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Stock futures begin the weekly trading at 5pm Central time on Sunday evenings. This week, following the protests, looting and general unrest in the country the futures opened lower. Given the state of the economy coming out of the quarantining period, civil unrest seemed like yet another dagger in the back of the economy. However, that drop was extremely short-lived. By the end of trading on Monday the Dow climbed almost 100 points.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Vladimir Lenin

Thomas Hobbes described life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but in the spirit of a long holiday weekend I will try to keep today’s newsletter upbeat, light, and short. But Hobbes, like myself, was a bit of a curmudgeon, which is probably why I immediately attached myself to his words when I first encountered them in a university philosophy course. I tend to be pessimistic, assuming the worst from people and from events.

I’m really having a hard time letting go of this. I just can’t seem to get my arms around it. I mean our unemployment rate, announced this morning, shows that 14.7% of Americans are now unemployed…and the Nasdaq 100 is up on the year? Even the S&P 500 is now only down 10% on the year. Ten percent? Hell, our unemployment rate just jumped that in one month! What’s ten percent among friends, right?

“When I was your age, they would say we can become cops, or criminals. Today, what I’m saying to you is this: when you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?”

An April 17^th newsletter should, in normal times after a big rebound in the stock market, call for an analogy to the arrival of spring, the beginning of the baseball season and all the joys of attendant hope. Yet outside my window sits a few inches of snow. Baseball may or may not becoming this year.

The old adage on Wall Street, well “old” is relative going back to maybe Allen Greenspan, is one should never “fight the Federal Reserve.” When the Fed is engaging in monetary easing strategies such as lowering interest rates or, as in the last ten years, outright purchasing of bonds and mortgage backed securities, one would be wise to hop on the Fed’s back and pile into risk-assets.

“Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them…The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”