only zero-emission rigs on its roads by that time. That there aren’t (and won’t be) anywhere near enough charging stations to accommodate the preferred battery powered jobs, and the weight (~2.5x diesel rigs) of the latter is certain to produce a strain on already over-taxed roads. But this has not impeded progress towards this righteous end.
Taking my concerns to the extreme, we’re looking at a locus with sinfully fallow farms, an alarming shortage of residential dwellings, sub-optimal logistics to move vital commodities, a dearth of Pizza Huts and Taco Bells, and a populous that is unable to pay the tab at those establishments which survive.
The smelt, though? They’ll be OK.
If we point our shoes north-facing, then East is on the right and West is on the left. And, as I gaze rightward from this orientation, I note that across the mighty Atlantic, the governments of both France and the U.K. are hanging by a thread, causing a selloff in the sovereign obligations of both ancient and proud nations. France is East of Britain, but replacement electoral outcomes push the twain farther apart, with France poised to take menacing steps to the right and England lurching back into the arms of the lefty Labor Party.
Over on these shores, we don’t seem to care. Our stocks and bonds are on the bid. Inflation, as reported this week, remains subdued, placing rate cuts back into play.
And the twain of the handful of mega cap stocks and the rest of the crowd continues to diverge, as is illustrated in the following year-to-date performance comparison between the Gallant 500, and the same group of names, calculated without rank (weight).
And even among those chosen few, the divergence between Supreme Leader NVDA and the rest is striking, with the former having well more than doubled in 2024 and the others mostly just chugging along.
While we might all benefit from certain forms which a twain-meeting of the few equity haves and the many have nots, I fear that were this to come to pass, it is more likely to take the form of a selloff of a former than the resurgence of the latter.
And that we don’t want, right?
Meantime, all this has put the hurt on hedge fund managers, many of whom are worth more sympathy than even the laid off grill jockeys from Cali Mikey D’s. Trust me. I’ve seen the numbers. They ain’t pretty lately.
But markets, are battles between men (and women), and are derisively indifferent to participant positioning on the map. Thus, like the battle between Afghan warrior and the Colonel’s son over the fetching mare that is the subject of the dispute in our thematic poem, the following can be said:
“But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face though they come from the ends of the earth!”
We could do worse as investors, and, indeed, as members of the human colony, to remember this adage. And, as for these and other twain meetings, ‘tis perhaps best to leave these matters in the hands of Providence.
TIMSHEL