Texas is booming. We road-tripped it June 28-July 6, giving y’all a break from market structure.
We rolled the I35 corridor from frenzied Frisco north of Dallas, to Austin, now home to 950,000 people, to San Antonio, the fastest-growing Texas city last year, pushing 1.5 million.
From there on July 5 following fireworks the night before in three directions from Hotel Emma, our favorite in the country, we were up in Amarillo by evening (an oblique musical reference back past George Strait to Chris LeDoux, God rest him), and in Denver the next day.
You’d suppose Texas would be taking it in the nose on low oil prices. Yet bergs like Dalhart on the reaches of the Llano Estacado (yaw-no esta-kahdo), the vast plain staked over north Texas, bustle on Main Street and prosper on the boulevards. If the world blows up, hunker between Texline and Masterson on Highway 87.
What’s Texas tell us about investor-relations, the stock market, investing, the Federal Reserve, the economy? The farther you get into the heartland the less the things the people in charge think matter, matter. Life goes on.
Of course, all of us gathered right here at this moment are rooted deep in the market, the Fed, the economy – even those of you in the heartland. We don’t have the – what’s the way to put it? Convenience. Of slipping off into the quiet purple of the fruited plain.
Looking from Dalhart, this strikes me:
The stock market. Passive Investment depending on average prices is carrying the market beyond fundamentals, producing superior outcomes. Can average breed superior, sustainably? Malcolm Gladwell and reality both say no. So prepare for mean-reversion between fundamentals and prices.
When? Nobody knows. It’ll come with no VIX signal, maybe as the Fed sells assets and spikes the dollar (The Fed trades bonds for dollars, so fewer dollars means higher dollar-value). It’s not that I’m pessimistic. I’m opposed to artifice in the economy, the market. I don’t think Dalhart would accept it. We don’t like it in people, politicians. Right?
Speaking of artifice, our estimable central bankers at the Federal Reserve have determined that after eight years of mediocre output we are ready to rock – though curiously weak inflation, they call it, vexes.
Say Sammy Hagar contended there were several ways to rock. We’d laugh. If I hear one more time that inflation is good, I’m heading to Dalhart.
Inflation is rising prices, which trims both buying power and productivity, the pillars of prosperity. The Fed might be underwhelmed by the increase but we’re paying more. For the same stuff. And calling it growth.
That’s artifice. A treadmill offering the illusion of forward progress, like confusing volume and liquidity (we’ll return to market structure next week so stay tuned).
The Fed should never have institutionalized economic mediocrity with eight years of training wheels. The Tour de France is underway coincidentally, drama on wheels turned by superlatives. You don’t reach the Tour on training wheels. You don’t become an economic tour de force by moseying.
Yet we can’t have an economic adult riding on training wheels. It just looks bad. So we’ll soon have the financial equivalent of a biker barreling into the shrubbery head over handlebars. Dalhart. Life goes on. We’d be better off without Fed artifice. Period.
Same with the stock market. The pursuit of average has become superior there, thanks to big training wheels (a good name for a rock band) from central bankers. Yet we value companies the same, engage in the same IR work. Why do we accept artifice?
Now pedaling toward the economic sludge, the training wheels are coming off the market. Central bankers believe they need only make a pronouncement that all is well and we’ll skim the muck.
The mistake we make is legitimizing it. But there’s reason for good cheer! The quicker these things mash in a big dustup (and they will), the sooner we get back to Dalhart, and a prosperous global boulevard free of artifice where what’s real matters.
We’ll have to cross the Llano first. Put’er on cruise control, and keep driving.
