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During the financial panic of the 2009 recession, Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard Group and prolific author, dashed off a pithy book titled, Enough. For all the fiery zeal so characteristic of Bogle’s style, this reflectively soul-searching book subtly and obliquely confronted the intransigent problem of wealth disparity in the United States, an increasingly visible scourge that was last this acute in our nation as the roaring 1920s drew to an ignominious close.

Over the course of several short months, a novel coronavirus exploded onto the global scene as the COVID-19 pandemic. Long-volatility and put-option strategies have garnered significant attention in the wake of the 2020 Q1 selloff as managers with exposure to market downside protection reported truly remarkable returns. This has reignited debate over the utility of hedging strategies.

On page 13 of the Berkshire Hathaway 2018 chairman’s letter, released February 23, 2019, Warren Buffett launched into his familiar refrain on American exceptionalism, this time titled “The American Tailwind.”

The great wisdom traditions of the world maintain that while the individual has a great capacity for personal transformation, in the aggregate, humans function within a certain range, or standard deviation, of behavior. The same is true for human societies.[1] Thus the words of French novelist, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Kar, “The more things change, the more things stay the same.”

Guest blogger, Jim Grant, is the editor of the estimable Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. Having read almost all of his books, I am among the many in admiration for both Grant, the man, and the brilliance that flows from his mighty pen. He has reciprocated…proportionately, as will be evident in our next post. For the moment, he has offered here for our readers an opinion piece recently appearing in the Wall Street Journal.

Attempting to ameliorate the immediate and adverse economic consequences of the rapidly spreading coronavirus, Congress is engaged in a pell-mell rush to force passage of $2 trillion in fiscal largess. Their actions are not without precedent.

As an eager plethora of pundits start writing the postmortem on the Fed-induced Ponzi bull market, it is being said that it ended just as it began—in chaos and out of the blue.

This post will almost certainly be out of date by the time notice of it arrives in your inbox. That’s because the current volatility in the market is extraordinary. It’s not uncommon to see a 1% swing in as little as five minutes. After quietly and systematically marching to a succession of new highs in January and through February 19, the index has slipped into a highly indecisive phase.

If you’ve pretty much tuned out political spectacles, you may have missed the president’s State of the Union speech and his latest economic pronouncement: “Jobs are booming, incomes are soaring, poverty is plummeting, crime is falling, confidence is surging, and our country is thriving and highly respected again.”