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.