Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.
Submitted by Tyler Durden.
Submitted by Ben Hunt via Salient Partners Epsilon Theory blog,
I figure not one Epsilon Theory reader in a thousand has seen “Suddenly, Last Summer”, but let me tell you … it’s got everything. Katherine Hepburn in a phenomenal performance as bizarro Aunt Vi. Elizabeth Taylor cavorting in the surf. Montgomery Clift. Lobotomies. Pedophilia. Cannibalism. Honestly, it’s kind of what you would expect if Gore Vidal took a Tennessee Williams script and just went gonzo with it. Which, in fact, is exactly what happened.
I found this quote, where Katherine Hepburn is
trying to convince Montgomery Clift to lobotomize Elizabeth Taylor so that she’d forget her former life and be less fearful and anxious … less volatile, in other words … to be an eerily apt description of what Central Bankers have tried to do with markets.
We endured an event last summer that, just as in the movie, ultimately brings all the mendacity out of the shadows and into the open. When Yellen declared last summer that the Fed had now firmly embraced a tightening bias, followed by the rest of the world declaring that they were doubling down on extraordinary monetary policy easing, the entire world was set on a path where all of the political fragmentation – all of the deep fissures within and between countries – would be inexorably revealed. Suddenly last summer, the mask of global monetary policy cooperation was ripped away, and the investment world will never be the same.
Monetary policy divergence manifests itself first in currencies, because currencies aren’t an asset class at all, but a political construction that represents and symbolizes monetary policy. Then the divergence manifests itself in those asset classes, like commodities, that have no internal dynamics or cash flows and are thus only slightly removed in their construction and meaning from however they’re priced in this currency or that. From there
the divergence spreads like a cancer (or like a cure for cancer, depending on your perspective) into commodity-sensitive real-world companies and national economies.
Eventually – and this is the Big Point – the divergence spreads into everything, everywhere. Some things will go up, and some things will go down. But the days of ALL financial assets inflating in lock-step … the days of everything, everywhere going up together … that’s over.
For a lot of active investment managers, this is great news.
For investors? Well, it’s a mixed bag. Certainly it’s a more difficult bag, where so many of the learned behaviors of the past five years that worked so well in an environment of monetary policy coordination will fail miserably in an environment of monetary policy competition. But it beats getting a lobotomy. I think. We’ll see.