George Rebane
Today we celebrate the closing of the National Hotel’s escrow. Owner Tom Coleman is a longtime Rebane family friend and poker buddy (developer of the notorious Coleman Shuffle, the Coleman Deal, and, of course, the ever-reliable Coleman Dollar bet). Tom called yesterday to tell me to get my butt down to the hotel for a last chance to haul some libations out of his inventory. Saturday night along with another couple of Tom’s friends, we spent an evening with him and his son (up here to help dad close up) in the Hoover Restaurant & Bar’s dining room toasting the old place, and being regaled with stories about the fabled hotel which Tom has owned now going on 40 years. Jo Ann and I wish Tom and Ernie the best of a retirement that has been too long in coming. Nevertheless, I promise to continue doing my best to assault Tom’s wallet during our longstanding monthly poker parties.
As I write, the Dow is up 2.22% (537 points) on its rocky recovery from attempting to scale an unsustainable super-exponential growth pattern. As Dr Didier Sornette of the ETHZürich has taught us, super-exponentials attempt to grow to infinity in a finite time. Our universe does not support those kinds of enterprises, and promises each such attempt a bruising correction. In the current correction I again smile at the naifs reporting on the markets – ‘Investors were bailing out of stocks today due to … .’ No they weren’t. Who the hell do you think was then doing the buying, the tooth fairy? For interested readers on why and when markets crash, I recommend perusing the good professor’s writings and the Financial Crisis Observatory website. And as you study today’s market charts, always remember – buy low, sell high.
The DC investigations memo wars are at a high fever pitch. RR readers from all sides of the political landscape have a fascinating weeks-long debate going (with citations galore) about what all the memos portend about Trump’s political future and this year’s midterm elections. (See comment streams here, here, and here.) Predictably the two major sides are trading ripostes from their separate universes which apparently have very few points of connection, most certainly not in what the facts are nor how we arrived at the current locations in our respective universes. By any measure, this dialogue (multi-logue?) is the most unprofitable exchange of words that the country has experienced in living memory, perhaps ever.
[14feb18 update] It now turns out that what all of us have been reporting about the Schiff memo was absolutely true – Adam Schiff and Pelosi lied when they claimed that President Trump gratuitously refused to declassify their rebuttal to the Nunes memo. It turns out that the lying SOSs purposely inserted sources and methods into their memo so it could not be released, and they could claim on national media that Trump was playing a political cover-up to his own wrongdoings in the memo wars. All lies, and lies that count.
And it turns out that what I reported as the dictionary's and RR’s definitions of ‘collusion’ also turn out to be correct. Collusion does not automatically mean a conspiracy to do something illegal, as the lamestream and the lesser lights have been hyper-ventilating about lately. From the horse’s mouth (or is it the other end?) we have that, “(Congressman Schiff) also somewhat backtracked on the Trump-Russia collusion issue, saying the Democrats’ definition of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was much lower than potential criminal acts being reviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Collusion is not a crime under the federal statutes.” (more here)
[15feb18 update] Obama’s economic adviser speaks with forked tongue (here). We all know how the Left denigrates stock market performance and puu-puuhs its economic effect on anyone who is not in their currently designated wealthy class. But suddenly when it serves their narrative or can be used to excuse past poor professional performance, then suddenly the lower and middle classes become shareholders whose economic behavior is immediately stimulated by the “wealth effect” of a rising stock market. This is how Harvard biz school professor Jason Furman attributes the cause of last year’s breakout GDP growth – it was demand driven by the broad population of consumers who mysteriously became the beneficiaries of their appreciating, but heretofore non-existent, portfolios and went on a buying splurge. This is the same professor who was Obama’s chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (2013-17), and one of the prime architects of the historically post-recession stagnant growth we enjoyed during his time in government. Wonder what he’s now teaching the next crop of MBAs – oh yes, it's "hoping for 3% or more (annual growth) is folly. The fundamentals—people and productivity—seem unlikely to provide it."
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