Happy Memorial Day. I expect a dearth of traffic today, consistent with past holiday experiences. I expect the traffic to be especially light, since the country is drying out for the first time in a week. We're expecting mostly sunny skies and our first 90-degree day. I'm not a fan of hot weather, but after the miserably-cold and damp May, I'm kinda looking forward to it.
Just this for today: interview with Jim Grant. It'll give you things to think about as you ponder your summer investments. Excerpt:
Q: Where should people put their money now?
A: The trouble with the present is that nothing is actually cheap. My big thought is that our crises are becoming ever closer in time. The recovery time from the Great Depression was 25 years. The stock market peaked in 1929. It got back there in 1954. We had a peak in 2000, crash, levitation, then the biggest debt crisis in anybody's memory. The cycles are becoming compressed. The temptation to become invested at peaks of these shorter cycles is ever greater.
Perhaps one way to proceed is to hold cash at the opportunity cost of not much in Treasury bills. You make nothing, but you want to have this money when things are absolutely, not just relatively, cheap. This time of full or overvaluation shall pass. On recent form, it'll pass in a thunderclap and there will be a panic and it'll seem as if the world's ending. And that's when somebody who is nimble can get fully invested in a comfortable way.
It won't feel comfortable, it will feel awful, but I think that's the way to do it. I mean everything (you could invest in) is either uninteresting or rich, it seems to me.
