Lie To Me

I THINK EVERY ECONOMIC COMMENTATOR OF ANY KIND OUGHT TO SAY WHAT MUSIC HE OR SHE LISTENS TO...

It would give you a stark perspective from which to ajudge their mind culture.

For this post I shall give you three that I listen to for your own consideration about what it can all mean or imply:

(You can see them all on YouTube).

Lola Astanova – Rachmaninov's Movement Musicaux Opus 16 # 5.

Above and Beyond pres. OceanLab – 'If I could Fly.'

Three Drives – 'Letting You Go' Greece 2000 (Dabruck Klein Vocal Radio Edit).

It's from the last of these that the following words occur:

“You can say what you want to/Cry me a river if you need to/Go put my name in a tattoo/and you can spin me lies if they come true...”

The last line has complex possible meanings and I approve of it. The problem with 'Jesting Pilate' is that he never stayed around to hear the answer to his infamous question.

The name of the game in the financial media today appears to be the spouting of data to justify a prognostication. I have a view that the G30 itself essentially consists of manufactured credentialists, driven from a long time ago by strong and powerful political elites in countries where democratic transparency has never existed – let's be kind and say: 'never properly existed...'

Nobody is prepared to contradict the 'data' and the spun versions of economic ground truth (as Rumsfeld might say) from groups or people speaking from the platform of G30 membership.

The fifteen seconds of fame and the mantle of the fifteen-second 'wise guru' that is the reward of the damned souls of economic limbo and tv-land virtual reality, includes all of the members of the G30.

To put it simply, my own view is that right now, they have no clue. And it's not a good idea to steer your course by anything they might say.

Certainly they have massive effects on markets of all kinds from moment to moment daily, but that is the same thing as the falling man claiming to be flying as he drops past the 12^th floor of a 13 storey building. Actuality, is critically a different version of the facts.

All of us who are actual professional investors of some kind, whether on behalf of official funds, or privately, must of necessity go back and consult our own waypoints of investing – that is, we must consult our own actual records of what we did, when, and for how much, and examine these in light of actual results. And this is relieved of the dictats of clever and manipulative prognosticants.

Having largely made my own personal biggest plays in the go-go era of the mid to late Eighties, and having necessarily been acutely aware of the types of mindsets abroad at the time, I often told the less experienced not to swing the words integrity and credibility around too much; for one thing I always feared those who made too big a thing about these qualities, and quietly questioned why they did it. For myself, these things are absolute givens and not subject to serious question. Full stop.

A businessman with this suit has integrity.
Soros gets close, which is good enough.

It's certainly not that I have changed my mind now or my view of things or the principles involved, it's just that I can't see modern era politicians and bankers in any other position than one which must be experiencing a sense of vertigo that they cannot admit to having. There is no ground under them, and there are no safe holds for them. The Dow is at great heights and sales and profits are under great question. Circulation velocity is anaemic and the notion of austerity matched to spectacularly unrealistic interest rates and simpering, keening, prognostications about economic growth abound in the mouths of everyone from Stanley Fischer to Bernanke to Dimon and/or Levin.

Notably Soros and Faber and Rogers and the rest of the private investor old guard are saying something else quite different again.

Currently the Yen via Japanese Government Bonds is adjusting what performances can be expected over the short run from Japanese corporates. I expect a phase of stunning and amazing superficial technology presentings to be brought about by the monetary policy currently being unfolded in Japan.

When taking serious market positions I personally tend not to go by particular views about the future, but rather, I structure or 'wind-in' a set of positions based on the immediately obtaining dynamics of the situation.

Mansory Maserati - definitely NOT the banker's version
of Punxutawney Phil's hutch!
Stockbrokers with integrity drive this car.

Thus, if I were to utilise positive revenues from equity upside positioning (adopting what is currently being claimed as the relatively attractive 'equity risk premium') then I would certainly also be positioning myself in low dollar priced long-dated Calls.

I have never been more confident of the directional pull of the existing dynamic tensions. And because of it I am most unlikely to go around making predictions or prognostications about the future or the outcome of markets' trajectories! There is no way I would want to alter what is being offered cheaply right now, just because I happen to have some kind of mathematical calculation that, if seen, would cause Bernanke's carefully-trimmed bearded jaw to drop and Fischer to look for a hole deep down Jackson way to crawl into. Which is where he belongs in the first place. A kind of Punxsutawney Phil of the financial world.

Calvin J. Bear