“Mickey Mantle forced us to grow up and see the world as it is, not as we wished it to be.”
-Bob Costas
In one of the more personally introspective books I have read in 2011, that’s how Jane Leavy ends it in “The Last Boy – Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.”
After an 18-year hall of fame career with the New York Yankees (playing in 16 All-Star Games and 12 World Series), Mantle became a missing in action father and husband who effectively drank himself to death by the time he was 64 years old. Everyone in his life could see it coming – no one had the spine to stop him from doing it to himself. The can was kicked.
The aforementioned thought Bob Costas delivered during Mantle’s eulogy was as honest as it was sad. He called Mantle a “fragile hero” (page 382). If that isn’t a metaphor for America’s stock market on this morning in October of 2011, I don’t know what is…
Occupying Old Wall Street
So far, I’ve left Hedgeye’s coverage of this generational protest to my defense partner, Daryl Jones, who is downtown surveying the NYC occupiers this morning. In Mantle’s 1960’s playing days, they called them protesters.
Earlier this week, after strapping on his jeans and mingling with the occupiers in Boston, Hedgeye’s Todd Jordan said the protesters ran the gamut from “end the bailouts” to far left hot points: environment, war, Che Guevara, etc…
That’s a lot.
I’m not a big fan of judging people and their protests unless I spend enough time to fully understand them. My Dad was a Fire Chief; my Mom a French school principal; and I’m supposed to be whatever people want to call me today. But I’m not an expert on humanity.
I don’t support losers. What I support is progressive change. And no matter how leaderless or hippie these protesters appear on the surface, I think there’s an American Zeitgeist here that’s playing out far away from anything you’ll see today on TV – in silence.
Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a member of PETA, but this is what he said about leadership:
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”
And, forgetting all of what you think about who is a nut-bar, always remember that someone probably thinks you have a few screws loose too. I think starting my firm is an explicit protest against the opacity and self handed dealings of Old Wall Street. I don’t need to analyze someone who is sleeping on a cardboard box with dreads to tell me what I think about that.
I have no confidence that Occupy Wall Street will find a leader today, but I have even less confidence that Old Wall Street will. That’s pathetic and sad.
At 910AM, our profession will be waiting with baited breath on Timmy Geithner telling us what he’s been groomed to do for 47% of his born life in US Government - bailout banks.
That’s not leadership. The Bailout Bazooka only quenches America’s stock market thirst for another stiff drink. We have a problem – a very big one. And, sadly, it might take another crash to correct it once and for all.
Back to the Global Macro Grind…
Yesterday, an up and coming Fed President in Minnesota by the name of Kocherlakota said that “the public will begin to doubt the Fed’s claims about its goals.”
Ya think?
That’s what we should be protesting in this country. The US Federal Reserve and its Keynesian ideologies have failed America on its 2 Congressional mandates – full employment and price stability.
I’ll be going through what I think the solution to this mess is on our Q4 Macro Themes conference call at 11AM EST today (email if you’d like to participate).
Fundamentally, I believe in what both Reagan and Clinton had fits and starts of realizing – a strong US Dollar strengthens American confidence, buying power, and employment.
I don’t believe that because some global warming quack is occupying this morning. I believe that because the data proves that – in the Hedgeye Chart of The Day today a picture tells a thousand words (US Dollar overlay with US Employment back to 1971 when Nixon abandoned the Gold Standard).
Americans aren’t as stupid as our monetary and fiscal policies have been during both Bush and Obama administrations. Like Nixon and Carter, the one thing that Bush Republicans and Obama Democrats have in common is a Keynesian running the US Federal Reserve.
There’s a reason why the name Arthur Burns isn’t remembered by history well. He was the modern day Ben Bernanke throughout the 1970s (minus the Princeton Depression Fear-Mongering thing). Burns and Bernanke are the only Fed heads to A) monetize the US Debt and B) devalue the currency, at the same time.
If Romney or Obama want to win the election, here’s the Hedgeye Political Strategy one-liner – “It’s The Policy, Stupid.”
As the Eurocrats are encouraged by Geithner and his cronies at Investment Banking Inc. to print the biggest bailout in world history this weekend in Paris, it’s no longer time to get hammered on Keynesian Kool-Aid and keep binging on our debt addictions.
It’s time to see the world as it is, not the way the conflicted and compromised are begging for it to be.
My immediate-term support and resistance ranges for Gold, Oil, the German DAX, and the SP500 are now $1, $84.29-89.10, 5, and 1170-1225, respectively.
Best of luck out there today,
KM
Keith R. McCullough
Chief Executive Officer
