Sign of the Times

Gross domestic product plummeted at a stunning 6.1% annual rate in the first quarter, the government tells us. Throw a tea party, not the one with bags from Ceylonese plantations tossed into Boston harbor, but the one on a sunlit yawn with crumpets and lots of jam. Wear ascots.

The story is in the mix – the cleansing decline in inventories and the rise in consumer spending is making our party. The train is leaving the station. Sure, there will be more tales of financial malfeasance and outbreaks of torch and pitchfork curmudgeons at various stops when we take on more coal and water and let Gary Cooper off to duel at high noon, but the path of least resistance has been paved. The choo-choo, fired by fiscal and monetary stimulus, is staying on the rails. The 2009 second-half recovery is playing out.

All that said, the inflationary world where savings evaporate and borrowing booms will meet us down the track. Great Depression II has turned into garden variety recession. Take what God has given us, which are cycles. Stock prices recover ahead of GDP.

In the event, though, things go awry. My Redbirds’ ace Lohse did his job last night with six scoreless innings, but the Cards lost 2-1 to the Braves. Nevertheless, I’m laying another dime on St. Louis and the stock market, even though the Steinbrenners are cutting ticket prices, a good sign because they are behind the curve. Prediction: Phil Hughes remains in the bigs and Joba is back in the bullpen.

Give Me V

Pity the noble swine. The animal that is always one step from going feral on us before it becomes breakfast was the focus of the great debate between Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. Which is smarter, the pig or the horse?

The horse, Ed averred, was the obvious choice, Johnny backed the pig, or was it the other way around? Not so fast, camel breath. We need Carnac the magnificent, who divined answers to questions in an envelope that had been sealed “in a mayonnaise jar left on the porch of Funk and Wagnalls since noon today” to tell us what lies ahead.

I make fun, and I apologize. It’s a defense mechanism. Here's hoping you and yours remain safe, but this is certain: Young and old folks in the United States will probably perish from a virus that has been ascribed to a protein source that generations of Americans have relied on in smokehouses and frying pans since Dixie came to be.

But, of course, it will pass, prayerfully with few of our sweet babies and grandmas claimed. That’s what Carnac and the financial markets are telling us now. We the people die all the time, but the traffic outside my open window this summer-like morning keeps up its incessant hum of hope.

The big hope now for those depending on escaping pig viruses and paying the rent is continued greed that shoots stock prices and the prices of what we consume higher.

If inflation does not revive then we are all in the soup. Surely, it will. A tenet of the monetarist religion is that, in the long run, though we may be dead, MV=PQ, with V, velocity, being stable. Deflation Cassandras believe that V will wilt forever.

Policy makers obviously feel otherwise. Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, et al., are intent that V will do what it's supposed to do. They’ll crack open the champagne when inflation begins galloping. And most of America will welcome a dose of it before debts overtake them. Equities look good for the rest of the year. Bonds will suffer. Refinance the home now if you can find someone to give you a loan. Interest rates are going up.

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

Mr. Inge, third baseman of the Detroit Tigers American League baseball club, is my hero of the day, though he scored no runs and did not drive one in. He didn’t bemoan his just-miss luck. He hit a just-foul double off the wall, a just-foul homerun and then placidly stroked what God gave him from hard-luck CC Sabathia -- a fastball that he solved and scooted into the outfield. Check the box score.

OK, later he was caught stealing after being hit by a pitch and then struck out. Yet he started the double play that pulled the plug on the pinstripers in the ninth -- yeoman’s work in the city that is the poster child of crumbling, but still aspirational, America. Life west of the Hudson goes on. The Yankees had 10 hits, for crying out loud, and only two runs with gobs of runners left on base. No need to break ‘em up until A-Rod returns.

Can the Incredibly Shrinking Three match the moxie of the Bengalese cats of northern Michigan?

The UAW will likely own a majority stake in Chrysler according to the plan that has been hammered out among the USA, creditors and private equity owners. GM is finally smelling the coffee and telling bond holders to take equity or get lost and putting Pontiac to its eternal rest (I can still see the jaunty smile of my father when he cranked up the air conditioning of his brand new baby blue Catalina in the 1960s. I think “Help!” had just been released).

Ford stands tallest, like its home town third baseman Mr. Inge, having secured financing before the credit crunch and refusing taxpayer help. It has missed on a few home-run swings but knocked the mud off its cleats and took a single, thank you.

And we have profited as well from buying Ford common stock because the luck of investing is to settle for the infield hit that can spark a big inning when all the world expects a strike-out. Disclaimer: I’ve been a member of all the world many times. But then, it’s no fun unless somebody gets hurt, even if it’s you.

Verlander threw serious heat for the hometown team. Fastballs can be struck by the weakest among us enough times to plate several runs, yet he gave up zero.

Ford bucked the market today as well. It has further to go. Taking gains is forgiven, but its stock price will be higher this time next year. Will the sub-.500 Yankees?

Miss Piggy

Like Keats listening to the nightingale, “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk.” But I am listening to the snorting and oinking of bacon, not the avian cluck of doom in recent years past. The influenza that originated with the porcine staple of subsistence farmers, such as my grandfather, who relented to my mother’s pleas and didn’t slaughter the pig she had raised in the depths of the Depression, has put us in the slop.

Given the panic infecting the markets, I fully expect to see pedestrians with surgical face masks when I venture out for my bacon (make that steak) and eggs this summery, un-flu like morning. But I got a shot back in the Ford administration when the swine flu alarum first sounded. Hope it took.

Miss Market can turn on a dime from seductress to you know what with lipstick. I don’t mean you, Gov. Palin. I look forward to your presidency and admire you for sticking up for everyone challenged by the mess we make of things. Plus you look as good as Obama in a tailored suit.

The day is not over, but I remain cheered. Unlike Keats, whose psyche (to which he wrote another ode) was absorbed with the fleetingness of youth, my gaze is fixed on tomorrow. I remain in the green, thanks to F and SLV. Even the redoubtable PALM refuses to bend. The only virus it fears is the one that could infect its operating system.

The airlines are suffering. NYT is down after Ms. Dowd’s wry farewell address to her profession on Sunday. Oil is dipping, but precious metals could be a refuge.

And Yankees’ fans, your ballyhooed pitching staff is suffering from walking pneumonia. I’m stealing home on them and I’m having a BLT for lunch.

Are We Not Men?

The stress test of dating Miss Market is getting the best of me. I have passed the midterm but worry about the final. This mischievous minx has been keeping me up beyond what my late years can stand. As I crush another cigarette into my 22-year-old crimson OU Sooners ash tray, pour another diet coke, ponder my winning line to the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest, uncap my pen to do a week’s worth of crossword puzzles and struggle to meet a Monday deadline, the sporting life beckons.

In one’s fifties, the best, the definition of which is up for debate, is behind you, but more subtle pleasures resonate with a tang that the impatient young can only laugh at – for now. My golfing buddies and I pulled into the parking lot with trepidation. The course was chock-a-block with men seeking a spring day in the sun, a hotdog at the turn and a chance at glory before the weekend duties of family, laundry, gardens and a spouse’s “honey do” list descended.

Almost an hour and a half transpired between the first tee shot and completing the second hole. Two of my harried partners were making phone calls and thumbing Blackberries to keep the commercial world at bay, yet they managed to engineer heroic shots – one with a cigar clenched in his teeth, another after taking a munch of his apple. It takes all kinds. Banter of awry domestic life, wayward business deals, tips on wayward swings (siblings and friends were probably bemoaning us, errant drives and Miss Market on golf courses of their own) and the futility of pleasing our cruel mistresses, Miss Market and three-putts among them, filled the interstices.

For my part, didn’t slice all day, which I consider a victory, though I hit my usual score of 104. I say victory because I can see the possibility of cratering my handicap. It lies just beyond the swale of the 18th hole at Dyker Beach. One crisp approach shot and I could have two-putted for par. It was not to be this glorious Friday, but it awaits me on Fridays or Mondays or Thursdays to come. I chunked it and cursed, but I could see the future as surely as Cotton Mather, Thomas Paine and Al Capone sensed the exceptionalism of the New World. It’s just a seven-iron away.

For a few hours, the Taliban were retreating to their caves, all our children were above average (like the banks, all of which I predict somehow passed Geithner’s stress test) and significant others were cheerful helpmeets while the lords of the manor frolicked after finding an entry on to the Gowanus.

Yet mistakes abound, such as my disastrous attempt to get out of a greenside bunker. Miss Market beckons with a smirk. Hey, big spender, she simpers, how about a smidgen of Viagra? No, thanks, darling. No leverage required in this environment. A scorecard with 90 at the end of 18 is all but assured. But wise men never fall in love so how are they to know.

Ford has enriched us with its $1.4 billion loss in the first quarter, less than expected, and refusal to take bailout dough. Palm continues to romance with the Pre smart phone. AMD is hanging in there. And this just in, Matthew Stafford will get gazillions in the NFL draft because he is young and strong.

But the old and weak can be winners, too, when they are misperceived as such. This is the due diligence or wishful thinking of the stock picker. Either it's cheap or cheap for a reason. Pessimism on real estate could be at a turning point. Adding Developers Diversifed Realty Corp. (DDR) at $3.90, up 11% on Friday.

After all, bogey golf would put me at 90, a milestone not to be sniffed at. Just a seven-iron away.

I'm Younger Than That Now

Where do original thoughts come from? Or, rather, where do the words come from that express the sentiment and truth that is inherent in every soul? The feeling that glues us all together and wonders and despairs at our fellows who roam outside of this gentle umbrella to feed on the carcasses of the weak and the sick?

In my dotage, I fear for the future, but am heartened by children, though I tear the decal off the top of my new baseball hat and gently curve the bill, though my blue jeans fit snugly (perhaps a bit too much) just below my belly button, despite my tendency to judge ladies and gentlemen by their inclination toward the designated hitter.

Oh yes, original thoughts. Are there any? Perhaps only scientists possess them. Lawyers rely on case law. Doctors refer to symptoms to diagnose what has been diagnosed in the past. Baseball managers call in the closer when up by a run in the 9th inning. The head coach orders a “prevent defense” in the waning moments of a one-score game. Writers usher in dramatic plot points to their screenplays. These are all things the prudent woman or man does.

How little does art imitate life. Life cares not a whit for the artistic spins we may desire to put on it, which may be why we love art so much. It must be an immense disappointment to the artist that all crumbles in his mighty effort to wring meaning out of this vale of tears. There, I just tried to make a sow’s ear into a silk purse!

But narratives persist. Even those outside of our lovely, late-empire American orbit have a story. The last few days have been filled with milestones. The killings at Columbine High School in Colorado (where an ex-girlfriend went to school), the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City (across the street from where I spent my journalism apprenticeship), and one good thing, the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, an event that defines the American belief in the future.

OK (no pun intended), I am a prisoner of my past, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now (thanks, Bob Dylan; original thoughts belong to others).

Here's another one that stirs me to look to tomorrow. Fitzgerald, disproving my original conceit that art can't illuminate, wrote in an otherwise undistinguished story called The Swimmers: "France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter--it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."


Which gives me that incurably optimistic outlook peculiar to Americans. Tony La Russa, despite having been found passed out, or something , at the wheel last year, has turned managing my Redbirds into a concerto, befuddling the Jerry Manuels who are reporters’ favorites but rely on folks who won’t slide because they might get hurt. Hey, Jerry, give it up. Put Sheffield in the lineup while he still has some pop.

Miss Market has been too kind to me lately. Goldman Sachs upgraded Ford and it soared. Faith in Palm’s new smart phone has kept it marching higher. Advanced Micro Devices advances and retreats but is still in the green as the semiconductor cycle looks to turn. Stay with them all, but don't confuse art with life.

Yankee Ingenuity

Is the ball juiced? Is there some mysterious wind current in the new Yankee Stadium that makes warning track power Ruthian? Home runs are on a pace to double the number hit last year in the House that Ruth Built. Word is the Steinbrenners are consulting the engineers who built the new palace to determine what might be going on. Is there some flaw in the façade that allows broken-bat triples and pop-up round-trippers? Or does the old horsehide come from the flank of Secretariat?

Doubtless, many missed Posada’s video-reviewed home run yesterday because they weren’t in their $2,500 seats, preferring instead to spend a day at the ball park munching on raw fish or savoring the filet mignon. I see this as a good sign. “Hey, kids, let’s go to Yankee Stadium and have lunch; we can always see the game on HD, which will show the players watching themselves on HD.”

I say it’s a good sign because it connotes a certain insouciance about the present and the future, a necessary ingredient for playing bogey golf (the best I can hope for at my advanced age), finding love and happiness, enrolling in that yoga class, enjoying the two hardy tulips that managed to bloom this year in my garden. I’m going with daffodils next year. I’m told they are hardy perennials, and I love the way they bow to you.

Times change, but fear and greed persist in all but the rare Mother Theresa among us, waxing and waning with whatever wind blows our way. Is greed, like the baseballs flying out of the Bronx, getting the upper hand now? Talk of "green shoots" is nudging the needle that way, but the survivalists and conspiracy sisters resist it mightily, hoping that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse come galloping to validate all the pork 'n beans they've laid up in the root cellar. My guess is they will be sorely disappointed. The bottom is in sight. The next tea party will be held not to protest the "the govment" (as Huck Finn's Pap complained), but the great inflation sure to come.

Key this week are first-quarter earnings reports and Friday’s release of durable goods orders for March and home sales data. If within expectations, the green shoots should grow a bit.

Though the market is taking a tumble today as I write, PALM and SLV are keeping me afloat. Avoid the usurious bankers. With the Fed Funds rate at zero and 25% on credit card balances, their means of making dough is exposed. The return to Glass-Steagall and “bankers’ hours” is coming. Paul Krugman tells me so.

Earl Weaver's Logic

Investing, gambling, managing a baseball team or confronting a par 5 with water in front have this question in common: When does one pull the plug?

The common rubric in baseball management circles these days is the pitch count. Regardless of the score and situation, once a predetermined limit of pitches is reached, the starter must be replaced with a fresh arm to keep the former from suffering arm fatigue or injury, the prevailing philosophy goes. But this is cookie-cutter discipline. If the object is to win, the best players should take the field. And if the starter is breezing along, why insert an inferior player merely because the starter has thrown x number of pills? Life itself is fraught with unknowns, but this doesn’t prevent the stalwart commuter or mom with a baby carriage from crossing the street merely because they have reached their limit by successfully doing so 10,000 times without getting hit by a bus.

If one is inclined to wager, the common wisdom is to press when ahead and pull back when behind. But this is a loser’s strategy. In effect, the wagerer acknowledges his position and gives up, preferring to dig the hole a little, not a lot, deeper, holding out hope that he can chip away at the deficit. The courage of one’s convictions becomes pale imitation.

When faced with a water hazard on a long par 5, the golfer is faced with the decision to lay up or go for the green (in my case, if all went right, it would be the third shot, but for the more accomplished it might be the second). Discretion may be the better part of valor, but as a poker-playing buddy of mine used to say, “No balls, no blue chips.” Since it’s just a game, it seems silly not to make a Homeric attempt that could result in a birdie or eagle, the psychic rewards of which would dwarf a day of triple bogeys.

The casino called the stock market has been encouragingly resilient this past month. But is it time to take money off the table, just as the baseball manager removes an effective starter or the prudent golfer or gambler lays up or reduces wagers?

The economic data last week were not encouraging. Retail sales were lower than expected. Deflation was evident in the price indices. However, much of this had to do with the decline in energy prices last month. The “green shoots” alluded to by Obama and Bernanke and the profit reports of Citibank and JPMorgan tempered the macro news. Indeed, the New York Fed’s Empire State survey of manufacturing suggested things are not sinking as fast as they have been.

I’m not taking out Sabbathia, not laying up and not cutting back on the wagering front. Look for further gains in stock prices as confidence builds that the worst is behind. Conditions may continue to deteriorate, but at a slower rate, which presages a bottom in the economy. Equity prices rebound before the economy. Sticking with F, AMD, PALM. Consider some REITS, such as DDR, which may be cheap after the General Growth Properties bankruptcy.

Like Earl Weaver, I'm leaving Cuellar, Palmer, Dobson and McNally in. Meanwhile, in our half of the inning, the gun is loaded, as Weaver used to say, and I’m counting on a three-run homer.

Masterful

It’s been said before, but bears repeating: The charm of sports as opposed to other forms of entertainment is that the actors write the script. There is no hidden Hollywood hand guiding the action to its often obvious dénouement. Even reality shows are edited to deliver the most outrageous or melodramatic impact. The raw spectacle of athletic competition can be pedestrian or soaring, much like life itself, but it is reality unfolding before our eyes with no outcome inevitable.

On Sunday, the canvas of Augusta National Golf Club soaked up a Jackson Pollockian riot of colors, provided a backdrop for a Shakespearean gamut of human heroics and folly and kept me from preparing Easter dinner until well past the time I promised. Even my sainted mother, a sports fan but usually unaware of golf, was riveted and didn’t complain she wasn’t being fed on time.

Given up for lost after Saturday’s round, the Woods-Mickelson duel was to be a subplot. CBS in its wildest pleas to the golf gods couldn’t have expected the rivals to catch fire and work their way up the leader board, giving Jim Nance one more chance to intone the only scripted line in this drama: “A tradition like no other.”

Yet they did, writing their own play, rejecting the scenarios of sports writers, who pointed out the obvious difficulty of sitting so far off the pace and having to pass so many players to make up ground.

I shan’t bore you with a shot-by-shot replay. Hooking around trees to the green, sinking long eagle putts, missing eagle putts, bogeys on 17 and 18. Pick up a sports page to relive it.


I saw these things, thanks to the miracle of television.

The humorless Greek god in his signature Sunday best – a red shirt – his sycophantic hunchbacked henchman at his side. Hah, I fall into the trap, writing a script where none exists except in the players themselves.

The once best-golfer-never-to-have-won-a-major brilliant and erratic, in a zone on the front nine, making mistakes at Amen Corner as a friend of mine predicted. To us right-handers, lefties have a certain fascination. They are like mirror images, the same but backwards, lending a peculiar grace to their motion.

The young Texan with the impossibly cute blond tour wife, hanging around the scorer’s tent and implausibly being recalled to play another hole or two – as it turned out just one.

The down-home Kentuckian, the very face of Anglo-Saxon hill folk in his visage and accent (I am afflicted as well), seemingly poised to give middle-aged men everywhere a sip from the fountain of youth, falling just short on his par putt at 18.

And finally the Argentinean victor, furiously chewing gum instead of chain smoking as he did two years ago in winning the U.S. Open. Unpretentious to a fault, this merry old soul would be the delight of everyone on a crowded muni track. He sees the ball, hits the ball, engaging in none of the excruciatingly painstaking pre-shot routine and doubt that can make a round of golf like waiting for a subway at 2 in the morning.

Oft have I rued picking up golf late in life, having missed all the fun, lived and vicarious, for so long. But now I feel it a blessing, knowing that the remaining years will be filled with adventure, untainted by ennui. Now I can say, “Remember the 2009 Masters?” with authority if not shot-by-shot recall.

Now I must clean my clubs and roll a few birdie putts on the carpet.

Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, Men Have Named You

There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here.

Hoping to redeem my last place finish in my group’s bracket challenge and 1,009,587th finish over all, I took the Michigan State Spartans and the points against the Tar Heels of North Carolina. It was the equivalent of rejecting momentum investing for the contrarian pick. The outcome is one more reason that Wall Street coined the phrase, “Don’t fight the tape.”

But I still have issues. Why does NC have a ram as a mascot instead of a guy in a black foot suit? And why does Alabama, the Crimson Tide, have an elephant as a mascot emblem instead of a surfer riding a wave, back lit by a blood-red sunset? These and other weighty matters bother me while re-tooling my golf swing to the stack and tilt and licking my handicapping wounds.

I suppose I could google the answers, but I resist. I prefer to ponder these mysteries as Plato or Thomas Aquinas or some other deep thinker of yore would have done, without the benefit of instant access to all sources for all things. I want to have someone whose grandfather told them tell me, a much more satisfying path to knowledge than the digital crutch that makes experts of everyone and every blog a newspaper.

Though my mind is distracted by these imponderables, hail to the sticky footprints of Chapel Hill and the tarred toe of Ty Lawson. This was no bear market rally, which is the debate Miss Market is moderating now. Which team will win? Miss Market is giving us a Mona Lisa smile, impossible to interpret. Come hither or You fool?

F, PALM and AMD have been good to us so far. Taking profits would be forgiven. But I’m sticking with them and avoiding financial names.

One Mona Lisa I think I do know is C.C. Sabathia. If he would put his hat on straight, he might get someone out.

Mind Over Matter

The logic is impeccable. If you swing a baseball bat as a lefty you are, what, two or three feet closer to first base? This enables you to steal infield hits that would otherwise be routine outs if you can slap it to the left side.

Unfortunately in golf it matters little from what side you swing the club. You are not running anywhere. Yet Phil Mickelson does everything right-randed but swings as a lefty. I'm thinking of giving it a try after an afternoon of tearing up fairways with blunderbluss explosions of divots taken behind the ball.

Can there be a more exasperating experience than hitting a tee shot that is a work of art, the dimpled Titleist landing exactly where you want it, and then crashing the iron into the ground, spoiling what should have been a perfect chance for birdie, or if short, at least par?

Then the mind goes to work. It is filled with things you did wrong -- grip, posture, back swing, weight transfer, head moving.

And outside disruptions -- the clatter of geese in mating season (I couldn't think what else was in their walnut-sized brains); the haze over a view of the Manhattan skyline, where commerce was hopefully being conducted while the idle with a stick in their hands pondered a silly little spheroid in the outer reaches of the gentle, sloping borough of Queens; the realization that in 60 million years, or whatever, the sun will burn out and the earth will become a frozen ice ball. These things, too, race through the minds of golfers, noble creatures most of them, defying the gods with their simple game.

Made one birdie, one par, both on par threes, and played horrendously on numerous holes, too horrific to relate in front of women and children.

Miss Market has been so kind of late that I offered my birdie and par to her as a kind of sacrificial offering of thanksgiving. I know she is a jealous goddess and must be placated.

PALM jumped after hours on the RIMM news, and the NASDAQ is in the green for the year. Obama sounded upbeat in London. The jobs data tomorrow could be dire, but it is still considered a lagging indicator (aren't they all?). I'm breaking 100 next week.