THE NON-PROSE OF ECONOMISTS

Economists are not known for their prose.

Mohamed El-Erian is an economic adviser to the big German firm Allianz and a former Pimco guru. He also pens columns for various media groups like the Financial Times and Bloomberg, two outfits one would think employ copy editors.

Maybe they do and maybe they don't. Maybe EL-Erain, like some of those too big to fail banks, is exempt from such petty editorial vagaries. Or maybe his assigned copy editor has already tossed up his hands and given the "Oh well sign" and turned the page.

In one of his latest, "Policy making tug of war leaves investors facing difficult calls," El-Erain penned this convoluted beauty.

In scaling such relative positioning, investors would be well advised to keep one more issue on their radar screens. The prospective moves in markets implied by the divergence theme would tend to complicate rather than facilitate policy making in a world subject to increasing bimodal distribution of potential outcomes and low availability of broker-dealer liquidity during transitions.

If you break this down it means: Since the new regulations hit, broker-dealers have less liquidity. Liquidity moves markets. Without it things could quickly get as calm as Coleridge's painted ship on a painted ocean. And that could leave a whole gaggle of folks holding their bags.

The divergence theme is the big dog, USA, pulling away from the pack. Such a economic fly in central bank soup kitchens muddies the fare.

When you get into statistics you run into distributions, bimodal and otherwise. It's a delicate way of saying stuff can hit the economic fan two ways, one of which might not be expected. You might think of  those on-the-other-hand economists Harry S Truman complained so much about were all bimodal.

What Truman was really asking for was a unimodal one.

It's fairly certain señor El-Erian is getting decent bucks to write this stuff.

So for simplicity's sake we'll leave you with another economic term: Go figure.

Meanwhile, know that the Fed has expanded its view of the what-counts factors to include the international scene. So just be careful not to get tugged over the line in this tug of currency wars.