Rejoice brothers and sisters, we managed to survive January. It was, however, touch and go. The weather sucked throughout, worsening across the cycle. On the plus side, and even though the blizzards of snowflakes whined about it, we managed to capture that cockroach Maduro, who is now cooling his heels at Rikers. But tens of thousands of protesters died in Iran, and here, right in our own heartland, inside one of the most vanilla-flavored cities the gods could, with all their awesome powers, create, federal agents managed to kill not one but two civilian types.

NYC swore in Zo, and I reckon we’ll see about all that.

Bob Weir exited, stage left, and though his contributions to a great band were finite, the world nearly lost its mind over this – expressing its grief by playing, of course, Jerry songs. Then we lost Catherine O’Hara, and that one really hurt.

We also, though barely, endured Davos. Lately, I measure the limits of my mortality by my ability to survive this annual Gathering ‘O the Hypocrites, and I’m not sure how many more of them I can endure. This year’s jumble, full of Greenlandic sound and fury, signified nothing but nearly did me in anyway.

Throughout, Trump was, well, Trump. He dropped a $5B lawsuit on JPM from that fabulous Alpine perch, and, upon his return, this past Friday, announced a $10B action against a division of his own Treasury Department – the Internal Revenue Service. This one blows my mind, because: a) if he wins, it is the taxpayers of America that will foot the bill; and b) as he oversees the Executive Branch (of which the IRS is plainly a part), he is responsible for the defense of a suit where he himself is the plaintiff. Let’s hope at least that in this legal action, serving as plaintiff, defendant, prosecutor and defense counsel will soothe his galactic ambitions

And wherever else we may differ, upon this much we can perhaps agree. As illustrated by the following graphic, Trump II has been very good for, well, Trump:

If this doesn’t encourage the young and ambitious to consider a career in Public Service, I fear nothing will. And even these figures are both dated and understated. Most recent estimates suggest that he’s added a cool $1B since the Senior Senator from Vermont (yes, you know who) published this chart.

And all this prior to the successful adjudication of the above-mentioned lawsuits (which we know will go his way because he always wins). At which point the combined $15B of judiciary awards will place his wealth at levels over $20B – a ten-bagger since they ran him out of town in the magical year of 2020. And he’s only just finished Year 1 of this term. The amounts he might coin before booking it back to Mar a Lago are almost too delicious to contemplate.

I have mixed feelings about the presidencies of Jefferson, Grant and Truman, but at least they had the decency to depart the Oval Office in rank destitution.

Indisputably, though, biggest news of the week, and perhaps, the month, was Friday’s announcement of Trump’s designated successor to the Chairmanship of the Fed – Kevin Warsh.

If approved by Congress, Warsh would take office in May, giving the lie to my prediction that Papa Bear would dispatch the current holder of the position prematurely. I was wrong and I apologize for this.

But perhaps retribution is on its way – taking the form of compelling me to derive yet another nickname for the new sheriff at the Central Bank. Across my adult life, this process has been relatively easy. I was too young to be forced into a nomenclature dilemma with respect to William McChesney Martin (1951 – 1970), Arthur Burns (1970 – 1978), or G. William Miller (1978 – 1979). Volcker (1979 – 1987) was, well, Volcker, and, similarly, Greenie (1987 – 2006) was Greenie.

Though embarrassingly obvious, I designated Ben Bernanke (2006 – 2014) Chair Bernie – in large part because he presided during the Madoff scandal. His successor, Janet Yellen (2014 – 2018) was, naturally and organically, Chair Yell, and her replacement/current man-with-the-plan Jerome Powell (2018 – 2026), became Chair Pow.

But what to do with Warsh? Well, the best I can conjure for now is a removal of the R from the center of his Christian name (even though he is Jewish). Thus, in anticipation of his conformation, I proclaim Pow’s successor to be Chair Wash. And, in doing so, I feel some literary pride. Wash is a synonym for launder, as in money laundering — a practice in which our Central Bank has been known, from time to time, to dabble. In addition, and with lyrical flourish, it should be noted that Mrs. Wash is the former Jane Lauder (granddaughter of Estee; daughter of Ron), and if we add an N to the middle of her Maiden Name (in part to compensate for the confiscation of her husband’s R), we arrive just there. At Launder.

Chair-designate Wash is said to be the preferred choice of the Wall. Street community (particularly Druck, who is his business partner and my investment hero), which 47 has not recently bent over backwards to please. So, the choice is little confusing from that perspective. However, it may be that he figures anyone would be a political uptick from Chair Pow, whose group outrageously held rates steady just this past week – instead of patriotically cutting them to do Trump’s political bidding.

And I have a word of further risk management advice for Chair Wash, which is: don’t stick around too long, lest you end up like your predecessor, who appears to have aged about 3 decades in the years since accepted the job:

There he is on the left, back in 2017. A somewhat anonymous member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, swarthy brown eyes giving us all a near-irresistible “come hither” glance. Which stands in sharp contrast to the just taken image of him on the right, less than eight years later, looking like an exhumed executive from Alexander Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States.

Still and all, and at minimum, Wall Street didn’t hate the pick, and that, by God ought to be, and is, good enough for me. In fact, and in “buy the rumor/sell the fact” fashion, the leaked Wash news took the Gallant 500 past 7,000 for the first time on Thursday, only to indecorously sell off as he was officially welcomed in during the following session.

Perhaps, now, we can get down to ordinary business, of which there is plenty to attend. We are in the first phases of the 4,967^th government shutdown of the millennium but are so benumbed by the spectacle that we can barely take notice. The earnings engine revs up, and is purring, save for MSFT, punished and pummeled by investors not for not minting profits (they did mint them), but rather for announcing a big AI spend that investors would have torched them for not undertaking.

It was the second worst capitalization slaughter in market history (~$357B), surpassed only by the NVDA rout of exactly one year earlier — as catalyzed by the certainty that DeepSeek (remember them?) would render them obsolete.

But it didn’t stop, as indicated above, the G5 from scaling previously un-breached heights.

Matters were less rosy in anti-currency land, with Gold, Silver and BTC all being waxed. I am compelled, at least for the time being, to advise investors to avoid these casino-like rat traps.

Instead, direct your focus to the earnings calendar, which this week features Gooooooog, AMZN, Palantir and AMD among others. Also, there’s the January Jobs Report, which, for anyone who cares, drops on Friday.

My best guess is that we are in for a blessedly less overwrought February. And I don’t see much edge in the world of factor migration. I wouldn’t want to be short this market, but contemporaneously, I cannot work up much enthusiasm for incremental buying. Sometimes, this is as it ought to be.

After all Peter (Chapter 5, Verse 2, King James Bible) warns us to shun the “filthy lucre”. And he’s right. But as a last word of risk management advice, if you find yourself with a stash of the latter, hold on to it.

Chair Wash and his bride Mrs. Launder will soon arrive on the scene to take us all to the cleaners. Because it’s my guess that they have no less elegant office appointment tastes than Mr. Powell.

And that, my friends, has been a tad problematic for the latter.

TIMSHEL

Exit, pursued by a bear

William Shakespeare, A Winter’s Tale (Stage Direction: Act III, Scene 3)

Our ritualistic purloining of Willie Shake is not in this case of a quote, but rather of perhaps the most well-known stage direction in the history of theater.

And I will be the first to acknowledge that it is over-indexed, particularly in the highfalutin intersections between literature and finance – where I am best known to vibe. Among me and my peeps, one must take great care to avoid excessive usage of such cliches – or risk the worst designation that can be applied in these realms – that of being trite.

Here, though, the set-up is so delicious that I feel I must take up the cudgel. First, because it’s Winter. And not only Winter, but a particularly harsh one – with vicious storms attacking and disrupting folks in the last weekend of January sufficient to ensure that no one in these parts could possibly mistake the season. And this winter, just as was true in our titular work, there are confusing tales to tell.

Because A Winter’s Tale is a very perplexing play, so much so that the plot cannot even be described. And the above-mentioned stage direction fits the chaos with precision — accompanying — as it does, a principal character’s efforts, at his king’s command, to desert a baby girl, experiencing associated guilt, finding his ship destroyed by a storm, and, finally, executing his ursine-induced departure. The Bard offers no context here. The boat is destroyed, he thinks better of abandoning the child, and then, somehow, a big ol’ Grizzly chases him off stage.

All of which kind of reminds me of the present condition of both the Capital Economy and the markets.

And adding neither clarity nor uplift to the ambiance is that this past week, the main center of action was the annual Gathering O’ the Hypocrites, otherwise known as the World Economic Forum of Davos Switzerland.

In a touch of verisimilitude, the main topic, of course, was ownership and control of the icy arctic mass known as Greenland. On this matter, silliness abounds, but, for our purposes, we can gratifyingly tie it to our main theme, through the device of an 1850s folk song – Farewell to Tarwathie, recorded by (Suite) Judy (Blue Eyes) Collins on her “Colors of the Day’ Album:

The cold coast of Greenland, Is barren and bare
No seed time nor harvest, is ever known there
And the birds here sing sweetly, In mountain and dale
But there’s no bird in Greenland, to sing to the whale
There is no habitation, for a man to live there
And the king of that country, Is the fierce Greenland bear

And here we was, thinkin’ our main problems in Greenland would be with Denmark, which, after all, is the home turf of one of Shakespeare’s most notable protagonists – Hamlet, who is also known as The Mad Dane. When riled, The Mad Dane was known to raise quite a ruckus.

But no, what we really need to worry about is them bears. There’s only a few thousand of them, but the locals tell me that they’s a fierce bunch, not likely to simply roll over and get stiffed.

Proving, though, that even at an assembly of preachy, entitled billionaires can generate pockets of rationality, somewhere between ski runs and apres festivities, the Trumpian/Greenlandian diktat evaporated. Exit plans for a military strike, combined with yet another round of tariff coercion to anyone who objects; enter a kumbaya announcement that a negotiated settlement was in the offing. All followed by claims that this was the objective from the start, and, of course, by declarations of glorious victory.

We were also treated to a stone-cold bitch fight, with California Governor Newsom on one side, and Treasury Secretary Bessent, acting as a proxy for Big Orange, on the other. It featured ad hominem tonsorial insults and even rather unfortunate props such as knee pads. I’m pretty sure that no such exchange had ever before transpired between Golden State Guv and Treas Sec — not between Leland Stanford and Salmon P. Chase during the Civil War, or Friend Richardson and Andrew Mellon in the lead up to the Great Depression. And certainly not when George P. Schultz ran Treasury and Ronald Reagan oversaw matters in Sacramento. In fact, so enamored were these two that the former served as Secretary of State for the three quarters of the latter’s two magnificent Presidential terms.

But hey, that’s Davos for you, a shindig where our betters hop on their private jets to convene, amid unimaginable luxury, to scold us about our over-consumption of energy and our greed/reluctance to completely subsidize the underclass. It makes, moreover, for some good sound bites and photo ops, and this year didn’t disappoint on either account. Pissing contests were ascendent, with the targets scanning the globe – from the Fertile Crescent to Caracas to the Twin Cities.

But perhaps my favorite moments came when 47/45 announced that he is suing JP Morgan — to the tune of $5B — for allegedly debanking him a half decade ago. And my first reaction was, bearing in mind that I have maintained the same account with them since opening it at the Chemical Bank branch at Broadway and 113^th Street in 1982, that I wish they’d debank me. Heck, I wouldn’t even charge them the full $5 Bil; half that amount would, for me, more than suffice.

However, more broadly, I am forced to marvel at the notion that the President of the United States/Leader of the Free World is suing the world’s largest privately held depository institution¹, as well as being the largest in this here country. It kinda seems to me that hauling this outfit into court on a personal matter is outside what The Founders had in mind when they set forth the duties and responsibilities of the Chief Executive. Because, among other matters and though I hesitate to mention it to this polite society, such a move creates at least the temptation to use awesome executive powers for personal gain.

And, as exacerbated by the Alpine altitudes, these doings appear to have sucked the oxygen out of the atmosphere of the Global and Domestic Capital Economies.

Which is a shame, because there’s stuff going on that merits our more righteous market attention. GDP dropped with a 4 handle on Wednesday, with associated measures of Inflation clocking in at ~2.7%. The earnings reporting engine is slowly cranking up, with MSFT, META and TSLA on the docket for Wednesday, and AAPL, Visa and Mastercard due up on Thursday.

Meantime, investors have thus far been expressing some petulance at these podium turns, with, in “exit, pursued by a bear” fashion, neither upside nor downside surprisers being spared the brunt of their derision:

The FOMC meets next week, with their standing pat coming in as a virtual lock. Fed watchers will then be reduced to following the actions taken by the Justice Department against voting members. At the point of this scribbling, SCOTUS is reviewing the case that Governor Lisa Cook brought against Papa Bear, for seeking, unjustly she believes, to fire her, and it does not look good at the moment for the latter. Powell was at the hearing, and presumably, is preparing for his pending Star Chamber turn with the same division of the executive branch, which, approximately a fortnight ago, subpoenaed his ass.

What impact these measures will ultimately have on Interest Rates is unknown. However, recent innings have not been encouraging. The Fed is likely on hold. Longer term yields on these here shores are on a moderate upswing, and rates Japan, as has been widely discussed, are at multi-decade highs. Which has failed to facilitate, as presumably they hoped it might, in the recovery of their currency against ours:

Normally, this graph is presented in the inverse – as the number of JPY required to purchase a dollar (~158), which is the way the market is quoted. Because, for eons – and I am not making this up – the Foreign Exchange trading system operates by a protocol under which the member of the pair with the larger unit is always on top.

But just as I did last week when I showed Captain Sully’s Hudson River-grounded airplane, sometimes, it’s simply better to review things upside down.

But mostly, I blame Davos. Because they have made it so easy for me to do so.

The confab is over, though, but winter persists, cold and harsh – never more so that this past weekend. And you’d think that it’s been too cold in MN for either ICE or its detractors to stir up much nonsense. But they were out there, freezing their asses off, and the federales even managed to complete the murderous trifecta of Minny martyrs, featuring George Floyd, Renee Good, and now Alex Pretti.

And, for all we endured – Arctic Blasts, bloviated geopolitics, pissing contests between the Executive Branches of Washington and Sacramento, the markets, while pressed, finished the week flat.

So, in taking my exit, I do so not directly pursued by a bear. But I worry that he’s out there. And if he is, he’s not likely to be in a particularly pleasant mood. Perhaps this is because this is hibernation season, and he should be sleeping. However, in this frigid winter cycle, full of tales too strange to tell, as the Mad Dane famously observed, to sleep, and, perhaps, to dream, appears to beyond our aspiration. So, let’s stay awake, eyes wide open, and prepare to react to whatever next this wacky Winter’s Tale may bring.

TIMSHEL

¹ Standard and Poors ranks JPM number 5, immediately behind 4 state-owned Chinese banks.

I read the news today, oh boy, 4000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire,
And though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all,
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall

John Lennon

Of course, here, I purloin the lyrics of what is widely (though not universally) considered the finest song in The Beatles cannon. And almost never out of the Top 5.

With a couple of caveats, I do not share in this viewpoint: 1) such matters are entirely questions of individual taste; and 2) I do like the song, but would not, personally, place it in the Fab Top 20.

It is, however, classic Lennon, with majestic musical hook(s) (interspersed by an entirely forgettable Macca bridge), and elegant but glibly clever lyrics, designed, as Lennon’s often did, to pose more questions than they answer.

We still, for example, cannot confidently confirm the true identity of The Walrus.

Meantime, ADitL begins by describing the death of Tara Browne – key member of the Carnaby Street scene, heir, on his mother’s side to the Guiness beer empire, and, destined, on his father’s, to become the Fifth Baron Oranmore – as described in an iconic British tabloid known as The Daily Mail¹.

He, who blew his mind out in a car, is also said to be the bloke that introduced The Lads – or at least the reluctant Paul, to LSD.

In the same January 19, 1967 edition of the above-mentioned newspaper, there was a brief article about the identification of 4,000 potholes in the (presumably otherwise) pleasant British township of Blackburn – located a short distance northeast of the port of Liverpool, in the County of Lancashire. Given its prevailing population of slightly more than 100,000, this implied, at the time, a pothole for every 26 denizens of the above-mentioned village.

However, with trademark verisimilitude, Lennon somehow conflates this with the revelation of the capacity of the Royal Albert Hall (known, even prior to this, to be just under 6,000):

Blackburn Clocktower (Left) and Royal Albert Hall (Right)

Full disclosure: I’ve never been to Blackburn, but did attend the Cream 2005 Cream reunion at Albert Hall. It was a helluva show.

That, however, is a different story.

I got to thinking about all this 00 in contemplation, not of the day, but rather of the week, that just passed, which began with the touching but in my judgment disproportionate reaction to the demise of Bob Weir. Even I was thrown for a loop, being compelled to execute a near-complete rewrite of last week’s note after I read the news (oh boy) late last weekend.

Monday came and went. But then, on Tuesday, an old friend of mine had his leg amputated. I awoke Wednesday morning to reports that our entire navy was streaming towards the Persian Gulf, with menacing intent to rid the world of the mullahs once and for all. The market didn’t like this, and my clients were losing money.

By that afternoon, of course, the entire nationwide Verizon network went down, causing untold aggravation, as well as some investment reversals due to the inability of selected market participants to execute trades. The Company, of course, is known by its ubiquitous slogan “can you hear me now?”.

Well, no, as it happens, we can’t.

Worse than that was the Company’s unfortunate decision to downplay the incident during those critical early hours. The network failed around 12:30 Eastern and it wasn’t until after 4 that their website acknowledged that “some users were having service problems”, which, if just by a titch, was an inadequate description of what went down.

At the point of this correspondence, no explanation for the extended outage has been forthcoming, and – not gonna lie – the response – tantamount to “networks go down; here’s $20” – left me and I suspect others – somewhat cold. Plus, as a grassy knoll kind of guy, I can’t help but wonder if the episode and the incrementally escalated tensions in the Middle East aren’t somehow, you know, connected.

Fortunately, the week improved after that. We backed off our aircraft carriers. The markets, if not recovering, at least held the lion’s share of their ground.

Thursday was particularly memorable. For one thing, it was the 97^th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest Americans/figures of the 20^th Century – Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. It was also the 17^th solar cycle since the heroic actions of Captain Sully, who, in 2009, managed to save everyone on board a commercial airplane, which, due to a bird strike, was forced to land in the Hudson River:

Captain Sully’s Plane (Flipped Upside Down for Dramatic Effect):

Furthermore, Thursday was the 25^th anniversary of the launch of the much-maligned Wikipedia. Of which I am a big fan. Maybe their biggest. So much so that when I caved, as I do every year, and stroked them fifty bucks last month, they asked me to kick in another ten and I happily complied.

There was, in addition, a very special event/milestone which transpired for me on Thursday. It is sufficiently personal that I won’t share the specifics. But to those who know, I will state that it went well enough to have rescued my entire year, and, perhaps more importantly, my week.

By Friday, I was spent. And such, for better or worse, is a Week in the Life.

But here is the thing about weeks. When one ends another begins. So, I reckon we’ll have to do this all over again. It is unlikely to mimic the one just passed. Bobby isn’t likely to die again, and my buddy has only one more leg that can potentially be removed. My guess is that Verizon will be on its toes.

But Trump could literally decide to seek to take over any country in the world and obviously intends to begin with Greenland. As everyone knows, he has announced new tariffs on any country that dares to oppose this bloodless conquest, and it’s hard not to conjure up memories of the Anschluss or annexation of the Sudetenland. We need this for our security, of course, because without full control of Greenland, we may face the same terrors that the Germans confronted when their tanks were forced to contend with the menacing Polish Cavalry.

None of which, at this point, is helping the markets

More mundanely, today is a holiday, and the earnings season is still in its early innings, with not much on the calendar about which to wring one’s hands. We do get a first glimpse at Q4 GDP on Wednesday, and it looks like a banger.

So, it may very well be that we will be compelled to focus upon and endure yet another cycle of over-reporting out of Minneapolis: a city which, in a better world, rather than being THE lightening rod for insurrection, revolution and the misappropriation of taxpayer dollars, would be enjoying a well-earned hibernation.

And I have no idea where any of this leaves the markets. Lots of crosswinds at play, and, as I like to remind all you young bloods, each year tells a story of its own, and it’s unwise, in my judgment, to anticipate the narrative this early in its chronology. My best risk advice is thus to wait and see.

Read the news today, oh boy. And tomorrow. And the day after that. What you find may surprise you. The English Army may win the war. A friend may blow his mind out in a car. NATO could collapse.

But, come what may, then you must find your coat and grab your hat. Or else you might miss the bus – by seconds flat.

However, there’s one thing about which we can perhaps all agree. And that is this:

I’d love to turn. You. On.

Upon my honor I would.

TIMSHEL

¹  The publication first found its way – as a direct reference — into Fab 4 lyrics within the 1966 single “Paperback Writer”.

You imagine me sippin’ champagne from your boot
For a taste of your elegant pride
I may be goin’ to hell in a bucket, babe
But at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride

Weir, Mydland and Barlow (all now dead)

I am obliged, of course, to write a few words about Bobby. On balance, I wish to praise him, but I do so with some ambivalence. Yes, he was a driving force of a band that changed my life and arguably the world. He also, while by no means being among my pantheon of shredders, deeply influenced my guitar playing — mostly by making me aware of the barred C chord, which, if played correctly, rings so brightly up and down the fretboard.

Now, before y’all get in my grill, let me acknowledge that this chart does not precisely depict a bar chord. It is the Cmaj shape slid up to the 7^th fret to form a Gmaj, with the flat tip of the index finger applied for the objective of modulation.

Thanks to Bobby, I use this form too. But also lay, as taught by him, my entire index finger across the fretboard for an even richer sound.

He wrote some excellent songs (for instance Sugar Magnolia, The Music Never Stopped, Weather Report Suite, Jack Straw, our title song), along with some annoying ones (as in Playing in the Band, One More Saturday Night, The Other One).

But he was one of the luckiest sumbitches in the rock pantheon. He walked into a Palo Alto music store one New Year’s Eve and met with greatness – in the form of Jerry Garcia, and the rest is history. Weir, in my judgment, road Jerry’s coat tails to untold riches of fame and fortune. There was a lot of talk about the Dead being a Democracy, with balanced contributions across the ensemble. Yeah, right. Kinda like the Bulls of the 1990s were a collective of equally shared responsibility.

To anyone paying attention. It was Jerry’s band. Full stop.

And I have one final beef to register here, having to do with the decade long cash grab in which he, at minimum, participated. Beginning with the Fare Thee Well shows in Chicago in 2015, which, due to representations that these would be the last ever performances of the surviving ensemble, caused ticket prices to eclipse $100K in some cases, all the way through, by my count at least a half dozen tours and Sphere residencies tied to the same representations, by my estimation, Bobby and the boys made more in a single active month in the last few years than they did during their entire thirty year original run.

I’m a capitalist and applaud them, genuinely, for cashing in. As was their right. But particularly with respect to that unending last show/Fare Thee Well spiel, they kind of killed the buzz. And what’s more, I don’t think Jerry would’ve approved.

Meantime, I am absolutely gob smacked by the outpouring of tributes that have flooded the ionosphere since his demise this past weekend. Everybody has weighed in. And that’s something.

Maybe a ticket to heaven. In a bucket. If so, I hope that he paid less than a few schlubs with more money than brains shelled out for those Soldier Field seats, 10 summers ago.

One might also have expected us to have learned something from these experiences, but similar madness appears to abound in every quarter – particularly in the realms of government.

Setting aside those magnificent Reagan years, the government seems to be poking its big fat nose into more places than its business justifiably takes it. Since the Grateful Dead formed in 1965, but particularly of late.

This past fortnight has been a especially active, witnessing the take over of Venezuela and its oil fields, the threatened subsuming of other jurisdictions, the purchase of $200B of Mortgage Bonds and the proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 10%.

All share the common characteristic of manipulation of key markets for political purposes in an election year.

The assault on interest rates, embedded in the credit card and mortgage moves, are particularly instructive – for both their wrong-headedness and their cynicism. If you can read the associated petulant, self-congratulatory announcements, published by the President on his own for-profit media outlet without retching, well, you’re a better person than me.

With respect to the former, I will stop short of going into the tank for the credit card companies, who make obscene (> 50%) profit margins and probably do charge excessive vig on their plastic. But if the Federal Government caps interest rates, it will most certainly diminish the amount of credit that these enterprises will make available to the unwashed.

Moreover, to propose a time frame of one year on this nonsense exposes the unmixed political motivations at play here, screaming, as it does, “vote for me. I cut your credit card rates in half”. And I must ask: do we really want to allocate scarce credit capacity based on manipulation of the electorate?

The answer is no. And I believe that folks are beginning catch on. Most notably as manifested by a surge in the demand for Old School Gold. I probably don’t need to inform you that the shiny yellow metal is up by 2/3rds since Big Orange took over the controls (but I will):

Bob, of course, knew how precious Gold was, as captured in his version of the Papa John Philips-written “Me and My Uncle”, which describes two subsequent thefts of gilded nuggets, the second of which involves the subsequent murder of the above-mentioned uncle:

Now I love those cowboys, I love their gold
Love my uncle, God rest his soul
Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know
Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold
And I left his dead ass there by the side of the road

I read somewhere that Philips wrote the song in a tequila stupor and completely forgot having done so. But Suite Judy (Blue Eyes) Collins managed to capture it on tape and record it on an album. Papa John did not realize he was the composer until the royalty checks started coming in.

It don’t know if this story is true. But if it’s not, it should be.

It certainly evokes truisms reflecting the state of latter-day living, where we all must contend with the conflicting forces of faddish hipness, morality and crude self-interest – a battle we appear to be losing on every front.

The story of Bob Weir and the Dead – in its various incarnations is a compelling object lesson for all the above. Across his astonishingly long career, he embodied each component – as the young hipsters’ flavor of the month, as a purveyor of rough but holy justice, and, finally, as an engaged economic agent, successfully monetizing, while contemporaneously maintaining his more ethereal brand.

But his time came, any day, and we won’t worry about him.

Because he asked us not to.

I suspect he would advise us, instead, to worry about ourselves.

We may be going to heaven or hell. With or without a bucket.

And we may, or may not, enjoy the ride.

TIMSHEL