Fortune Tells

   Last night I had a nightmare, one in which my wife had to shake me awake.  It wasn't horribly bad, nothing gory or violent; but I had a difficult time returning to sleep, staying awake for another few hours as if trying to digest all the chatter in my head.  The thing is, I rarely get nightmares, perhaps one per year or so, a blessing when compared to those suffering from PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  Briefly, this nightmare of mine found me at what appeared to be my mother's former house although the rooms had been juggled around; I was talking to someone sitting on the toilet but both of us were fully dressed, and I was just beginning to read him a science article when the front door knob jiggled quite violently along with loud banging on the door, but no voices.  I yelled back, "It's too late, leave," and repeated that again, apparently loud enough to awaken my wife who in turn nudged me awake.  The time (in the dream) was 10:30 at night; the time in actuality was 2 AM.  When I finally did go back to sleep, I was back in the continuation of a nightmare but now hiding under a bus, an innocent last-to-leave bystander with a thug approaching; his young guard dog sniffed me out but for some reason was quite friendly and uninterested but still I decided I'd better run.  Down, down, down this dark barely lit street, me desperately trying to find a side street or head into a driveway to hide, but those options somehow seemed even scarier.  Then it shifted and I was in a hallway, another thug working on something or another but I felt okay, uncomfortable but not feeling in danger as if I were the innocent baby-brother of a gang or something.  I left that room, went down the hall where another group seemed to take me in their confidence, one telling me that he was going to build me a lock, a five-way combination door lock so that I could feel safer; he began prying away at some large kit as if the lock were part of a larger Lego-like set, then he fiddled with something and the entire group walked away as if done.  I looked back at the door, assuming it was fixed with the new lock but found that the doorknob was little more than a beat up broken stick, now duct-taped into a makeshift handle.  What was going on?  I walked back up the hall into what appeared to be a somewhat normal cooking class, the chef of sorts asking another for ketchup then calling for a volunteer whom he lightly cut as if to show the similarities of the two in color (the blood and the ketchup).  A fellow observer standing near the door looks at me disgusted with it all and we both left, stepping out of the building entirely.  And then suddenly I was in the cargo hold of a large aircraft, as in the largest I've known, an X-86 (as if such a thing exists...it doesn't).  There were only four other people, sitting there at a makeshift desk and somehow I knew that they were waiting for me -- I was about to be presented with a baseball cap, only this cap was a special cap, one that would guarantee my safety.  The presentation was just about ready...and cut!  That's a wrap.  Dream over.

   Sorry to bore you readers with all of that but that's about as fierce and as horrifying as my nightmares become, a jumble of sights and sounds that once I'm awake seem to have little or no correlation to anything.  Still, they leave me puzzled as to a meaning if there is any...was the rattling door in her home my deceased mother wanting back in to this life?  Doubtful as I continue to sense that she's quite content.  What of the thugs coming at me but never really touching or threatening me?  The cap of safety?  Okay, there are dream interpreters out there, as well as books galore that try to explain some of the symbolism; but I leave all of it as just the fascinating matrix of the brain doing its thing...dumping the old clutter and worries or simply creating an imaginative series of clips that add to the normal variety of dreams our sleep so easily brings?  Who knows?  Maybe, just maybe, the fortune tellers?

   Call them what you want --shamans, witches, spirit seekers, psychics, gypsies-- there are many versions (and levels, so sorry to lump them all into one group) and if you've been to one or more you've likely come to realize that while there are many folk who simply try to tap into your intuition by taking subtle clues which you unconsciously provide, some of the people are quite in tune and genuine (and generally not in it to make money).  My wife encountered one such fortune teller at an outdoor fair, saying that the woman was the only one who seemed to truly be able to read both her past and future, telling her the odd name of her deceased aunt and that she would get married when she was 36 years old (as it happened, we did get married when she was 36).  Here's another: a good friend of mine had made friends with some locals in Hawaii and they took her deep into the maze of cane fields where they wanted her to meet an "auntie," one who could read her fortune (even with my growing up as a child in Hawaii, I was always told to never venture alone into the cane fields for I would likely never get out, this being the days before GPS).  My friend was and still is quite skeptical of this sort of stuff but she patiently listened and took it all in as if happy to just be able to witness such an intimate part of Hawaiian culture (many are the Hawaiian ancient beliefs in kahunas, spiritual chiefs of both good and evil powers).  She thanked the woman on the way out but the woman stopped her and gave her a small envelope, telling her that she would have a dream later that night and to open the letter only then.  She thought nothing of it, but placed the envelope near her nightstand and fell asleep.  Later that night she had an violent nightmare, one that jolted her awake, her heart racing; and it was only after settling down, she told me, that she glanced at the envelope and tore it open...it described in detail her horrific dream.

   The word fortune can mean many things, something so evident with the recent tumbling of the stock market.  Fortunes come and go, as they say, and analysts are noting that the markets are now changing as undeniably as the climate; with the stocks went the bonds this time, something that just doesn't happen that often in the U.S., one sector generally countering the other.   Reported Bloomberg: "The correlation between stocks and bond yields has been positive for the better part of 20 years," Bloomberg Intelligence equity strategists Gina Martin Adams and Aditya Kalgutkar wrote in a note on Tuesday. "Each flip to a negative correlation (2006-07, 2013-14) preceded a significant equity market correction."   One could almost say that fortune telling continues in today's stock exchanges...some are good at it and many are just a side show (the difference being that they get to play with your money so there's virtually no risk).  Felix Zulauf, president of Zulauf Asset Management, told Barron's: Global fiscal-stimulus initiatives are poison for bond markets.  Bond yields are rising around the world.  After major new fiscal-stimulus programs are announced, perhaps from mid-2019 onward, yields will rise quickly, resulting in a decisive bear market in bonds.  Several factors are pushing yields higher: The U.S. economy is growing above trend, capacity utilization is high, and the intensifying trade conflict with China suggests disruption in some supply chains, which leads to higher prices.  The Federal Reserve is selling $50 billion of Treasuries per month, and the U.S. Treasury must issue $1.3 trillion of paper over the next 12 months.  All these factors are pushing yields up.  Added John Lanchester in the London Review of Books: ...one of the things that happens in economic good times --a very clear lesson from history which is repeatedly ignored-- is that money gets too cheap.  Too much credit enters the system and there is too much money looking for investment opportunities.  In the modern world that money is hotter --more rapidly mobile and more globalized-- than ever before.

   One interesting thing was pointed out in The New Yorker, that all of this stuff --including money itself-- is taken on faith: “Banknotes depend on confidence,” Felix (Larry Felix, the former director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing) told me. (Our paper bills are called banknotes because they are, technically, promissory notes --formal I.O.U.s-- issued by the Federal Reserve.) “You accept a banknote because you figure the person you will hand it to will also accept it.”  This is the essential circular mystery of money: its value comes from each of us believing that everybody else will continue to believe in its value.  The physical bill reinforces this bit of theatre, with the feel of the cotton-and-linen paper reminding us that dollars are long-trusted, and the ever-upgraded magical effects reassuring us that they will hold value far into the future...A decade ago, there was serious discussion of the euro or the Chinese renminbi becoming the central global currency.  Then there was a great recession caused, in large part, by the failures of the American financial system.  This coincided with advances in digital-payment systems, such as bitcoin and Apple Pay, and the proliferation of cell-phone payments in the developing world.  Yet the dollar emerged dominant, showing that a currency doesn’t have to be great to be trusted -- it just has to be the least bad. (Wall Street traders refer to the dollar as “the cleanest dirty shirt.”)  Today, more than half of U.S. banknotes, including the vast majority of hundred-dollar bills, are held outside the country, acting as a store of value more dependable than local currencies and as an extension of American influence.   Scientific American tried to explain it a bit more, saying: What's more troubling is that the prevailing framework we use to guide macroeconomic activity is based on outdated paradigms.  Models that are typically used to govern money creation and interest rates, for example, still treat private banks as simple intermediaries, ignoring the fact that they are big, active, money-creating elements unto themselves.  That banks have their own motivations and profit-making strategies injects major opacity into the system.  It's no wonder that the 2008 mortgage crisis was difficult to see coming.

   So what now?  It would appear that if you look at the big tech companies, once the darling of investment advisors, they're heading into those simple paper notes.  Said The Economist: Take a moment to admire --and fear-- the ascent of America’s big-five tech firms.  Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook have recently become the five most valuable listed companies in the world, in that order.  With a total market value of $2.9trn, they are worth more than any five firms in history...Old-economy oligopolists, such as cable, telecoms and beer companies, are confident about their ability to extract reliable rents from customers, so they finance themselves largely with debt, which is cheap but inflexible, and return most of the cash they make to shareholders.  Yet, oddly, the biggest tech firms have the opposite approach.  Together they have $330bn of net cash (cash less debt), a ratio of twice their gross cashflow...The money mountain will get much bigger as profits soar.  The five firms have policies for returning some cash to shareholders.  For example, Alphabet and Facebook will not pay dividends for the “foreseeable future” but have small buy-back programmes, albeit with no deadlines.  Apple pays a meaty dividend and has a budget for repurchasing shares until 2019.  Factoring in these programmes, and analysts’ profit forecasts, their total net cash will reach $680bn by 2020, or three times gross cashflow. Even Amazon, which has a relatively small pile now, will reach $50bn.

   My, my...with so many analysts assuring the public that they are right in their predictions, saying all the right things such as "the charts show," or "the historical pattern indicates," one might think that their previous job was that of fortune tellers, a field which apparently proved less lucrative than this one.  For many, just being "in" the market is out of reach, limited to a small dabbling of mutual funds from a 401k plan but certainly not having the "play" money of almost overly-watching the performance of the market.  For me, I tend to view it all as no less chaotic than my nightmares, a mish mash of random thoughts and scenarios that only seem to make sense if pieced together by someone who might be little more than a fast-talker.  Best to not worry but to rely on the one person you know best...yourself.  What does your gut tell you?  After a few hours of going back and forth, my gut told my brain to give it up, that the entire thing didn't make sense and the rest of my body was tired.  Can we just deal with this tomorrow?  Two hours later, I was asleep...