Anyway, when i started to write earlier i meant to go in a different direction. I feels today as though everything is different and I’m not sure why. Putatively what is different is the election, and i guess that is likely to be a huge change. Personally I feel the direction of my life changing and I’m not sure why but I seem to be reorienting toward something financial after years of finding the subject both depressing and perplexing, now i really want to understand how it works.

i find myself constitutionally unsuited to speculation not because of my moral objections since i am certain I could overcome those with only a modest amount of remuneration in return for my virtue, but because i simply don’t and can’t seem to understand it. Perhaps it is the ancient Teutonic genes, but i am much better with cause and effect than i am with waves and trends. That said, it is a system, even if the exact cause and effect can’t be deduced, or at least not by me, the likely larger outcomes should be broadly visible.

There can no longer be any pretense that the stock market is in any way investable. Even my uncle Perry, formerly a great proponent of value investing, said as much when i saw him recently. Still, giddy on his returns he was quite cheerful about continuing to ride the rollercoaster, hoping only that he dies before the ride comes to an end. Although the analogy is probably reversed because the market resembles a roller coaster in some sort of gravity devying reverse mode where the initial and subsequent ups and downs will eventually terminate in a huge ascent followed by spectactular crash into the launch platform.

So here we are, cspeculation in everything, houses, land, stocks of course, Trump has said he would like to fire Jerome Powell and have a hand himself in setting interest rates. Will he really demand that they be lowered and will that make a bull market in bonds? i have two questions. The first is how this vast speculation is possible and my initial suspicion is that it has to do with the dollar a reserve currency. My second question is what is cheap? Something must be cheap somewhere to counterbalance this enormous balloon of asset prices. Is it Chinese goods? They certainly are cheap and most of them are also shit, but lately some of their manufacturing is downright good. Is it quality Chinese tools and machinery that is cheap right now? What else.