Second Acts

As Big Daddy said in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the odor of mendacity is powerful, sister girl.

Louisville basketball maestro Rick Pitino, “success book” author and motivational speaker, is revealed as less than the man he pretended to be. Who made “six years ago” the statute of limitations?

The bloody ankles’ David Ortiz, “big poppie” and lovable slugger, says somebody slipped him a performance-enhancing mickey in his blueberry-banana smoothie. Who put the lemonade in my lemonade?

And now Michael Vick, who gets $1.3 million this year as long as he stays away from your poodles, is working overtime at the Philadelphia Eagles training camp. Who let the dogs out?

There are plenty of second acts in American sporting life, so we have that going for us. Which is nice.

But the checkered past can never be repealed. It can only be repeated (the definition of insanity) or addressed by excuses and apologies to allow one to limp along, the latter option not as good as a time machine, but the best that the real world offers.

Pitino will never sell another “how to be like me” book. Ortiz may be done, too, not because he is a bad guy but because he can’t turn on the inside pitch. Vick, however, will go to the Super Bowl (write it down), not because he’s a super guy, though he might turn out to be. The premise of Christianity, my preferred religion, is to deny the power of Satan, who whispers seductively that you can’t change.

Can’t repeat the past? Of course, you can, old sport, Gatsby confidently told Nick Carraway. But who would want to?

Tell Me You're Coming Back to Me

Is Miss Market a changeling, one of those offspring of elves and fairies that the wee folk exchange for human babies? Why, just the other day we danced merrily through a meadow of green shoots with her. But when the sun arose the next, we found a slain rabbit in our pot when we attempted to make our morning oatmeal. And there she was, tangled hair and pointed ears, hissing like Catwoman in a field of burnt straw.

Suspicions that the economic recovery on the horizon was a mirage were roused by the Empire State survey of manufacturing conducted by the New York Fed. The data showed a decline in May after two months of improvement. Oil prices fell, as did interest rates, the most recent fear of the financial press. These are not indicative of green shoots. Kev is of the opinion that rising commodity prices and higher interest rates should be cheered as a sign of acceleration in the real economy, not brakes on the recovery.

But the familiar arc of expansion and recession that has marked the post-war period has turned unfamiliar. That’s because the model has been revealed as a changeling as well. As the United States turns from consumption to saving, incomes decline as jobs vanish, which reinforces contraction and the great hunkering down. So despite all the reserves the Fed has pumped into the system, banks find fewer viable businesses to loan to. The liquidity trap is not a tender one.

Yet policy makers surely know this. The cleansing power of a collapse in economic activity and the erasure of iconic American enterprises some call for would be so great as to cut serious gashes in the cord that binds a society together. So Bernanke, et al., must keep pushing on the string, hoping that the trauma of change from consumption to saving doesn’t entirely dissolve the rope to which we are hanging by a thread. The effort of government spending and Fed largesse is aimed at supplying a parachute to slow the descent so the pilot can live to fly another day.

For the investor, this means rewiring the brain. Look for things “to begin stop worsening” as the Bank of Japan said was happening in its latest dispatch. Being nimble and not too greedy will be prized attributes. Waiting for GMGMQ, DXO (oil) and SLV (silver) to get cheap again, keeping PALM and F in the portfolio. Plaxico Burress and Michael Vick look as if they will get a second chance in the NFL soon. So shall we. Miss Market will comb her hair, don the cocktail dress and take our arm.

As we heard Jean Arthur say to Cary Grant the other night: “I’m hard to get, Jeff. All you have to do is ask.”