A Fit Of Farseeing

On our return from a weekend on the Med attending to the various geriatric inanities of the in-laws - hereinafter referred to as the Shuffle Demons - we arrived home to find ourselves electronically accosted by lots of very ugly economic predictions, and went to bed half way between depressed and pissed off. The point is we're getting right tired of hearing how bad it's going to be in the future from the same flotilla of economists that couldn't find it, with the rare exception, within the grasp of their shamanistic powers to bless us with such a bold prediction in, say, 2007, or 6 or 5, when the groundwork for the present was being irrevocably laid. But no matter. The easiest route to becoming an acclaimed clairvoyant, as any punter knows, is to light up a big jimson weed blunt and go with the flow.

Our malaise, unfortunately, continues unabated through today as the morning read included five economists touting four distinct remedies and proliferating several dozen criticisms of the cures proposed by others of their caste. Let's add it up. Predictive powers beyond continuation of trend - nearly nil. Remedial powers beyond million-monkey probabilities - well, some 'school' will eventually be declared (at least by themselves) to have done the trick after time itself has done all the heavy lifting.

This, of course, leaves us with a personal conundrum - what to do with the net short portfolio when economists are screaming 'Go long!'. Well, we'll take the second best strategy, given the possibility of nasty news items appearing and the real shortage of convincing buy candidates, and close out our profitable position for the meantime (privilege reserved to retail investors) . Since we can rest assured that widespread predictions of certain depression are a sure sign that it has already arrived, we'll be devoting some time to thinking about how to turn a penny in that environment.

Or perhaps, given the traffic jam that extended one kilometre up a Madrid motorway Saturday from the exit to some big box park, could one even dream of taking the under on the duration bet? Between the possibility that the corporate world has way overshot in its negativity, the resilience of equity markets and the very marked recent liquidity in corporate bond trading, it is worth entertaining the notion - at least until the economists come around.

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Blossom Dearie (pictured above) died on February 7th, at 82 years old. Her rendition of 'A Fine Spring Morning' (1956), dating from before she was to depend on her kewpie doll persona, stands out as a masterpiece of vocal interpretation.

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