Good Advice If Heeded

Someone once told me, 'Never Trade Luck for Skill' and cretin that I am often (with reason) accused of being, I thought about the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small and quiet decisions that households across this nation make on a daily and weekly basis as the economic tides continue to threaten to pull so many of us under.

A non-economist acquaintance once said, 'When you're out of a job, it's a recession; when I'm out of a job, it's a depression,' and I suspect there's more to that than meets the eye. At the end of last week and intermittently this week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been 'flirting with 45,000 points'. I have absolutely NO idea what any of that preceding sentence means, but I've heard it repeatedly and parrot it like I know what I'm talking about.

All of us do. We all assume, or did until the whole house of cards decided to reshuffle itself, that someone somewhere knew and understood what it was we were doing. Like Wimpy, offering to gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, knowing full well we would have no money on Tuesday, we just kept adding days to the calendar and hoped Tuesday wouldn't arrive.

I didn't really understand and, like so many, haven't been as successful as I'd like in appreciating the larger picture and fuller impact. Conversely, with Jerome Powell in the Seventh House and Scott Bessent aligned with Mars (or something like that) am I alone in detecting a tone of barely-controlled euphoria by broadcast and print news reports about economic growth? Except I'm still not "getting" it.

Why isn't it all this Accidental Excellence? When we got it right, we had no idea what we did to produce those positive results, so, not surprisingly, we couldn't duplicate them. When things started to go south, we went with them. It's hard not to be very superstitious. 

In times of stress, we rely more on routines; they offer us the appearance of the familiar, the known, and the comfortable while serving, in their way, as a mantra against a world we cannot otherwise manage.
-bill kenny