Friday, May 25, 2007

3/25/07


The bunny thinks he is losing his mind.

He thinks this because he has lately heard a mantra on CNBC increasing in volume and frequency: buy high, sell higher (and borrow cash to do it).

The first time he heard this he thought he had ear mites.

An era of historically cheap money has yielded rampant speculation across the board. Its legacies are a real estate bubble, the subprime lender meltdown, the carry trade, and an explosion of loosely-regulated hedge funds, all of which carry much more water than needed to rock the boat.

And humans are still not satisfied. Woe betide you, greedy bipeds, thinks the bunny. As ye sow, so shall ye be reaped, prison-shower style.

The bunny thinks thinking an interest rate cut is baked in the cake derives from copious cranial/culinary confusion. A rate cut would be akin to squirting gasoline on a barbecue, with increased borrowing to fund increased speculation the messy result. As if things weren't volatile enough.

Watching the self-styled seers on television or eating their words from the periodicals he shreds, the bunny is reminded of the famous Joe Kennedy story, in which one of America's most successful crooks beat the Great Depression by selling all his stocks after being questioned on the market by a shoeshine boy just before the crash. (A close personal acquaintance of the bunny's experienced the same thing in the fall of 2000, when a Haitian cab driver asked him in broken English for that day's closing price for Microsoft.) The moral is clear and straightforward--rampant speculation Bad.

An interest rate cut (which may yet occur as we slouch toward another election sludgefeast) would only intensify volatility and inflate future bubbles. Not good with an incumbent legislature that does not even call "letting current tax cuts expire" a "tax hike".

And just as overly cheap money is financial nitroglycerin, so too is unchecked media harping on the subject. Incessant round-the-clock yammering about rate cuts fans the flames too. As Max Frankel said when writing on the Scooter Circus in the NYT magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/magazine/25Libby.t.html?pagewanted=10&_r=1&ref=magazine), "Back off. Butt out."

The bunny would add the following corollary to the good folks inside Media Moloch: "Shut up and shut down."

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