VALUE IS TO VAGUE

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, where does that put value?

Insiders supposedly sell for a variety of reasons.  And according to Wall Street folklore, they buy for only one. Last time we looked the G7 and a host of others in Euroland had negative real interest rates. And a good number of the others like China are manipulators.

Members of the manipulator group come and go. Membership is circumstance-based. So despite what mental behemoths like Chuck Schumer try to tell you, China's hardly alone. It can get crowded at the top.

Negative real and low nominal interest rates are designed to discourage saving and ramp up borrowing. Boosting equity prices and pumping air into the phony wealth effect many main stream economists love to cite is the neat brown wrapping on the package.  

It's we-feel-so-much better now we can rush right out and go further into some more debt.  No wonder Lenin coined the term "useful idiots."  For sure he had more people in mind than the Krugman's of the world. It's the ultimate monetary-policy elitists' insult. 

Most are aware of 1492 and what occurred. But just a 100 years later in Elizabethan England in 1592 Robert Greene's pamphlet, "The Defense of Coney-catching," first appeared. According to the vernacular of the day, a coney was a rabbit raised for food and thus tame. A coney-catcher was a thief, a con man who worked the streets preying on unsuspecting, innocent passers-by.

The term coney appears in at least two of Shakespeare's plays and Giovanni Florio's translation of Montaigne's essay, "Of The Cannibals." As a quick aside some scholars believe Florio, a scholar in his own right, was Shakespeare.  

Greene argued that there were worse crimes committed by so-called reputable folks. What Greene was pointing out swindling is still swindling, choose whatever name you like; they're male and female, high and low class practitioners of the art. Card sharks, slackers, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes are only one layer of coney-catching. Just as many don suits, carry iPads and valet park.

The point is with all the political and economic jockeying for position the definition of value gets vague and vaguer. But it's the third part of the comparative case you got to most worry about. Bricks and mortar aside, that's a dangerous jungle.