Black Swan

In the early 70’s singer-composer Tom Rush had a minor hit with “Circle Game” in which he talks about the cyclical nature of life.

There are essentially two ways of divining the future. Both involve looking to the past. Most fortune-tellers look to the recent past to make pronouncements about tomorrow’s weather or stock market. Others make bold leaps, taking into consideration such things as the ‘Big Bang’ and the rise and fall of empires. Either approach risks not seeing something that may be critical: the sudden and unexpected appearance of a black swan.

Take the stock market for an example. Looking to the recent past will show that markets go up and down. As we are currently clawing back from a low, conventional wisdom would have it that we should be investing now rather than later (when the markets can be expected to be higher). This view, however, assumes that nothing fundamental has changed with the election of Barack Hussein Obama. It assumes that he either will fail to deliver what he has promised; or that he doesn’t really mean what he says. I do not fall into that category.

I continue to believe that something has fundamentally changed. The free market has been discredited and will no longer be given the breathing room that it needs to survive. Instead, we will see market manipulation by men whose judgment may be flawed by emotion and skewed by bias. As competing interest are likely to undercut any given strategy every step of the way, we will see abortive rallies and reversals which will in effect grind the markets into chaotic bits.

We will look back with bitter longing for the predictable cycles of yesteryear as we find ourselves entangled in the chaos of someone’s slipshod vision from which a new world order will be said to have emerged. No yardstick will yet exist to measure the efficacy of this Utopia. It will be what it is, and what somebody tells you it is. You see, you will no longer have a brain with which to judge these things for yourself.