“The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.”Jean Lorrain, Le Crime Des Riches: Suivi de Paris Forain, 1905“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.”Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
The US will have a three day weekend for Memorial Day on Monday, in which we remember those who died in service to the people of this country.
Stocks were frisky after the core CPI printed a little hotter than expected at .3% for the month. No one apparently noticed that wages had zero growth.
The notion that inflation, not driven by wages or presumably demand, is a good thing smacks of cargo cult economics. Oh look, we have inflation, so we must have growth.
Or, this could be what happens when the Fed vigorously expands its balance sheet in a top down stimulus policy error that inflates assets while driving the velocity of that money to record lows because of the lack of organic growth from the bottom up in wages and broad demand.
I have a small index short working since yesterday. There could be a few more attempts at breaking overhead resistance, but the risks look mispriced a bit here. Let's see if it works or not because as the wiseguys like to point out, in the short term these markets don't listen to anything except their own self-serving baloney. Kind of like our politicians.
Have a pleasant weekend. See you on Monday evening.
