IT'S ALL GOOD UNTIL

 
There is a saying: It's all good until it's all bad.

A business acquaintance likes to tell the story about inheriting some money when his dad died. For the sake of brevity, we'll call him Smith. Smith was married and when he informed his wife some money was left to the other immediate Smith family members like his brother and sisters, she replied: "Where's mine, I'm a Smith?"

To which he responded: "You are until you decide not to be."

That's pretty much the way it goes with markets from time to time. They don't care what those cellar-dwelling economists with their econometric model babble say. It's all good until it ain't all good. Markets are comprised of humans and humans in their weird way are as unpredictable as any animal. It's just that we've fallen prey to a host of psychological and psychiatric mumble jumble that we're somehow rational.

Says who?

A long time friend who for years taught a business class in night school at a local university told me this story. On the first night of class in every new semester he would ask this question: "How many of you saw any irrational behavior today? Raise your hand."

No hands would go up he told me. Then he would ask a second question: "How many of you drove your car here tonight alone?" Now this is SoCal, the land of concrete, vanity plates and one person one car, diamond lanes notwithstanding. Every hand would go up.

He then would repeat his first question: "How many of you saw any irrational behavior today?"

When you put a human behind the wheel of a two thousand pound part-metal, part-plastic object that can hit speeds up to 100 miles an hour, and put a cell phone capable of texting messages in many cases In the driver's hands, you're going to see irrational behavior. Lots of it. Daily.

The market is filled with irrational behavior, always there lurking like a professional voyeurer just out of sight. And all the King's regulators and all the King's bureaucrats ain't going to ever change that because if they ever succeed there won't be any markets left. The current turmoil in European banks is a case in point. But the examples are too numerous to detail here.

Thirty-five years ago owing in part to the arrival on the economic scene of two people named Reagan and Thacther and a mostly fed-up, weary populous the country was ready for a sea change. Couple that with the fall of a European wall and a move for open borders, a so called defense dividend like it's promised brethren, a balanced budget, that somehow never materialized, free trade agreements and the future we were told looked bright.

Today owing in part to a gluttonous Wall Street with its greed and arrogant rips-offs and the rise of populism with its gaggle of peeping Tom socialists who have always been there just below the surface, a host of bail-ins and bail-outs, the pronounced lack of national leadership, the country again seems ripe for another sea change, one that will hardly be favorable to even the semi-free markets we now have.

Handsome may be as handsome does. But so is stupid. Like we said: It's all good until it ain't any more.

The Globalist agenda is alive and well. Enjoy your shackles.