MERLIN I saw this series on Amazon and had to give it a chance; a few years back I read the classic fantasy The Once and Future King and its finale’ The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White. It is a lighter version of the saga of King Arthur loosely based on the much older (poem?) Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. Because the lore surrounding King Arthur is varied to begin with, many characters’ names were familiar, but the circumstances of their role were changed. I have to believe that, in addition the many historical versions of the story, the producers took additional license with it to fit the appetite for magic and fantasy and to fill several seasons with content. The acting

WHEN I SEE Christian Bale and Margot Robbie as leads in the cast, I am already smelling the popcorn, There are other  big names involved, including De Niro. It’s set after WWI, and in part based on real events. It’s light, funny at times, yet there’s an intrigue that builds; it takes a while to show up, but the action holds ones interest until it does. The director, David O. Russell (American Hustle, The Fighter, Sliver Linings Playbook), has a solid resume. Bale is the usual joy to watch, Margot Robbie keeps getting better (hard to imagine), and then you have John David Washington (Black Klansman), Rami Malek, Anya Tayler, and list of celeb cameos from, for one example, Taylor Swift. There’s not much else

    WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION less than nine months away, the plot couldn’t get much thicker. Trump’s approval hit a new high of 49%, and the Dems seem to be struggling to identify a candidate and agree on a platform. The pundits mostly focus on two things, namely a) who can get the Democratic nomination, and b) will that person be able to beat Trump. Little of this is new information. But really, the spoiler in the whole business may not be a candidate at all. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the economy has to hold for Trump to win;  without the economy, he would lose 20-30% of his current supporters. The candidate best suited to unseat the president might be the

[Note: This content is for entertainment purposes only] I WAS FIRST introduced to the concept of cycles through my career in financial services. The idea was that the natural world operates in waves, recurring patterns or “cycles” of varying lengths of time. The general premise is that people are part of nature and thus generate predictable patterns–and anything of predictive value was, of course, deemed useful to investors. One longer-term social cycle that is starting to get attention is the eighty-year cycle; history has produced some evidence that a serious calamity occurs roughly every eighty years. The most recent “serious” calamity was World War Two–which started eighty years ago in 1939 (we didn’t enter until 1941). Eighty years before that it was the Civil War,

WHILE THE SPECTACLES of impeachment, daily scandal, and the democratic primary distracted voters from almost everything else, the 2019 Federal deficit accelerated to nearly a trillion. The interest alone  got to 380 billion per year.  In 2015, Obama only needed 485 billion for the whole year. Let me see…1) stock market is right on top of a new high, 2) unemployment is extremely low, 3) countries are supposed to use extended booms (ten years now) to pay down debt, and 4) the GOP—especially the “tea partiers”—have, prior to Trump, represented themselves as deficit/budget hawks. What’s wrong with this picture? There’s no mystery; it’s what Trump has always done: borrow big, promote shamelessly, get paid no matter what, and never use much of your own money.

[This post is for entertainment or educational purposes only and does not offer investment advice of any kind. Investments decisions should be made with careful consideration on an individual basis along with a professional.] PUNDITS AND POLLSTERS will soon begin to argue passionately over their predictions for president in 2020. They usually make emotional cases and use tired, second-hand reasoning on either side–sounding much like sports bums at the beginning of a new season. Everybody loves a fortune teller. But despite the minor blips in the polls, the outrage du jour, and the talk of impeachment (and the expanding list of reasons for it), the best predictor of the election–assuming it’s held on schedule–will be the performance of the stock market over the next year.

    NOW THAT MERYL STREEP and Nicole Kidman are both starring in the second season of the TV series Big Little Lies, it’s probably safe to say that the bell is  ringing furiously to signal the end of an important socio-cultural era: the great period of feature films that began almost a century ago.  While there are still feature films and movie theaters, it seems as if most of the films are superhero fantasy or animated films. The energy, the talent, and the money is pouring out of “movies” into these TV-based series. We might have a net maintenance of creativity–perhaps even more. Maintenance of quality? Not as easy to say; the productions are very good and getting better as the market heats up. But

[NOTE: This material does not represent investment advice in any way. It is for educational purposes only. Investing is personal. See your personal guru before making decisions.] Bulls can live 20 years, but they aren’t much good to the herd after ten. Bull markets are probably the same. This one is ten years’ long in the tooth, but it’s weathered a number of “storms” along the way, so many investors could need to get quite scared before they sell. The scariest thing for me is the global trend toward authoritarianism; you can check a lot of boxes to compare the first part of the last century with today. I could probably list six or seven parallels. Protectionism is a big one. Wealth inequality is another. That

[NOTE: The following does NOT constitute investment advice of any kind. It is for education or entertainment only]  ‘There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.” Donald Rumsfeld 2002                  That the stock market fell does not surprise me: I have wondered how the rally could continue before the long list of threats to the global economy would reduce share prices. But I was surprised that it happened so abruptly.  I should not be surprised at that, however, because markets generally fall much faster than they rise: investors often “get in” in increments and “get out” in a cataclysm.  And while stocks only

  WHAT HAVE YOU done for me lately? I find tremendous irony in the fact that the US president was the star of a reality show where he was surrounded by less-than-brilliant sycophants and presented as the epitome of  business success in charge of a thriving empire (though it turns out his decision-making often led to bankruptcy). The  climax of each episode was when he got to pronounce to a hapless contestant “You’re fired!”  The irony makes an entrance in that he is now at a point in his tenure where the party that embraced him (only after they realized that he could get them power) may soon make a similar pronouncement to him.   Almost two years ago on this blogsite, I posted that