Crazy Inverted Yield Curve

Forgoing the crazy-old-drunk all-caps and exclamation point, but if I ask myself, Does this phrase spark joy?, the answer is an unequivocated, if perverse, hell yes. There is nothing "crazy" about the current inverted yield curve, or most any such critter, for that matter. It is merely a numerical expression of the confidence bond-holders have in the state of the economy.

Therefore, when Preznit Barstool Drunk spouts something like that in response to an eight-hundred-point dump on the Dow, it simply underscores the obvious:  he has no fucking clue how an economy -- this or any other -- actually works. Likewise when he steps on his old-man balls trying to declare himself the un-grinch, saving Christmas from the tariffs, contradicting his months-long chant that it is the Chinese who pay those tariffs, perhaps to some big imaginary tariff fund that then gets dispersed to the midwestern farmers who fell for this cheap three-card-monte game he's been running his entire life.

I'm not going to pretend to have any unique insight into what institutional investors are thinking when it comes to short-term bond yields exceeding long-term yields. It is reasonable to speculate that some or all of the following factors are affecting things:

• Regardless of who you want to give credit to, or offer reason why, the fact is that Trump is correct when he talks about the economy's record expansion. It has never before continuously expanded for this length of time. Which is great, but also by definition serves as a reminder that it will eventually contract, probably sooner rather than later. That's not politics, just probability, especially since the tax-cut stimulus was not reinvested in any meaningful way back into the economy.
• If you didn't know better, and you checked back over the historical patterns of economic expansion and contraction, you might start to suspect that the handful of people who own most of the assets are not only relatively unaffected by recessions and contractions, but in fact are generally able to find ways to profiteer from them. Yes, the smoke-and-mirrors finance weasels go belly-up and out the nearest window, but industrialists and companies that actually manufacture tangible goods usually make out just fine, because they are equipped to ride the cycle.
• It's becoming increasingly difficult not to look at pretty much every forecast and project through the prism of impending climate change doom. If you have seven to ten figures' worth invested in municipal bonds and other trading mechanisms depending on civic infrastructure remaining intact, you have to be getting at least a little bit worried. We're lucking out so far this hurricane season, but there will be more and more like the last couple years. How much did Harvey end up costing Houston, like $125 billion or so? Sooner or later one is going to smack clean into Miami, which already floods several dozen days out of the year, and eliminate billions of dollars of real-estate value. If you're in the right industry, of course you can cash in on the rebuilding end, otherwise not so much.
• Failchildren and useless heirs aside, a fair number of these greedy, pelf-grubbing weasels did not get to where they were by being stupid. They were happy to take the tax-cut gifts, but they know an idiot when they see one. He may be an idiot who works for them, but odds are he's going to screw something up sooner or later. It makes sense for them to hedge their long-term bets.

It's important to note that Trump is a special kind of stupid, and wreaks additional havoc unnecessarily, simply because he can't acknowledge even to himself that someone might know more about a subject than he does, and maybe he should listen to them. But it should also be noted that this is probably not too far off of where Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would have gone, the same tired-ass supply-side no-tax orthodoxy, fiddling while the country burns, so long as the donor-owner class is taken care of.

True, Presidents Rubio or Bush would not have lurched into cracker enclaves with increasingly strident white nationalist herrenvolk rhetoric, nor conducted sensitive foreign and trade policy negotiations with 5 AM Twitter shit-posts. Those things are certain to make the coming bumpy ride unnecessarily bumpier. But it was going to happen anyway, and the stage was set soon as our wonderful Gooper senators all endeavored to give a trillion dollars more to a handful of bastards who can't possibly spend what they already have.

Unlike Bill Maher, I don't want a recession. I get where he's coming from, though; there is a certain breed of cat that just isn't going to get that their boy's a fake-gilt dunce, until it's snapped clean off on them. But I don't know if those folks will get it regardless. They'll just buy into whatever lie he concocts to shift the blame -- Obummer, Crooked Hitlery, Fake News Media, blah blah blah.

In the meantime, it might be a good move to cash on out of your more volatile holdings, and dump it into a stable mid-yield money-market fund, because it's a reasonable bet that the market's going to take at least a ten percent haircut between now and Thanksgiving, despite the angry moron's fake heroism. Season's Beatings!