"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint."
Edmund Burke
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La la la, whatever. La la la, doesn't matter. As cynical an IPO as seen since 1999 they said today.
Where is the MF Global customer money? First it was missing, and then it was not. And then it was lost (or) missing again, and then found at JPM. And then that was denied, and now it seems to be lost at sea in a financial storm of venality.
Maybe Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa took it with them.
Value can be an ephemeral thing, but especially when it is defined at a keystroke from the touch of a faceless bureaucrat. To create and distribute a nation's money at will is liberty without virtue, folly, vice and madness.
I have seen strange markets and economies, and the organizations that ran them, going back to the days of Richard Nixon. But this is one for the record books. As I remarked in the equity commentary:
'Perhaps the disconnected nature of the nation's money, its profound alienation from the real economy, is the key to the market's increasingly erratic behaviour, and the remarkable silence of the lambs.'
Relativism at the extremes has a will of its own. You may wish to grab something solid, and hang on. The trick is to properly define 'solid,' and to stick with it amongst the growing madness.
Expect some serious volatility in the days ahead.
"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside."
Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
Have a pleasant weekend.
