Out here in the Rockies, I am doing my very best to ignore what is going on in the markets until they close around 2 pm, Mountain Time. This is not easy to do. I know things continue to be dicey out there, down, up, down, but mostly down. It is easy to get freaked out by it all, by the idea that "this time it's different' and that this market decline will be the one that really fucks us all.
But in my lifetime, there's been only one time that has been truly different, and that was the collapse of the Japanese market from 1989 forward. Japan has never really recovered. And of course it's not really about the Japanese market, it's about Japan.
So the question we must ask ourselves is: "How are we different than Japan?" First and foremost, I have always seen the great difference between the US and Japan as being our attitudes towards immigrants. Our degree of openness and closure has waxed and waned -- and the recent instance of anti-immigrant sentiment personified but certainly not caused by Trump is just another instance, amplified by social media and siloed traditional media channels as well as the general decline of literacy and print as a preferred way of ingesting news.
But what is even more exceptional about America is the fact that the nation does not exist without its legal framework in a way that is not true of older nations. America began as a debate about the role of government and centralization in the managing of public and private goods and continues to exist as such. And our capital markets are a function and instance of this struggle, a struggle which takes place at a variety of levels, from the SEC to the Fed to Treasury to FINRA to the IRS to the analogously long list of private sector actors on the other side, including a robust press apparatus. It is all playing out in real life at all times and at many levels. In the end, things balance out and roll forward.
So this week I am sleeping and eating and walking in the mountains and hanging out with family.
No comments:
Post a Comment