We have long thought.................

.............that the psychological component to the economy was both underrated and undervalued.  One lesson taken away from Reagan and Trump is that optimism matters.  Faithful readers may remember that, while mostly fearless, we fear deflation more than inflation.

Ben Carlson weighs in:

There is a lot we still don’t understand about inflation, especially since there is such a huge psychological component to prices and spending by consumers.

Inflation could remain elevated for some time if governments continue to spend money or the energy crisis worsens.

But it also wouldn’t surprise me to see severe disinflation or even deflation if the Fed overplays its hand with interest rate hikes and we go into a recession.

Maybe we’re due for more economic volatility than we’ve had these past 4 decades. Or maybe the pandemic will be an outlier because there was so much economic weirdness going on.

It’s good to keep an open mind about what comes next in regards to both prices and financial markets.

Nope............................

 more fun here

Please...........................

 

 more fun here

Checking in.................................

 ..............with Robert Louis Stevenson:

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits

 Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. 

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

mental factions......................

      There are minds that, having risen beyond primitive, unthinking orthodoxies, often merely turn to a rejection of the traditional.  Whoever has made this apparent advance is convinced that he or she has reached a superior condition.  Minds that have improved their knowledge and remained open to more have indeed progressed.  But we often find those who have achieved a critical attitude to the traditional have also adopted a largely, or wholly, uncritical attitude to untried, or even failed, alternatives whose attraction so verbal rather than real.

     "Special interests" are often, and sometimes rightly, indicted for various social and other offenses.  But, of course, special interests are not necessarily economic.  What may reasonably be called interest groups could equally be emotional or mental factions, that is, insistent minorities in society.  Often, what is more, they themselves feel pressure from their own extremer wings—that is to say, a minority within a minority.  Greed is only one of the deadly sins.

-Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation:  Reality and Delusion in the Course of History

thanks Michael

An easy choice...............

 

via

Fifty years ago...................

The Doobie Brothers..............the Toulouse Street album

Be careful what you wish for......

 I am radically opposed to technology (it goes without saying), but also against politics and social reform. These oppressive disciplines have been invented by do-gooders, seeking the perfection of the world. They are, characteristically, in league with devils.

-David Warren, from "The beauty of a world in confusion"

Good thing........................

via

Keeping your...................................

 ...........................................balance.

Humility is always a good idea..............

 "I was very puzzled when a year ago so many people were so confident that inflation was transitory," he said. "There was so much we didn’t understand about the post-COVID inflation that humility would have been a good idea."

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Quest...........................

 

What makes this country great, I think, is not what it gives us (which is considerable), but what it allows us to give to others.

When we talk about American enterprise, this is what we mean. When we talk about “building something”, that is what we’re really after. The opportunity to be a net positive on this Earth. A producer of something meaningful and lasting, not just a passive consumer of bread and circuses.

That is the real American Dream. Lest we forget.

-Gaping Void, from here

I miss Doug Fine........................

 

Miracles happen, or fun with numbers........

 There are about eight billion people on this planet. So if an event has a 1-in-a-million chance of occurring every day, it should happen to 8,000 people a day, or 2.9 million times a year, and maybe a quarter of a billion times during your lifetime. Even a 1-in-a-billion event will become the fate of hundreds of thousands of people during your lifetime. And given the media’s desire to promote shocking headlines, you will hear their names and see their faces.

-Morgan Housel, from here

It would have certainly been interesting.........

 Interesting thought experiment - ask yourself how the country would have been different if the Democrats had chose Marianne Williamson instead of Joe Biden in the last election. Kind of a fun exercise. Things couldn't have been worse under Williamson than under Biden. Maybe not even more goofy under Williamson.

-Chris Lynch, from here