Best Laid Plans?
“Pish. Posh.” is a technical term only used by market professionals* for those situations where one has decided to go full Alinsky rule #5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage…
Capital Thinking · Issue #782 · View online
Most people will remember the 1992 movie, “A Few Good Men”, for the crescendo court scene where Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) shouts at J.A.G. Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise):
“You can’t handle the truth”
Depending upon your politics, you were either inspired or offended as Jessup continued:
“You have the luxury of not knowing what I know; And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”
“Where is the Folder ?”
Harley Bassman | Convexity Maven:
I was occasioned to think of this scene as I considered our rather haphazard response to this pandemic.
It is a primary responsibility of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), and likely a few more embedded in the “deep state” to game out any possible national security risk, from Martians to meteors.
So why does it seem there was not a secret folder in the file cabinet labeled: Pandemic response?
There have been over a dozen movies on this topic, so it’s not like the idea of a global pandemic was totally alien (irony intended). And while some will surely blame this entirely on the President, too many people would have known this folder existed for it not to be leaked.
At a bare minimum, the Congressional and Senate intelligence committees would have had this folder delivered to their desks sometime in late December when (our spies at) the World Health Organization(WHO) first received reports from the Chinese about a cluster of 41 deaths from a mysterious pneumonia.
Surely the gears would have been grinding at a dozen Govt Agencies as early as late January when the President closed the airports to flights from China.
I suppose the alternative, of which I am incredulous, is that there was no folder.
The CDC have something like 11,000 employees whose employer is called the freaking “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”The folder has to be in somebody’s desk.
Forced to consider the latter, let us not make the same mistake with our investments; perhaps it is time to take the long view and build our own folder.
Courtesy of the latest quarterly review from Hoisington Investment Management, the -oriole line-is the quickly expanding Monetary Base, which is projected to reach the -heron dot-of $5.0Tn at month’s end.
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Photo credit: Laika Notebooks on Unsplash