“If you're first out the door, that's not called panicking.” - John Tuld
“I’ve spent since 1983 working with people that sold companies, and we see a lot of wealth…I have to say that a lot of these people - I know they’re not happy, and they’re not happy for different reasons, really. Some of them really are not happy with their spouse, a number of them are not happy by the way - they feel a tremendous guilt about the way they raised their children, because they were working all the time. They never saw their children, and now they’re paying the price for that, because the children are really sort of away from them. I see that quite a bit…
Now the ones I see that really do it correctly, they have done it right, they have tremendous family lives, number one, and number two - they’re fulfilled in life.”
Reminded of these two quotes:
“I’ve always told young people, in terms of parenting, forget ‘quality time’ - it’s quantity time. All time with your children is quality time…” - Stan Druckenmiller
And this, from John Bogle:
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history.
Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough.”
Good thing the Fed has now cooled inflation!
"We've made a lot of really bad choices, and it takes a long time to see the consequences of those choices, and we've only just begun."
"It's OK to miss out." - Melody Wright
A lot of wisdom in that line.
We remain in a crazy bubble.
Via Grant’s:
A minuscule handbag measuring less than 0.03 inches wide − or 657 by 222 by 700 microns − sold for more than $63,000 at an online auction this week. Aptly dubbed the “Microscopic Handbag" by creator MSCHF, the fluorescent yellow-green tote appears to be based on a popular Louis Vuitton design and is "smaller than a grain of salt."
This was from August 2020:
The Balance Sheet is back to where it was before the regional banks blew up. That QT is really coming along.
This will end well.
The government should encourage greater co-investment with private sector pension funds if it wants to unlock more retirement cash for the economy, the trade body for Britain’s trillion-pounds savings industry has said.
The Association of British Insurers (ABI) — which represents the biggest pension providers — said state backing for riskier, illiquid investments would help make the UK a “more attractive” destination for its members.
“By developing further initiatives that use co-investment as an incentive, the government could create opportunities for pension funds to put more money behind assets that align with its wider policy objectives,” it said.
UK Apparatchiks diverting money to their favorite pet projects.
“The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
The A.I. Bull Market
SPX/SPX Equal Weight
I’ve never watched Yellowstone, but Taylor Sheridan wrote Sicario (and its sequel), Hell or High Water, and Wind River, four movies I really liked.
Nice anecdote here: Taylor Sheridan Does Whatever He Wants: “I Will Tell My Stories My Way”
“We go to lunch in some snazzy place in West L.A.,” Sheridan says. “And [Yellowstone co-creator] John Linson finally asks: ‘Why don’t you want to make it?’ And the vp goes: ‘Look, it just feels so Middle America. We’re HBO, we’re avant-garde, we’re trendsetters. This feels like a step backward. And frankly, I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think anyone should be living out there [in rural Montana]. It should be a park or something.’ “
OK, so there’s a lot more below. Try a paid subscription if you’re interested. I do a lot of reading (and a little thought) to put these together - I think Bill Fleckenstein said of his writings years ago that if it’s worth his time, it’s worth paying (a nominal sum) for.
The most common reason people give for unsubscribing from paid is 50/50 price and time. Price is 27 cents a day. Time, I can understand. I used to get the WSJ newspaper every day, and they’d stack up because I almost never got to them (I do look ‘em on online from time to time now). There’s often a lot of eclectic stuff in my non-single topic posts - don’t view it as a giant meal to eat, but as a buffet - delve into what’s interesting to you, and skip the rest. Unfortunately, just about everything interests me.
And if you can’t pay, that’s fine. I still do a lot of free stuff, no hard feelings. I do appreciate the people who have paid subscriptions. It’s encouraging.
Regardless, my 81 million free & paid subscribers seem to get something out of it.
Lately I’ve been focusing mostly on real estate, because that’s where I think the big changes may be occurring. Clearly in some parts of the country/world things are correcting, but other areas seem more bubbly than ever. Location, Location, Location. I suspect that the “this isn’t 2008” crowd maybe be right in theory, just not in practice. We shall see. It took 5 years last bubble from top to bottom (using Case-Shiller for the sake of argument.) These battleships turn slowly (although CRE seems more like a Destroyer.)
As I’ve said before, I think CNBC or the New York Times or Forbes are not the places to look for the nation’s pulse. During the bubble before this bubble, it was the little bloggers that nailed the housing bubble, not the LA Times or Fox Business. It’s not that Reddit - which I use frequently nowadays for anecdotes and ideas - isn’t full of misinformation and liars - it is, just like CNBC - but it’s also full of regular people, you know, non-billionaires. This is also why I like people like Melody Wright, who is actually doing boots-on-the-ground research, and who also has a memory of what happened before March 9, 2009, which almost no one else today seems to have.
We all know Barry Sternlicht’s take - he wants/needs ZIRP, QE and high inflation, STAT! That view doesn’t play as well in your local supermarket though.
“Predicting an event is one thing, and benefiting from it is another thing. See, I’m a very bad predictor - I’m wrong most of the time - but it doesn’t cost me much to be wrong. That’s what matters, it’s the payoff, not the frequency of being correct.”
This is also true in poker. - rh
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