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

I was tempted to welcome y’all to 2026, but is it really my place to do so? Because who am I? Georgie Jessel¹? Besides, it’s not as though I arrived here before you; we all entered MMXXVI more or less together – beginning with those on the tip of the eastern side of the International Dateline, and ending, 24 hours hence, in the vicinity of its adjacent western neighbors.

I feel we don’t talk enough about the International Dateline – maybe because it’s mostly on the water. But in terms of ushering in a new year, the process, as illustrated below, begins, unmistakably, at the IDL.

Nobody, and to the best of my knowledge, has ever explained the Dateline’s eastward wiggle north of Tonga/Samoa – resembling nothing so much as the logo of the United States Postal Service facing the opposite direction.

Maybe also, if you’re like me, you confuse it with the Continental Divide, a hydrological separation, the northernmost point of which, like the International Dateline itself, is proximate to the Bering Strait which separates Russia from Alaska, but which then takes a turn thousands of miles east, concluding in the South at the Strait of Magellan.

If you’re confused at this point, you’re not alone. Because we enter ’26 in perplexing configuration.

About all I can state with certainty is that the year marks the Platinum (20^th) Anniversary of this here publication. For the math-challenged, it did indeed begin at the end of 2005 and has been in continuous weekly production ever since.

Extending the arithmetical elaboration here, I have produced ~1140 of these masterworks, which tend to run roughly 3.5 pages. Using a handy approximation of 500 words/page, we arrive at the tidy word count of 2 Millions (or thereabouts).

‘Tis indeed cause for celebration. And perhaps a bit of historical context is also in order. It all began not long after I foolishly decided to create my first risk solutions business, with the notion that sending a weekend note to each of my clients might be a sound strategy for, at minimum, maintaining their fond remembrance. Because it’s nerve-wracking, as a service provider during slower intervals, to have no interaction with the latter other than the issuance of monthly invoices. My weekly notes, in other words, were there to remind them that they remained in my thoughts.

Some of the content logically concerned market conditions, which thus allowed me to genericize portions therein, while customizing the idiosyncratic elements within separate sections of each communication.

But the generic components took on a life of their own and soon required institutionalization. All of which was crowned, somewhere around ’07, by my decision to add a pithy title and associated thematic cadence to each publication.

Media content distribution channels then came clamoring to get in on the action, most notably my own LinkedIn page and the Contributors Section of ZeroHedge. And, before I knew it, the thing had reached the improbable zenith of between 300 and 500 readers in an average week.

To place this in context, it has somehow attained the reach of ~0.000005% of the number of bibles (~6B) currently in distribution.

And nobody can legitimately dispute its market impact. In the years since launch, The Gallant 500, two crashes notwithstanding, is a 6-bagger; Cornel Naz – busted to the ranks twice over this period due to poor performance — has risen 8-fold. BTC, now at $90K, was nothing more than a Satoshi pipe dream back then, but I hesitate to take full credit for its subsequent upward explosion.

In terms of the broader world, it was the year of Hurricane Katrina, where, for a couple of terrifying days, we feared the loss of Fats Domino.

Pope John Paul II died in April of that year. I’m not sure the folks in Rome ever replaced him.

YouTube launched in February. And Facebook, still a private company back then, made the financially lucrative but stylishly dubious decision to allow membership beyond college campuses, fostering the birth of billions of cat pictures and other horrors too plentiful to enumerate.

I’m not sure if this is related, but to the good, Charles and Camilla married at (where else?) Windsor Castle, and, to the better, the original members of Pink Floyd joined together for one last time on stage at Wembley.

The Bears won the NFC title that year and began the Super Bowl with GOAT return man Devin Hester taking the opening kickoff to The House. It was, in retrospect, a generational high-water moment. They lost that game to the Indy Mannings, and it’s been all downhill for my team ever since.

But back to the markets, where I wish I could, but cannot, claim to have created unmixed blessings. When I first took finger to keyboard, the National Debt, having recently surpassed $38T, stood at a quaint by comparison $8T.

And total indebtedness? All I can do is show you the chart. And weep:

There are eerie parallels between then and now. We are, again, a year into the second White House term of a nepo baby with a rich daddy, both of whom, heroically and at great financial cost, managed to avoid action in the Vietnam War (though W, to his credit, did spend time as a National Guard Fighter Interceptor – stationed, albeit, in a place where no hostile fighter planes were likely to be found).

Meantime, both president faced or are facing “you broke it/you bought it” conundrums in multiple foreign jurisdictions – then it was Iraq and Afghanistan; now it’s Gaza and Venezuela. It should be noted here that our track record for taking over countries whose leadership we dispatched militarily is less than stellar. The blowback — from Caracas to Berkeley and the Upper West Side — has already begun and is likely to increase in volume from here.

It’s a year of a Midterm election, with every indication being that the pendulum may very well swing back leftward. In 2006, the Dems picked up 31 House and 6 Senate seats, regaining, in the process, control of both august chambers. God help us if there’s a repeat in ’26.

Back in ’05, my city and state were, improbably, controlled by Republicans: Bloomberg running things at Gracie Mansion and the unforgettable (?) George Pataki holding down the fort in Albany. Here, the tables have turned. As of Midnight last Thursday, just as the last $50 pair of Depends sold near Times Square was performing its righteous, elegant duties, NYC swore in a new mayor, who, if he hasn’t ruined the town in less than a week, it’s not for lack of trying.

Twenty years ago, we found ourselves on the threshold of a Housing Bubble which ultimately came just short of bringing the capital market down on its ears. Matters in those realms are much calmer today, but it will be instructive to observe the triumphs and tragedies of Housing this year, and, while not particularly relevant, I can’t resist pointing out that Mortgage Rates are almost precisely where they were when I hit the send button on my first note, two decades ago:

For so early in the year, we’ve put FRED – Federal Reserve Economic Data — to substantial use, and I hope it’s not to our detriment. Or his. Or that of the good folks at the St. Louis Fed he reps. They may after all be tired. As am I. Two million words is a lot two write. No matter how long one has to concoct them.

I’m not sure I have another two million in me. But I reckon that’s in the Good Lord’s hands.

I can, however, wish you the best of fortune in ’26. And I do. Wish you the best of fortune in ’26 that is. And my fondest hope is embodied by my time-honored salutation, supplied below. It is the best risk management advice I can offer. So, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I suggest you look it up. Before it’s too late.

TIMSHEL

¹ George Albert “Georgie” Jessel (April 3, 1898 – May 23, 1981) was an American actor, singer, songwriter, and film producer. He was famous in his lifetime as a multitalented comedic entertainer, achieving a level of recognition that transcended his limited roles in movies. He was widely known as the “Toastmaster General of the United States,” for his frequent role as the master of ceremonies at political and entertainment gatherings.

Amazona, Is a zone where
There is no doubt, No more fall-out
Why don’t you step, Through the mirror and see?

Bryan Ferry

With a couple of caveats — I’m glad Roxy Music made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

First, the institution suffers from a major credibility gap — through its omission of such obviously deserving bands as (among others) Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Blue Oyster Cult (who at least retain the dignified consolation of having been inducted into the Long Island Entertainment Hall of Fame), and The Smashing Pumpkins.

Beyond this, like so many other great ensembles, Roxy ran out of steam pretty quick. Their first two albums, deeply influenced by Eno’s manning of the keyboard bench, are incomparable. The first one is self-titled; the second’s title is identical to that of this note.

It is their third album, though, that is my favorite. Eno was gone, and Ferry had taken over full stop. The music changed, but arguably, for a time, for the better.

Because that record – Stranded – is impeccable – featuring such gems as Mother of Pearl. And Amazona – the theme for this week’s analysis.

And while I may be late to the party, I realized that we – all of us – have entered Amazona: a zone where there is no doubt. Or fall-out.

But what (or where) is Amazona? Wikipedia, to which I recently donated the princely sum of $52 (after repeated solicitations, I stroked in $50, whereupon they asked me if I wanted to add another two-spot, leaving me with no viable alternative other than to accede) indicates that it is either a genus of parrots or a Portuguese horsewoman.

OK; fair enough, but Ferry, by contrast, suggests it’s a state of mind, and I like that too.

Because there I was the other night, in a football-starved condition, bleakly anticipating the long cold winter that follows the Super Bowl and thus tuned in to the (otherwise unwatchable) Falcons/Bucs broadcast on Amazon Prime. This is far from a first. Team Bezos has been airing one-off games for a couple of years now. But what hit me this time was that during each commercial, my television screen availed me with an option to, at the physical expense of a single click, buy the advertised product.

Maybe this had been going on for a long time, but it was new to me. So, by halftime, I found myself the proud owner of a brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee, multiple drugs of (to me) unknown application and episodically redundant insurance policies issued by Progressive, Geico and Liberty Mutual.

This marks my entrance into the new world – one where, when enjoying electronic entertainment, not only am I tantalized by the possibility of refreshing beverages and new age pillows but can purchase them as a fluid part of the viewing experience.

Thus far, and to the best of my knowledge, CBS, NBC and ESPN are unable to match this product distribution prowess, and I fear that this will soon redound to their detriment.

And, from this perspective, it seems to me that Amazona should’ve been on For Your Pleasure, instead of Stranded. On the other hand, if one indeed finds oneself stranded, one could do worse than logging into Amazon Prime, and for one’s pleasure, purchasing whatever is offered by associated content sponsors.

The experience, for me, was a glimpse of the future, and lord help us when AI gets its act together and takes over the show. At which point ALL our technology will assault us with enough personally and precisely curated purchase prompts to beggar us into eternity.

But as anyone who was paying attention is aware, AI took it on the chin a bit in the markets this past week, as NVDA wannabes Oracle and Broadcom reported disappointments in the synthetic cognition elements of their enterprises. Which were of sufficient magnitude to place a damper on what otherwise was shaping up to be a pretty fair weekly showing for the equity complex.

To wit, the Gallant 500 breached (albeit modest) new heights on late in the week, before the above-named transgressors cast it down by an alarming >1% on Friday.

Prior to that, I found the vibe to be surprisingly upbeat, as driven, improbably, by a .25% Fed Rate Cut that everyone knew was in the bag. Chair Pow was rather dour in his subsequent remarks, hinting that future such actions would be few and far between.

But he’s out. By May at the latest, and I continue to believe that his exit will transpire earlier, as part of an effort by the Administration to co-opt the FOMC for political purposes. However, the latter showed some stones this past week by unanimously reappointing 11 out of 12 voting members (the 12^th – Atlanta Fed Chair Raphael W. Bostic – is pending resignation at the end of the year).

This renders 45/47’s path towards interest rate hegemony more difficult, but that is not to say he won’t succeed or at least try.

Because the electoral winds, as most recently exemplified by Miami’s having voted in its first Democratic Mayor in three decades, are blowing strong and ominous against him and his supporters. And these cats are known for neither their decorum nor strict adherence to established rules of engagement.

But sneakily, the Fed rendered some improbable aid and comfort in other forms to investors, specifically by initiating the purchase of ~$40B of its own securities this past Friday. In so announcing (at Wednesdays presser), Powell mumbled some gobbledygook about offsetting a growing challenge of reserve deficiencies. But I’m not picking up what he’s laying down.

Because in ancient times, these trades (the financial markets equivalent of copping a case of Bud Lite through an advertising link on a TV football game) were referred to as Quantitative Easing. And, particularly when Big Orange gets his man into the Fed Chairmanship, he and Bessent will indeed be cramming down rates.

Across the board and to beat the band.

The other market factor within his partial control – Commodities – has been for months showing signs of political manipulation which I expect to continue well into next year. Crude Oil – that most politically sensitized of commodities, is down nearly 20% in 2025. Wheat and Corn have yielded ground as well.

Precious metals, however, are a different story, which is not surprising given their historical reluctance to do the bidding of elected officials during periods of political strife. Copper is up >30%; Gold >60%. The biggest winner, though, is Silver, risen an astonishing 114% over this fast-expiring year.

This odd set of price trajectories has created a construct, not witnessed since 1980, where a single troy ounce of Silver carries sufficient value to purchase an entire barrel of Crude Oil

One way of looking at this is that when viewing a football game on Amazon Prime and considering (among other expenditure options) single click purchases of fine cutlery or petrol for one’s automobile, whether one would prefer to secure approximately two fill ups at the pump (42 gallons/bbl), or a single small silver spoon (weight range 1-2.5 troy oz.).

For me, this would present such a vexing quandary as to cause me to switch from the Falcons/Bucs game to the (commercial free) Ken Burns Revolutionary War series.

In further support of that trusty truism: what goes ‘round comes ‘round, and as identified by the WSJ as evidence of an AI-driven redux of 1990s dot.com risk, web infrastructure darling CSCO – the NVDA of its day – has just this past week regained the high ground it last achieved a generation ago:

CSCO’s millennial collapse was indeed rapid and frightening; its full recovery glacial, largely unremarked/unnoticed. But, while instructive, it probably has minimal implications for our fortunes in the dozen trading days that remain in 2025. One could also argue that the real action ceases by this Friday, as both Christmas and New Years fall disruptively in the middle of the subsequent two weeks.

Data-wise, and somewhat tardily, the November Jobs Report drops on Tuesday. And about the only other statistics on the ’25 docket are Friday’s release of the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment surveys.

But in terms of the latter, my advice is either to ignore the results or expect them to be artificially suppressed. Because given recent doings in Ann Arbor, one can only assume that the mood there is some combination of distracted and depressed.

But, perhaps, the less written about this the better.

Other than this; 1) the recent shenanigans at U of M have led to the temporary elevation to the exalted position of Head Football Coach of a guy who formed a successful hedge fund during the Bo Schembechler era; and 2) it has put at risk the largest-by-a-wide-margin NIL deal between the University and its starting Quarterback.

One can take a dim view of these outcomes. Or, like me, deem them as yet further examples of capitalism and free enterprise backing itself up all the way.

But now my Beauty Queens (Side 1, Track 2 of FYP), the time has come for us to become un-stranded, and to begin acting for our pleasure.

One can presumably achieve partial success in this regard in Amazona. During the Falcons/Bucs broadcast. With remote at the ready. And — whether it brings you a Portuguese horsewoman or a flock of parrots – I wish you due happiness.

However, from a risk management perspective, you’re on your own on that one.

TIMSHEL

When we get back, I’ll drop a line

Jim Morrison

Forgive me, but I always get a bit keyed up on December 8^th, and this year is no exception.

Because, across the ages, lotsa shit happened on that date. For one thing, it is the day, in 1776, when General Washington is said to have first crossed the Delaware River – setting the stage for our first significant victories – at Princeton and Trenton.

But more about 12/8 in a bit.

Because first, I feel compelled to weigh in on the sale of Warner Brothers to Mag 7 Junior Member Netflix – bringing the former’s iconic cast of characters – everyone from Bugs and Porky to Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois — officially into the world’s fave streaming family. And to wonder if it doesn’t, from a market perspective at any rate, mark some sort of top.

Because delving back into the far recesses of my memory, I recall a courtside conversation with a mid-level WB executive whose son and mine were on the same munchkin hoops team. A mere fortnight after a millennial turn that was feared would cast us all into darkness, his company had merged with AOL – NFLX of its day insofar as it was the dominant force in the then-emerging forms of entertainment technology. A few weeks later, and for a brief time, options-endowed employees were insta-millionaires.

Sitting with him in the bleachers that winter, I asked my friend how the merger was progressing. “What merger?” he asked, and I said Time Warner/AOL.

“Don’t know” he responded “I’m still working on the integration of Warner Brothers with Time/Life” – a business combination consummated in the Mesozoic era of the late ‘80s – more than a decade earlier. Still and all, there was a huge buzz respecting the latter deal, as evidenced by the following image of Combined Company CEOs Steve Case and Gerald Levin:

Say what you will about the merits of the hook-up, which, on paper at any rate, was intended to integrate the world’s best catalogue of entertainment content with a new-fangled and unimaginably powerful technology delivery protocol:

YOU CAN’T FAKE A LOOK OF LOVE LIKE THAT.

If Case looks happier than Levin, it is with some justification. While Warner’s catalogue proved eternal, AOL’s technology quickly faded to also-ran status, History shows unambiguously who took, and who got taken, in that there deal.

More broadly, during the interval between the merger announcement (2000) and its consummation (2001), Captain Naz lost half its value (and this months before the famous attacks of the latter year):

The Captains Journey: Q1 2000 – Q1 2001

It took the Good Captain almost a decade and a half to recapture its previous high ground. Meantime, by 2003, AOL had crumbled, but Time Warner shuffles on. E. Fudd is still on his quixotic hunt for that Silly Wabbit, Time continues to pump out highly regarded if a bit pompous content – not only through its flagship publication but also via other snooty rages such as Travel and Leisure Magazine.

As if to prove that nobody learns nothin’ never, the Company merged with AT&T in 2016. But, of course, that didn’t work neither. Warner spun out in 2022, and ran independently, until, that is, last week’s announcement of its acquisition by the swarthy Netflix.

We wish them godspeed. But it sure seems like every time Warner Brothers, founded and run for so long by the toughest family of Jewish businessmen in these here parts, gets itself passed around, something bad happens in the markets. And in this instance, the parallels to the AOL episode are especially eerie, involving the sale of WB to a telecom flavor of the month.

Meantime, back to 12/8. While personally triggering for me but worth mentioning nonetheless, in 1886, a pain in the ass organizer named Samuel Gompers formed the American Federation of Labor.

In ’41, FDR gave his “day that will live in infamy” speech.

And now we get to the real stuff. On December 8, 1943, Jim Morrison (quoted above) was born. On his 22^nd Birthday (1965), the Catholic Church issued the formal findings of the Second Vatican Council – the first official ecumenical conclave in 400 years. I’m not sure what they decided, but it seems to have done little harm. Or good.

And then, of course, 15 years later, we arrive at the night when John Lennon was murdered.

The year was 1980 – 45 years ago. He was 40 when he was shot, so has long since passed the threshold, which all of us much reach, where he has been dead longer than he lived.

It breaks my heart.

But with that, we have run the gamut of events about which I care that transpired on December 8^th. No matter; it’s enough.

Here’s hoping that by contrast at any rate, today is quiet.

Because the week heats up from there – primarily due to the long-impending FOMC rate decision to be announced Wednesday afternoon. By now market participants have come to their senses and realized that a rate cut of at least 25 bp is in the bag.

For the bajillionth time, political forces impel this action, but the associated cause was certainly aided by a November ADP Jobs Report showing an alarming 32K contraction.

Meantime, over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after having cancelled outright its October release, it has pushed back the November data drop till the 16^th – several days after the FOMC speaks its wisdom.

Two days hence, this self-same BLS is said to be prepared to proclaim its November Consumer Price Index estimates. The release date for Producer Prices remains uncertain. But about these we can infer two things – that again for political reasons, the Administration will seek to influence prices to the downside (particularly foodstuffs and energy products), but that in order to do so, it must reverse the tide of surging commodity price baskets that now prevail:

Since I’ve nothing better to do on this (not so) hot afternoon, I’ll reiterate my belief that Wednesday’s podium turn will be Powell’s swansong. The political winds are blowing less than fair for the powers that be, which must steer its boat out of harm’s way by next Election Day.

Under these circumstances, the obvious thing to do is to throw a few old horses like Chair Pow over the Port side, which, again, I anticipate before Christmas.

If we get through today, there will be 16 trading days that remain to 2025, and I am reasonably confident we can endure them without much bitching things up.

But as for 12/8, much is out of our control. Jim Morrison’s birth had little apparent impact on the content of the 2^nd Vatican Council. Nor did the latter save some cockroach, 15 years later, from plugging John Lennon several times in the back.

It is only with rare wisdom that we bear these things in mind, and to react appropriately.

I’m off now, but I can say with near-certainty that when I get back, I’ll drop a line.

TIMSHEL

The money feels good, And your life you like it well
But surely your time will come, As in Heaven as in Hell
You see, he feels like Ivan, Born under the Brixton sun
His game is called survivin’, At the end of The Harder They Come

Paul Simonon

First, farewell to James Chambers, better known as Jimmy Cliff, who left us a week ago. It’s hard to be my age and maintain your dignity without having at some point declared yourself a Cliff-Head. But for me at any rate, he made his bones entirely in the year 1972, by having played lead gangster Ivan in the classic Jamaican film “The Harder They Come”, for which he also wrote most of the soundtrack.

And let me ask you: has there ever been more of a badass than Ivan, with his two guns, yellow hat and striped pants?

OK, so he’s been mailing it in ever since. But who hasn’t? Most of our heroes quit trying about 50 years ago; many have hung around to collect the check.

But for Cliff’s Ivan – further immortalized in the above-quoted Clash song — the game was called surviving. And, like Tiff, he never had a chance.

Almost indisputably, Cliff’s finest composition, featured prominently in the film, is “Many Rivers to Cross”, which he wrote in 1969 – a full three years prior to the release of the movie.

In late November 2025, he crossed his last river.

Meantime, somehow, we are down to the last 23 trading days of ’25. The associated remaining 9.1% of the action is, improbably, more than we usually get on this late date (8.33%) – mostly due to the reality that the month begins on a Monday and thus offers up 4 full weeks of action (minus holidays).

Still and all, that’s not many rivers left to cross in ’25.

It’s been nothing if not strange. Particularly in the back half, which, for me, has been marked by more bizarro shit than I care to recount. Among improbable events, late this summer I found myself for the first time in my life rocking compression socks. I can’t call them my particular jam, but they served their purpose at the time.

Still and all, the markets have survived — even, by some measures, thrived. All our equity indices are up by double digits. Interest rates are down across the curve. As is Crude Oil. Earnings growth has also dwelt comfortably in the low teens all year.

We’ve got strong GDP and employment numbers. Inflation remains stubborn but not alarmingly so.

So, there is now every probability that we can bring ’25 on home in such a way as to look back with pleasure on the experience. With the only things likely to trip us up being the consequences of human nature.

Ah, human nature. Always lurking to trip us up. The toughest river we are compelled to cross.

A few examples from this very past (holiday shortened) week come to mind. In the realms of food processing, a Campbell’s Soup IT Vice President was caught in a hot mike moment claiming that the chickens that populate its iconic delights come out of 3-D printers, with the finished product earmarked exclusively for poor people with limited information and financially constrained culinary options.

This False Profit of Fowl is no longer with the Company.

And one cannot help but feel a little bit sorry for Bibi, now seeking a pardon from an Israeli President no one knew even existed (or, for that matter, the job itself). If he fails and bails – to New York at rate – Zor will arrest him. There is thus every likelihood that his options shortly will have dwindled to prison in the Land of Milk and Honey’s less than welcoming correctional facilities, or Rikers Island.

If he chooses the latter, perhaps he will benefit from some local civic distraction. Two days before Thanksgiving, the New York City Council tried to slip one past the goalie by voting itself a 16% pay raise. Complicating matters is the reality that the timing of the move –transpiring as it did between the election of a new mayor and their installation in Gracie Mansion — was illegal. The elected representatives of the 51 municipal districts will thus be compelled to wait until 12:00:01 on January 1^st to present the proposal to the new mayor for his signature.

I’m really glad this happened, as I gleefully anticipate, yet again, that delicious, ironic intersection between moralizing and profiteering. If approved, the righteous new movement for civic affordability will have, as their first official act, enriched a group (themselves) whose affordability challenges are perhaps not at the top of the associated hierarchy.

This puts Zor in a difficult position. He didn’t come to town to light up a bunch of aldermen who already get free lattes at Starbucks anytime they so choose, and if he signs the proposal, it will give the lie to this rhetoric. Alternatively, he could bust out a veto, and, by doing so, annoy the very group he most needs to do his bidding.

Once he has settled matters with his own City Council, he can pivot to myriad other monetary beefs that await him – including the funding of services operated by unions not particularly famous for setting aside their own well-being in the interest of their constituents.

But once this is done, we can all drop off our kids at free childcare centers, hop on free busses and amble into city-sponsored grocery stores to fulfill our wildest shopping dreams. One can barely contain oneself in anticipation of the paradise that New York will become once that happy day arrives.

But that’s all one month, two major holidays, and 23 trading days, away. Meantime, market participants not given to turkey comas but rather to the resumption of post-holiday trading activities were greeted Thursday night by blank screens signaling malfunction at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Water-Cooling facility in Aurora, IL. Home of Wayne Campbell. And Garth Algar.

For nine long hours that night, it was “game off”, reminding me of nothing so much as that time a couple of years ago, when the Las Vegas Spere was forced to display the Blue Screen of Death.

But the markets handled the glitch with touching equanimity, with Cornel Naz, after the previous week’s ignominious drop, rallying to end November in near-flattish territory:

Many of my clients, however, have a sadder post-Halloween tale to tell. Of, in some cases, an alpha nightmare. While its underpinnings are strong, the tape is acting strange. I believe that conditions will ease over the next several weeks, and expect, among other matters, that Team Trump//Bessent will have taken over the Fed by Christmas.

I don’t think that this will be a wise policy move, but it will goose stocks into year-end and beyond.

It is not an easy environment in which to operate. But then again neither was Ivan’s Trench town, circa 1972.

I think, though, if we can channel Cliff’s Ivan, we can, if not prevail, at least go out, like he did, in a blaze of glory. And that, my friends, is something for which to give thanks.

TIMSHEL

Moon River, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style someday,
Dream maker, you heartbreaker,
Wherever you’re going I’m going your way,
Two drifters, off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world, to see…

Mancini/Mercer

This one goes out to you, Tiff – Tiffany Grant Tulley my recently departed half-sister –who, though I didn’t find out about it till a week ago, left us on November 9^th.

Yup, that’ s her. Looking a good bit like her mother, which is understandable.

Because while Tiffany and I shared a father (we think, but with me more certain of my patriarchal lineage than her), that’s where our bio connection began and ended.

She is pictured here on the Mendicino coastline – near where she lived. I know this, because she was not one to travel much. And she didn’t need to, because, as anyone who’s been there will tell you, Mendo is a beautiful place.

And I have another half-sister, Sabrina (of even more questionable paternity): she’s Tiffany’s full sister (we think) — two years her junior. And (as I am sure you will agree), it’s only fair that I share her image as well:

I have not encountered Sabrina in more than a decade, and perhaps (though perhaps not) it’s because she may be a Sister from Another Mister.

Of the two, it is Sabrina that appears more likely to share DNA with me – if for no other reason than that unmistakable schnozz which resembles the probosces passed down from Grant generation to Grant generation, since the days when the Cossacks, overlooking these flaws, for several centuries ravaged our women.

But there is biological evidence to the contrary, and, though this is a story upon which I am disinclined to elaborate, the transfer of said intelligence was sufficiently upsetting for me to sever ties with Sab for eternity.

On the other hand, I stayed in touch with Tiff – albeit sporadically. So, I was not terribly surprised, if a little vexed, that I only learned the sad news indirectly, a fortnight after her passing.

This much is certain: Tiff was brilliant. I’d like to state that it runs in the Grant family, but, near as I can determine, the modifier can only be applied fairly to me and her. Among other things, she had a stone-cold photographic memory, a condition that I routinely tested by allowing her one minute to peruse pages from obscure books, which she would then recite verbatim.

But she never stood a chance. Affairs just never broke in her favor, and some of this was her own doing. For example, she quit Berkely a month before graduating Suma Cum Laude — after having financed her own tuition by doing the books for a clothing store on Telegraph Avenue, run by a dude that was fall-down drunk every morning by ten.

Meantime, while the girls were of uncertain paternal lineage, it can be confirmed that she and her sister were indeed the biological daughters of my dad’s second wife (whereabouts unknown), and a woman to whom I owe an eternal debt of gratitude — for turning me onto Audrey Hepburn.

I was in my 30s before I realized that she named both of her daughters accordingly – Tiffany based upon a line from main protagonist (the divinely named Holly Golightly), played by Miss Hepburn, in the film adaptation of Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (which, in outlier fashion, was a better movie than the novel upon which it is based).

“Sabrina”, of course, is the title character – played superbly by Miss Hepburn — in the Billy Wilder classic that also starred Humphrey Bogart and William Holden.

I also took a page from my step mama’s book, by naming my own son, whose 34^th birthday would have been this Wednesday, after the disturbed hero from “A Clockwork Orange”. As far as I am aware, the actor who played him – Malcom McDowell – is still with us. As is, presumably, my sister Sabrina. I’m not sure about my step mama, but the others are dead – including my son, my other sister, Truman Capote, Billy Wilder, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden and Miss Hepburn.

And it terms of the last of these, I think I fell in love with her during the scene in “B @ T’s” wherein, sitting on a windowsill of a Manhattan flat with a nylon-stringed guitar perched on her lovely lap, she authentically played, and sang, in a breathy voice, our thematic song.

Which is now one of my favorites. But this wasn’t always the case. This timeless classic, penned by no less than Henry Mancini (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) was ruined for me during my childhood for being adopted as the theme song of Andy Williams, sung as smarmily as can be expected at the end of each episode of his weekly variety show.

But as for me, I will forget that outrage and think of the song only in conjunction with Audrey. And Tiffany.

There’s a moon river out there. It’s wider than a mile. We’ll cross it in style. Some day.

But not today.

It’s been that kind of year.

From a market perspective, we entered it in encouraging fashion. Political conditions favored the fortunes of the capitalist class. Artificial intelligence was poised to power our boats across any stream – no matter how wide. The regulatory vise was poised to come off.

The Prez and his family, themselves minting billions in crypto, were certain to use their political power to unleash the full force of digitized currency on the masses they presumed to control. They was also gonna squeeze the nuts of the Fed Chair and his cronies, forcing them to take short term interest rates down, while the Treasury Secretary took care of affairs at the longer end of the curve.

That’s adds up to a set of pretty fair winds for risk assets, and, indeed, our boats came out of dry dock in ’25 with sails unfurled into a gentle breeze. But we hit a stormy patch in early April, when 45/47 not only decided to unilaterally co-opt the world’s international trade protocols, but to do so in whimsical, inconsistent fashion. If it’s Tuesday, we are tariffing the shit out of everyone, if Thursday, not so much.

And so on and so on and shoobie doobie doo.

Ironically, the composer of that phrase, the incomparable Sly Stone, died in June. But by then the markets had recovered. Equity indices were on their way up; rates were coming down. BTC was trading comfortably in the six digits. The Fed began cutting in September, and it looked like we might at last reach the other side of that Moon River well before year end.

Somehow, however, we simply can’t seem to hold ourselves together. Like Tiff blowing off her last semester finals, we are acting, at present, against our own interests. Earnings have been about as pleasing as any mere mortal could wish them to be. And, just this past week, and after some hand wringing about whether AI was ahead of itself, that great corporate ship captain NVDA reported blowout earnings and guidance.

This delighted investors for all of about 15 hours, after which it and the rest of the equity complex sold off. Hard.

Contemporaneously, the deferred September Jobs Report showed strong gains — despite the impacts of the then-pending government shutdown (now ended) and the permanent dispatch of tens of thousands of public sector bureaucrats. Atlanta Fed Q3 GDP estimates now exceed 4%.

Thus, we enter this holiday week with the blessings of strong jobs and earnings data, surging GDP, significant downward pressure on interest rates, and, in summary much for which to be thankful and little about which to complain.

Yet not only are we in a pissy mood, but we are self-sabotaging in a way which perhaps only my sister(s) (either one) can fully appreciate. Indices are down. Vol is rising. BTC, recently up >50% from its April/Liberation Day lows, is now negative for the year.

I am tempted to refute this buzzkill and remind everyone of the penultimate lines of our song: “we’re after the same… …rainbow’s end, waiting ‘round the bend…”. Which of course is a hopeful message.

And there is hope. Particularly over this holiday week.

But then I think of Tiff. With so much going for her, and nothing ever going or going her way. And now she’s gone.

But we remain, and that same rainbow’s end is out there. In fact, it’s just around the bend.

It’s time to set our course and go.

TIMSHEL