My investment posture is rooted in a grim worldview. Presuming an Independent's dispensation from One Hundred Sixty Pounds Of Baked Beans Racing Around In A Bearsuit Without A Trapdoor's costive no-politics dictate (it's a fine line between celebration and calumny), here goes.
Reagan ate Gorbachev for breakfast. He ended the Cold War, made the world safer for democracy, and accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. Game, set, and match. Our fortieth President could not have scored a more decisive victory.
The end of the Cold War coincided with a communications revolution. The implication: the despots of the world cannot keep their populations in the dark. Not entirely. Less and less. The planet grows a bit smaller (and relatedly, increasingly tightly wound) every last day. Pushes toward open and democratic societies are inevitable. But damnit, Washington can be freedom's worst enemy.
Back at the ranch, you see, the American people, fat and happy, took to electing chief executives precisely for their lack of solemnity, precisely for their shamelessly callused tabloid properties. Heckle, Jeckle, and Heckle Jr. do not boast one single ounce of vision or the remotest sense of history between them. Votes for such conspicuous ciphers were mandates for torpor.
Skipping to the bottom line, because The Zeev, that loopy ex-chorus boy, has me on a word count. Our diplomatic and intelligence communities' inattentions and screwups have extended the winters of the most onerous regimes on Earth and have allowed for the spectacular rise of an al Qaeda.
A bearish coming of age is not chipper, but this thinking--admittedly incomplete, and without touching on the prospect of war or pursuing other expectations--allows me to reconcile what little I have read about Kondratieff and the nature of bear markets with the tape and our times. The post, therefore, appears on the correct thread.
Confidential to Physicists Don't Need Lab Coats You Just Wear That Starchy Thing To Impress The Honeys: causes...not...excuses.
aldaka
