14 March 2013

The winter that will not end

It is mid-March. My thermometer refuses to move above freezing. 

The white Christmas blanket covers my world well into Lent.

Winter now just lingers, past the anticipation of October, past the appreciation of December, deep into the disgust of March.

Like the last guest on a boring evening
Like the last chapter of a dull novel
Like the swill at the bottom of a child's soda bottle
Like tennis elbow
Like leftover cabbage



 

05 March 2013

14164 and 14254

The DJIA closed today at 14254, an all time high, finally taking out the 14164 set on October 9, 2007. On that day I was in Philadelphia for a client meeting. I took the train that afternoon to DC and had dinner with a friend and his wife. He also happened to be a member of Congress. It was a good day. I spent the rest of the week in DC at an investment industry conference.

I don't recall discussing the new high that day with anyone, though I may have. We might have had a sense that it was a false high, an undeserved one, for we were in the early days of the housing market collapse. At that point we were probably just calling it a normal downturn. Don't remember.

This one will get a lot of attention, as it should. We've waited a long time. A bit of a victory for capitalism, though one that could have come much sooner had it not been for interference by the United States.

One group will be glad and think the credit is theirs for keeping the government at bay. Wrong. Another group will try and use it to justify giving some of that wealth to an imagined class of victims. Also wrong.

Anyway, most of the time the stock market should be near its all time high. That is the normal condition. We've been off track for a few years. Still, the market is twenty times the level it was when I first started in this business in the early 80s. Lot of wealth created, a lot of it destroyed. Creative destruction. Many more winners than losers.

Today is an uneventful day. No meetings, just catching up on previous projects. Like last time, if there is anything bad just around the corner, it is not on my mind. Later, i will think it was.