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fyeahcamcountry · 4 years ago

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Cam: The Otherside - track by track

(Apple Music)

'...“I was a total idealist,” Cam tells Apple Music. The Nashville country singer, who’s also one of the city’s most sought-after songwriters, says the five years she spent writing her sophomore album were some of the hardest of her life. “I had this Disney idea of how the world worked, and at some point that just...broke.” Tracing a string of major life changes��breaking up with her old label, inking a new contract, marrying her husband, and welcoming her first child—The Otherside reflects a dramatic shift in thinking, or her journey through disillusionment into clear-eyed realism. That evolution unlocked a new side to her sound. “My songs have always pulled from my psychology background, but I had this filter on and didn’t even know it,” she says. “Once I took that off, I could be so much more honest. I could see the world, and myself, for exactly what they were.” Read on as Cam tells us the inside story behind each song.

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Redwood Tree

“I grew up in the Bay Area with a redwood tree in my backyard, and I did a lot of thinking up there. I wasn’t raised in a specific religion, but the most magical, awe-inspiring experience I can think of is being in the redwoods, feeling so small. It’s like a cathedral in that it reminds you of your place in everything. Fallen redwoods have rings that represent the thousands of years that they lived, and you’re like, ‘Oh, we’re just flies buzzing around.’ We wake up one day shocked to realize our parents are suddenly old. Like, when did my dad's beard get so white? I had watched the movie Arrival around the time we wrote this song, and I loved the idea of time not being linear. The soundtrack has these voices that go ‘Da, da, da, da,’ and we nod to that in the production. I hope time isn't linear. I hope I get more time with my parents.”

The Otherside

“Tim, or Avicii, came to Nashville a few years ago to write for one of his albums, and we were in the studio with Hillary Lindsey and Tyler Johnson. He started playing this piano melody over and over and over again, and I don't smoke cigarettes but when Hillary took a cigarette break, I was like, ‘I'm going, too.’ It was just so intense. He was really stuck on this thing. While we're out on the back porch, she and I came up with an idea for the chorus, and he loved it. But he fiddled with it for hours. He was thinking about cadence, about how we speak, about code-mapping it onto a melody, and about the actual phonetics. Tim never wound up releasing that song, so I was like, ‘Ooh, maybe that means I can.’ Even though it’s such a heavy thing not having him around for the final edits, I did feel this great responsibility to work my ass off to get it right. Because I knew that’s what he would have done.”

Classic

“On the other side of the spectrum, this is one of those songs that just magically fell into place. I went up to New York for a few sessions with Jack Antonoff at Electric Lady Studios, and it was so fun. Creatives tend to beat themselves up a lot, but Jack and I sat there jangling around on this 12-string guitar and writing a song that had this nostalgic Simon & Garfunkel ‘Cecilia’ vibe. It’s about how there are people in your life that outlast everything else—technology, fashion trends, swings in politics, whatever. Nothing's a constant in life, but a few people are. It was inspired by this moment when my husband and I were in Argentina and he found a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He doesn't smoke anymore, but he goes, ‘I’ve got to smoke these because they don't make ‘em like this anymore.’ And then he looks at me and goes, ‘That's a country lyric.’”

Forgetting You

“I was writing with Lori McKenna, Tyler Johnson, and Mitch Rowland, and we’re all pals from working on various projects together. Still, I always get nervous when I go write with Lori, even though she's so humble and chill, because I’m like, ‘Don't embarrass yourself in front of the poet of our generation!’ Which is to say, I knew I needed to bring in something cool. I had this line, ‘I'm getting older/But you never change.’ The song is about holding on to the concept of someone from the past, and measuring everyone up to them even though it’s no longer real. That's why you keep moving forward but they never seem to age.”

Like a Movie

“Before we were married and had a kid, I’d come home from tour and my husband and I would have this tiny bit of quality time together. And the truth is, we’d usually get high and go to Walmart. One day, we were unloading all our groceries and I was like, ‘How did you know it was me? How did you know not to settle for someone earlier or wait for someone else?’ And he just smiled and said, ‘Because when I met you, it was like a movie.’ Now, I can remember when we met. I was a mess. It did not look like a movie. But it was so, so sweet. I wrote with the love junkies—Lori McKenna, Liz Rose, and Hillary Lindsey—and the strings are David Campbell, who’s actually Beck’s dad. Jeff Bhasker wanted a ’50s movie soundtrack vibe with strings that swelled like an orchestra, and David immediately got it. Apple Music did a teaser video for the album, and if you watch it, there should be video footage from that string session.”

Changes

“I usually write all my own music, but this is the first of a couple songs on this album that I didn’t. I guess I feel like it's cheating. I'm supposed to be digging all this personal stuff up and figuring myself out, so taking someone else’s song feels like a shortcut. But I trust Harry [Styles]’s writing. I feel like he tries so hard to be himself in his music, and he doesn't take it lightly. That pursuit resonates with me. The demo had Lori McKenna singing with Harry on background vocals and his whistle, which is still in the track. It was amazing to hear a song that someone else wrote that clicked so much with me personally. It’s about feeling like you’ve outgrown where you're from, and you don't really want to admit that. It’s kind of an uncomfortable thing to say, but I love when things are uncomfortable. That means it’s important.”

Till There's Nothing Left

“This song has steamy sexual energy... Like, ‘I'm giving you my whole heart but also my body and a quickie in the back seat.’ While we were recording my vocals, I was trying to sit back and make it cool and sexy, and I realized I was blushing. I was blushing because society tells us that sexuality is a private thing. If you want to be respected as a woman, if you want to be considered intelligent, you can’t be sexual. But then I was reminded of my grandmother who was raised Baptist on a farm in Saskatchewan. She's the one who gave me the sex talk, unbeknownst to my mother. She said, ‘Sex is like a milkshake. Once you have it, you're always going to want it.’ She was comfortable with her sexuality without it being the main thing about her. So I thought, ‘If a woman born in the 1930s on a farm in Canada can own it, I can own it.”

What Goodbye Means

“A friend of mine was going through a divorce. It was pretty ugly, but he was being so kind. I asked him, ‘How are you being so nice right now? I don't get it.’ And he said, ‘Because she might change her mind.’ I still get goosebumps thinking about it. We've all been there, not quite ready to accept the reality of something, and that's okay. You've got to take it at the rate you can take it. This song has such a classic melody. It’s warm. For some reason it feels like a summer evening in New Mexico to me.”

Diane

“This song is a response to Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene,’ and man, it really seems to resonate with people. Crowds sing it back to me in this emotional, over-the-top, theatrical way. I suppose most people have had infidelity affect their life one way or another, but it’s hard to watch people you care about go through it. There's so much shame around it that you don't get to talk about what you need or how to heal. And you almost never get to hear the other party’s side. So ‘Diane’ is my moment to role-play, I guess. I'm the other woman and I slept with your husband and I didn't know he was married, but you’ve got to know the truth. Parton's lyrics to the other woman include the word ‘please,’ and that just killed me. She's so humble and human, asking someone to please not take the love of her life away. Immediately, I was like, ‘That's the narrative. That's what is so often left unsaid.’”

Happier for You

“This is the other song that I didn't write, and it’s from Sam Smith and Tyler [Johnson]. Sam and I have a great relationship because I helped write the song ‘Palace’ for their album and then they brought me out on tour. We have a lot of trust. When Lindsay [Marias, Cam’s manager] and I first heard this demo and Sam came in singing, our jaws dropped. The emotion was so raw and honest and real. I love the juxtaposition of saying something very loud and publicly—to the point where it almost feels proud—but actually it’s something that makes you want to curl up in a ball.”

Girl Like Me

“This is the author's note at the end of the book. Natalie Hemby had come over and started playing a verse on the piano, and I was like, ‘Oh god, that is so sad.’ And she's like, ‘It's your story. This is your comeback story.’ It’s funny how sometimes you can’t recognize your own self. Writing this song was uncomfortable but in the best way, trying to pull lyrics out in the chorus (‘They’re going to give up on you/You're going to give up on them’). You can’t just become jaded. You have to push through. It’s a gift to be able to see life for what it is, and to see yourself for who you are. I think anyone who has been through that phase of disillusionment will think, ‘Oh, yeah, tough. But this side is better.’”

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zenlesszonezero · 7 days ago

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You feelin' fired up now? Make way for the undefeated Champion! Welcome to New Eridu!— PS5™/iOS/Android/PC | Version 1.3 "Virtual Revenge" of Zenless Zone Zero, HoYoverse's urban fantasy ARPG, is out now

#zzzero #zenless zone zero #lighter #gaming #anime gaming

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jeparlelibremente · 7 years ago

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Demian (Hesse)

“There was the world of my parents’ house, or rather, it was even more circumscribed and embraced only by my parents themselves. This world was familiar to me in almost every aspect - it meant mother and father, love and severity, model behaviour and school...”

“The other world, however, also began in the middle of our own house and was completely different; it smelt different, spoke a different language, made different claims and promises. This second world was peopled with servant girls and workmen, ghost stories and scandalous rumours, a gay tide of monstrous, intriguing, frightful, mysterious things; it included the slaughter house and the prison, drunken and scolding women, cows in labour, foundered horses, tales of housebreaking, murder and suicide...”

Spoiler alert for the book in question

The dichotomy of Hesse’s narrator runs through the novel with singular accuracy; we are reminded, again and again of these two worlds that exist only as his own creation - and this is important: the problem is philosophical, existential. Hesse virtually gives this up in the prologue chapter, at any rate - analysis and interpretation not even necessary. But it’s crucial to bear this in mind, because I wanted to talk about why this theme is recurring in Hesse’s work; his books are populated with narrators plagued by internal crisis, who endure an entire lifetime of misery before eventual catharsis and denouement. “Misery” here may imply some tone, but it would be hard to classify them as happy or unhappy, they seem to exist only to deliver a kind of weapons grade ideology of psychoanalytic reflection right into the mind of the reader. And I would be hard pressed to name another writer who can peel back the layers of the human psyche as easily as Hesse. The Nobel Prize in literature has at times been controversial, but few would doubt the place of Hesse in the pantheon of the Western Canon. How many authors have even remotely tried, successfully, to explain the meaning of life? Siddartha isn’t even parable or metaphor, synecdoche or analogy; it is the eponymous character embarking on a quest to determine the meaning of life. And just like Sinclair in Demian, the tale is driven by an existential thirst: something is wrong, this is not enough, there must be more. More what?

In 1930 Freud published Civilisation and Its Discontents and began to tackle a problem that must have taken root in his mind even as he formed the early theories of psychoanalysis: the drives of the id are fundamentally incompatible with the principles of a peaceful civilisation - how does the ego mediate between the id and the super-ego? It’s one of the most unfortunate paradoxes of our species that as math enables us to connect more broadly and more rapidly, many of us are losing the ability connect on any deeply intimate emotional level; we marry the wrong spouses out of anxiety of loneliness, we surround ourselves with acquaintances but struggle to make ourselves understood. We’re screaming in a vacuum and nobody can hear. We suffocate. We suffer needlessly. We turn to Tinder and see profiles of “ENTJ” replacing dialogue and passionate conversation. Don’t get me wrong; online dating profiles only give you so much resolution to work with, and you’re going to need to write something - but so few people seem ever able to progress beyond this point. They attach themselves to someone, anyone, simply because they are there. There may be little attraction, shared interests, chemistry, humour - but - as an object, an abstraction, an idea - this person will do. We have increasing divorce rates and more pictures of our kids and failed relationships on Facebook and Instagram then ever before. We didn’t even have Facebook and Instagram before. People reflexively marry in order to post the relevant pictures to the relevant social media sites and tick the relevant boxes. Then what? The prognosis is poor; misery begets misery, and our children are learning unconsciously to mimic this behaviour. Disaster. And who is to blame for all of this?

Everyone at some point in their lives has to kill their parents. Youthful teenage rebellion is a psychologically fulfilling necessity. You need to individuate - the truth is you’re going to be carrying a lot of baggage (negative connotation not necessarily implied) and you will need to take responsibility for this. Understanding oneself is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do - by the time we have the cognitive faculties to do so, our impulses and instincts, attachments and transferences are so keenly developed that un-rooting them takes considered effort - I know all too well how extremely difficult this process is. Putting your finger on some unconscious instinct is like trying to thread a needle in the dark. Exhausting. Sleep, repeat. People are who are treated really badly by their parents tend to develop problematical personalities; borderline personality disorder has only increased in diagnostic rate; and it is only a description of behaviour, not even a real diagnosis with somatic malfunction to point to! Narcissism is even worse: modern psychiatry has very little to say about our increasing divorce rates and failed relationships. Why, after five years of marriage do you want to stab your husband in the face when he laughs in just that particular way? Take solace: the problem is not your husband, the problem is you. Or perhaps the problem is both of you. Either way, this is not the person you were supposed to spend your life with. People say monogamy is unnatural, but in truth this is an intellectualisation with one goal: to avoid making any concrete decisions. If you don’t make a choice with consequences then what have you risked? And in the perverse interpretation of narcissism, what does your partner choice say about you? The alternative is to frantically pick someone, anyone, and run with it. If it doesn’t work out (it won’t) you can always un-friend them and un-tag all your photos together. It is this invisible fourth wall that is causing your frustrations. Your inability to meld to another persons well-being. I am not anti-social media, I am anti-you not understanding why you repeat the same patterns over and over in despair.

“I was glad my father upbraided me about my muddy shoes. It side-stepped the issue, the graver sin passed unnoticed and I got away with a reproach which I secretly transferred to the other affair. In so doing, a strange new feeling lit up inside me, an unpleasant, ruthless feeling, full of barbs - I felt superior to my father!”

Sinclair knows from the beginning that something is wrong; the opening passages of this essay are taken from Chapter Start. I feel like it’s low hanging-fruit to look at Sinclair’s remarks about his father and then look at Freud and back again; and besides, his mum tries to comfort him after the ordeal with Franz Komer begins, and Sinclair doesn’t really display any Oedipal tendencies - his refusal to eat the chocolate she brings can be seen as a pattern of positioning himself to move away from his parents. Max Demians’ initial appearance is a convenient way to Deus Ex Machina dear old Franz out of the picture, but by this point it is already too late: Sinclair has tasted the forbidden fruit of knowledge (that Franz Kromer can so easily trick Sinclair should not be lost on the reader: Sinclair’s naivety shines through) Whoops. Also, this is... kind of the titular character. He wasn’t about to slink away. Sinclair and Demian hang out, they talk about stuff in a way that probably only Nietszche would find amusing. Sinclair is semi-infatuated, retreats back to the safety of his parents and sisters (take note that he has no brother, yet attends boys’ schools) and goes back to study. He learns about interpretation, and begins to think deeply about the character of a man. He sympathises with Cain, and not Abel. This is important: it is the first time his intellect has demonstrated the ability to abstract, it lets him reason with symbols: semiotics is the basis for metaphor. “You mean the mark isn’t a literal mark?” Demian says some edgy stuff with one common theme: be true to thyself.

Several years and puberty later, and cue boarding school. Sinclair is going out and getting wasted, his talk is cynical. He is deeply, deeply alone. He knows all the right moves to make socially, but he connects with no one. Grades are bad, and his old friends are trying to distance themselves from him. That’s ok, he’s made a lot of new ones - that he feels nothing for. Uh oh. For a book written in 1919, this is starting to look a lot like... us.

Part 2 soon.

#books #literature #hesse #demian

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melindarowens · 8 years ago

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“The Western Status Quo Political System Is Collapsing Into ‘Something Else'”

Authored by Ben Hunt via EpsilonTheory.com,

Michael Corleone: I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren’t.

Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?

Michael Corleone: They could win.

Hyman Roth: This county’s had rebels for the last fifty years— it’s in their blood, believe me, I know. I’ve been coming here since the ’20s. We were running molasses out of Havana when you were a baby — the trucks, owned by your father.

Hyman Roth: Michael, I’d rather we talked about this when we were alone. The two million never got to the island. I wouldn’t want it to get around that you held back the money because you had second thoughts about the rebels.

? “The Godfather: Part II” (1974)

Michael Corleone is like me and every investor over the past five years who held off on an attractive investment for fear of political risk. Except he was right and I’ve been nothing but wrong.

Somehow, I think Silicon Valley got even more spun up than Manhattan. There were hedge fund people I spoke to about a week after the election.

They hadn’t supported Trump. But all of a sudden, they sort of changed their minds. The stock market went up, and they were like, ‘Yes, actually, I don’t understand why I was against him all year long.’

? Peter Thiel, in a New York Times interview (January 11, 2017)

John Wick: People keep asking if I’m back and I haven’t really had an answer. But now, yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back.

? “John Wick” (2014)

Me, too. Political risk, though, not so much.

If political parties in Western democracies were stocks, we’d be talking today about the structural bear market that has gripped that sector. Show me any country that’s had an election in the past 24 months, and I’ll show you at least one formerly big-time status quo political party that has been crushed. This carnage in status quo political systems goes beyond what we’d call “realigning elections”, like Reagan in 1980 converting the formerly solid Democratic Southern states to a solid Republican bloc. It’s a rethinking of what party politics MEANS in France, Italy, and the United States (and with the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, and maybe Germany not too far behind). The last person to accomplish what Emmanuel Macron did in France? The whole “let’s start a new political party and win an election in two months” thing? That would be Charles de Gaulle in 1958 and the establishment of the Fifth Republic. The last person to accomplish what Donald Trump did in the U.S.? The whole “let’s overthrow an old political party from the inside and win an election in two months” thing? I dunno. Never? Andrew Jackson?

Now don’t get me wrong. Do I think Emmanuel Macron, a former Rothschild investment banker whose “ambition was always two steps ahead of his experience”, is the second coming of Charles de Gaulle? Do I think Donald freakin’ Trump is a modern day Andrew Jackson? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha … good one!

But here’s what I do think:

Something old and powerful is happening in the real world to crush the status quo political systems of every Western democracy.

Something predictably sad is happening in the political world to replace the old guard candidates with self-absorbed plutocrats like Trump and pretty boy bankers like Macron.

Something new and powerful is happening in the investment world to divorce political risk and volatility from market risk and volatility.

The old force repeating itself in the real world is nicely summed up by these two charts, the most important charts I know. They’re specific to the U.S., but applicable everywhere in the West.

First, the Central Banker’s Bubble since March 2009 and the launch of QE1 has inflated U.S. household wealth far beyond what the nominal growth rate of the U.S. economy would otherwise support. This is a classic bubble in every sense of the word, with the primary difference from prior vast bubbles being its concentration and focus in financial assets — stocks and bonds — which are held primarily by the rich. Who wins the Academy Award for creation of wealth inequality in a supporting role? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Source: Bloomberg LP and TCW, as of 12/31/16. For illustrative purposes only. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

And as the second chart shows, this central bank largesse has sharply accelerated the massive shift in wealth to the Rich from the Rest, a shift which began in the 1980s with the Reagan Revolution. We are now back to where we were in the 1930s, where the household wealth of the bottom 90% of U.S. wage earners is equal to the household wealth of the top one-tenth of one percent of U.S. wage earners.

For illustrative purposes only.

So look … I’m not saying that the current level or dynamics of wealth inequality is a good thing or a bad thing. I’m just saying that it IS. And I understand that there are insurance programs today, like social security and pension funds, which are not reflected in this chart and didn’t exist in the 1930s, the last time you saw this sort of wealth inequality. I understand that there are a lot more people in the United States today than in the 1930s. I understand that there are all sorts of important differences in the nature of wealth distribution between today and the 1930s. I get all that. What I’m saying, though, is that just like in the 1930s, there is a political price to be paid for this level of wealth inequality. That price is political polarization and electoral rejection of status quo parties. I won’t give the whole history lesson here, as it’s a good excuse for readers to immerse themselves in Wikipedia for half an hour or so and read about guys like Father Coughlin, but the rhyming of political history in Western democracies between the late-1920s/early-1930s and today, particularly in the way that status quo political parties were subverted or overthrown or just plain eliminated throughout Westworld is … pretty amazing.

Western democracies, mixing a healthy dash of popular political representation with a big dose of capitalist economic structures, are extremely good at the most important driver of social stability: co-opting the more talented members of a mass society into the status quo system, bringing new blood into that top two percent socioeconomic club who might otherwise apply their talents in more subversive ways. Maybe not the top one-tenth of one percent on a purely financial wherewithal scale, but definitely the top two percent on a more broadly defined socioeconomic scale of wealth, stability, and influence. That co-opting process is the steam valve for Western societies, and it has two components, particularly in the most successful Western society, the United States — educational mobility (move to where the good intellectual jobs are) and labor mobility (move to where the good physical jobs are). Educational mobility, spurred in the U.S. by more than $ 1 trillion in government-backed student loans, is in high gear, and the importance of an educational pedigree to get into the 2% Club has NEVER been greater. Labor mobility, on the other hand, crushed by globalization and the housing crisis, hasn’t been this broken since … yep … the 1930s.

As a result, the composition of the 2% Club of wealth, stability, and influence is changing. Today it’s almost entirely a Club of the educationally mobile and accomplished, the people who deal with symbols for a living — words and tickers and numbers and code — and whose language and lingo is similarly abstracted. And because our status quo political institutions, like political parties, are in all nations and in all times the top-down creations of the 2% Club, our political parties themselves speak a different language today than they did even 10 or 20 years ago. No political party is immune, regardless of where it sits on the traditional left/right spectrum. This isn’t a Republican vs. Democrat thing. It’s not a rich vs. poor thing, either, because there are plenty of rich people who aren’t symbol manipulators and are feeling less and less at home in the 2% Club. It’s a who’s-dominating-the-2%-Club thing, and in Westworld that’s the educationally accomplished symbol manipulators.

Our status quo political parties speak well and clearly to the 2% Club and their educationally mobile circles, not so well to the guy who didn’t go to law school and whose kids don’t have a prayer of getting into Stanford. Not so well to the guy who, to be honest, kinda hates lawyers and the professional symbol manipulators, and definitely hates anyone who went to Stanford. Not so well to, as Amity Shlaes titled her seminal history of the 1930s and the Great Depression, the Forgotten Man, citizens who — today and in the 1930s — are well and truly stuck. Stuck because labor mobility is broken. Stuck because their wages are flat and their debt is up. Stuck because they’re getting older. Stuck because, like the sailors on the Battleship Potemkin, they are served disgusting, rotten meat but are told by the well-spoken professionals that these are dead fly larvae, not live maggots, and so they can simply be washed off with salty water. Stuck because the entire political system is rigged for the educationally mobile and the symbol manipulators. Not rigged in a cartoon evil sense, but rigged in the same way that the German system is rigged in favor of people who speak German and the Chinese system is rigged in favor of people who speak Chinese. Don’t speak Symbol Manipulation? Sorry, but the status quo Western political system is rigged against you. And you know it.

There’s no attachment to a political party that from your perspective is speaking gibberish. The attachment is to change and reversion. The attachment is to Something Else. The Something Else will not have a well-considered or coherent policy wrapper. It won’t look smart. It didn’t in the 1930s and it doesn’t today. Why not? Because if it did, it would be co-opted as part of the status quo! Words like “well-considered” and “coherent” and even “policy” are the abstracted words of the modern status quo. They are the language of the 2% Club, particularly of an educationally mobile 2% Club, and it’s a very different language than that spoken by anyone hailing from the world of physical construction and manipulation rather than symbol construction and manipulation.

So what is this other language? Importantly, as Joan Williams describes in her phenomenal article, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class,” it’s not a soak-the-rich language (in fact, it’s more disparaging of the poor than the rich). It’s a non-abstracted language of direct, physical involvement in localized social behaviors (what Nassim Taleb calls “Skin in the Game”), because that’s the language that has meaning for anyone who depends on labor mobility and physical construction to make a better life for themselves and their kids. It’s an uncomfortable language for the educationally mobile 2% Club, because it doesn’t abstract away the racist, sexist corners of real world, localized social behaviors and beliefs in a carefully constructed linguistic architecture. That doesn’t mean that the Forgotten Man is necessarily racist or sexist (doesn’t mean that he’s not, either). It means that these are not behaviorally motivating or politically meaningful words to a major sub-population. It means that our language defines and constrains our thoughts and behavior, not the other way around. It means that we ARE our grammar, at least in our lives as social animals. It means that the Confusion of Tongues is not just a quaint Old Testament story with cool Gustave Doré engravings about some apocryphal Tower of Babel.

It is THE political story of this or any other age, and it always leads to a radical restructuring of the political order, because you cannot have a stable political equilibrium where a critical mass of national sub-populations speak different social languages.

But that’s where we are in every Western nation in 2017. The politically ascendant sub-population on the educational mobility track hear the language of the Other and say “Unacceptable people. Must resist. Zero-sum game.” The politically stuck sub-population on the labor mobility track hear the language of the Other and say “Bad hombres. Must fight. Take no prisoners.” The center cannot hold. More accurately, there is no center, no cooperation. Competition is all, and that’s no way to run a country.

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the new political leaders who emerge from a collapse of the Tower of Babel are rarely the champions of the Forgotten Man that you might think would emerge. Both in the 1930s and today, there’s no shortage of non-status quo political entrepreneurs who speak the language of the politically stuck and are willing to put themselves out into the political arena. But to be successful in their political entrepreneurship it’s almost essential that these new candidates be card-carrying members of the 1/10th of 1% Rich Club. Why? Because it requires an insane amount of money and sheer notoriety to replace the machinery of a status quo political party in a mass society. A political party is a media company. By joining a status quo party and toeing that party line, you communicate an enormous set of signals to potential voters for free. But by toeing that party line, you lose your Forgotten Man authenticity and any hope of being the champion of Something Else. Want to be a “change candidate”? Better make a couple of billion dollars first, or have plenty of billionaire friends, so you can afford to bypass the status quo political party.

Little wonder, then, that Donald Trump, a billionaire TV star, succeeds in overthrowing the Republican Party. Little wonder that Emmanuel Macron taps a vast banker network from across Europe to fund his campaign. Little wonder that zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on a nationwide “listening tour”, complete with equal zillions of photo ops — none of which are with educationally mobile symbol manipulators — as he prepares for a political life. Good old-fashioned mustachioed fascism may work in Turkey, but here in the U.S. you need a smiley-face with your Panopticon. Sharing is caring!

So that’s my political take: the old and powerful Tower of Babel process is starting up again, and status quo political institutions are not long for this world. As we move to the Something Else to come, we’ll have to endure a parade of billionaires wielding political power in unprecedented ways, aided by unprecedented technologies of social control. That’s the Big Risk for everyone reading this note, regardless of your politics, regardless of your social language, regardless of your vision of the life well lived. That’s the Big Risk we have to manage, as investors and as citizens.

So how do we do THAT?

For today’s note, I’m focusing on the investor side of that question, and that means focusing on the one Big Question: as the Western status quo political system collapses into Something Else, how is it possible that our capital markets are not similarly gripped by volatility and stress? What is responsible for breaking the transmission mechanism from political risk to market risk?

I’ve got a macro answer and I’ve got a micro answer.

The macro answer is that you need status quo political parties to govern a country effectively. Thankfully, there are only enough billionaire candidates of Something Else to fill the top of the ticket, and even if there were more, a party of independently wealthy and independently popular mavericks isn’t a coherent party at all. There’s not less gridlock with an essentially party-less American president or an essentially party-less French president, there’s MORE gridlock. And that means that any sort of fiscal policy — whether it’s a clear-the-decks debt assignment or a classic stimulus program or whatever — is more difficult under this sort of independent political regime than in a status quo regime.

Sure, there’s a lot of excitement when the Stranger comes to town. Take a look at what happened to the U.S. 10-year bond after Trump was elected.

Source: Bloomberg LP, as of 04/10/17. For illustrative purposes only. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

But excitement fades as fiscal policy promise fades to fiscal policy deadlock. When I look at Washington today, or London or Paris or Rome or wherever, it sure looks for all the world like a return to our regularly scheduled entertainment. Nature abhors a vacuum, and politics is no exception. In the absence of an active and effective fiscal policy authority, global monetary policy authorities will fill the policy void. And what is their policy? Refer to chart 1 at the start of the note, please. Low growth. Financial asset inflation. Low volatility. Wash, rinse, repeat. The new Goldilocks, now eight years old. Could go for another eight years, easy. Wheeee!

Yes, there’s enormous political risk associated with the collapse of status quo political institutions and the rise of the Trumps and the Macrons of the world. But …

for financial markets, these new leaders are familiar, encouraging faces. They’re members of the 1/10th of 1% Rich Club, because they had to be to sidestep status quo political parties. Moreover,

there’s going to be a hope and a promise of fiscal policy initiatives, and that’s a tailwind for markets, too. And finally,

don’t worry, Mr. Market, when that hope and promise of pro-growth policy fades into the realization of anti-growth gridlock, our old friends Janet and Mario will be there to pick up the slack with more liquidity.

That’s my macro story for the divorce of political risk from market risk, and I’m sticking to it. Where does it break down? Not with a funky German or Italian election, but with Janet and Mario declaring victory and taking away the punchbowl. That’s what will bring political risk back to markets.

On the micro side, it’s the triumph of Communication Policy, just as far as the eye can see. I’ve written a lot about Communication Policy in the past, here, here, here, and here. It’s what the Fed calls their use of words and public statements for effect, as a specific policy tool designed to influence investor behavior rather than to communicate truthful information. You know … what we would call lying in other circumstances. As Ben Bernanke said in one of his last speeches as Fed Chair, Communication Policy (“enhanced forward guidance”) has been the star of the show since quantitative easing lost its mojo with the QE2 program. Making up narratives and telling them convincingly has worked for politicians for, oh, several thousand years. I suppose the only surprising thing is that it took central bankers so long to get in on the act. Today it’s their primary shtick.

But now that politicians and central bankers have demonstrated the incredible efficacy of what game theory calls Missionary Statements — the intentional construction of common knowledge through highly mediated statements — everyone wants in on the act. Everyone wants to be a Missionary for their own institutional ends. And that Everyone definitely includes Wall Street.

Here’s what I’ve noticed in the past two major political risk events in Western markets — the Italian referendum on December 5 and the French first round election on April 23. In both cases, the most political risk-impacted equity markets began to rally sharply three or four days BEFORE the vote.

Source: Bloomberg LP, as of 05/03/17. For illustrative purposes only. Past performance is not indicative of how the index will perform in the future.

The index reflects the reinvestment of dividends and income and does not reflect deductions for fees, expenses or taxes. The indices are unmanaged and are not available for direct investment.

The top chart is the European bank equity index before and after the French vote. Below is the price chart of the broad Italian equity index before and after their referendum.

Source: Bloomberg LP, as of 05/03/17. For illustrative purposes only. Past performance is not indicative of how the index will perform in the future. The index reflects the reinvestment of dividends and income and does not reflect deductions for fees, expenses or taxes. The indices are unmanaged and are not available for direct investment.

In both cases the bottom was reached well before the actual event. Why? Because in both cases the sell-side research machine — all the chief economists and chief strategists and acolytes of all the big Wall Street firms — began churning out a flood of Missionary Statements designed to create a positive narrative around a potentially very negative (for markets) political risk event. Ditto with the U.S. election, where the positive narrative around Trump began a full week before the election (see “American Hustle” for the full Narrative Machine description).

I mean, the effort to create a positive narrative out of whole cloth would be comical if it weren’t so seriously impactful. My personal fave on the Wednesday before the French vote was a bulge bracket strategist who shall go nameless, writing to say that a Le Pen victory wouldn’t really be that bad of a thing for markets in general and the banks in particular, because if she won there could well be a massive run on the French banks, which means that Le Pen would have to backtrack on her anti-euro stance to prevent a complete economic collapse. So buy now!

My first reaction to this avalanche of positive Narrative construction was indignation, tinged with a little anger. Give me a break! Markets are getting a little squirrelly going into the vote, and so you’re going to start pumping out this drivel? My reaction was what John Maynard Keynes, who was at least as good a game theorist and investor as he was a macroeconomist, would have called a first level response to a Missionary statement — I’m right and the Missionary is wrong! This is the human, natural response. It’s also a losing response if you want to play the game of markets successfully.

As Keynes explained so smartly with his parable of the Newspaper Beauty Contest, you don’t make money by holding firm to your personal opinion of who’s the prettiest girl or what’s the most attractive stock. You don’t even make money by identifying the consensus view of who’s the prettiest or what’s the right answer to a market question, because all of us are smart enough to be looking for the consensus view. No, you make money by getting ahead of the formation of the consensus view through Missionary statements, even if your personal view is that the Missionary is dead wrong in their assessment of pretty girls or attractive stocks or market outcomes. Would you rather be right or would you rather make money? Back in my younger days I didn’t think there was a conflict between the two. Now I know better. Once the Wall Street Missionaries started their Narrative blitz, it didn’t matter that I believed (and still believe!) that an anti-status quo Italian referendum creates a systemic risk for the European banking system. I wasn’t going to get paid for that view, even if the anti-status quo vote won (it did) and even if I’m objectively correct about the risk (we’ll see). Frustrating? Sure. But in the immortal words of Hyman Roth, this is the business we have chosen.

It’s this micro explanation of the divorce between political risk and market risk that I think will prove to have the most long-lasting impact on investor behavior. You know, I started writing Epsilon Theory because Mario Draghi kicked me in the teeth in the summer of 2012 with the pretty words of his mythical OMT program. I couldn’t believe that mere narrative could be so powerful. But it is. It’s the most powerful thing in the world. Bad enough that politicians have wielded this power for centuries. Worse that Central Bankers have recently proven to be such adepts. Now that Wall Street and the global banking synod have fully embraced the dark narrative arts? Katy bar the door. Even when the androids of Westworld knew it was just a story, they were hard-wired to respond. So are we.

So put it all together and what do we have? As a citizen I’m on high alert. Political volatility is only going to get worse in Westworld. But as an investor my systemic risk antennae are pretty quiet. Is there stuff to do, long and short? Sure, particularly away from Westworld. But until and unless Draghi starts to taper and Yellen looks to hang a recession around the Donald’s neck with beyond-tapering balance sheet reduction, I don’t see how political risk translates into market risk. And even then you’ve got a powerful volatility reducer in the self-interested Narrative creation of every Wall Street Missionary. Will it last forever? Of course not. The Missionaries, both on Wall Street and in Central Banks, are only human. Inevitably they will disappoint us. Let’s just try not to have a gun pointed at our heads when they do.

source http://capitalisthq.com/the-western-status-quo-political-system-is-collapsing-into-something-else/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-western-status-quo-political-system.html

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everettwilkinson · 8 years ago