#whereas in long term he's grim in some ways and is a end justifies the means type

[devotion-between-the-wheat]

finally got around to cleaning o.m nigh.tbringer's 17th chapter, and oh it's giving me thoughts about the si + solomon dynamic again.

[recurring-polynya]

Hi Polynya! I’m curious and in the spirit of Ginrei’s birthday, what do you think are his opinions of Rukia and Renji separately and together?

Ha ha, this is such a simple and straightforward question and my answer is going to be so long and so complicated and have almost nothing to do with Rukia and Renji because Ginrei's feelings toward Rukia and Renji have almost nothing to do with Rukia and Renji.

So, I want to start out by saying that Ginrei is a lot like Hisana in the sense that he's a canon character, we get the idea of him and what he's there for, but there's no actual characterization of him, which gives fanfic writers a tremendous amount of leeway to do whatever they want with him. I'm not going to try to justify anything I say here, it's just my ideas and how it goes in my fanfiction. I love it whenever a writer tries to take on the Kuchiki clan and I'm always interested to see what other people's takes are, even when they vary wildly from my own.

I love the fact that "Kuchiki" means "dead tree." We meet Rukia first, and it's sort of a delightfully spoopy name, very appropriate for this salty, overdramatic, grim reaper girl, but it takes on additional meaning when we meet Byakuya, the noble and powerful scion of a dying house.

The thing that makes Ginrei interesting as a character to me is that he is the one who ruled over his house as it fell. I tend to regard filler episodes as semi-canon, so I like the idea of Kouga, even if I don't want to acknowledge the rest of the Zanpakutou Rebellion shenanigans. I think that the main line of the Kuchiki was already running a little thin, Soujun's health was a big concern, and so they marry in this guy who is a scholar and a powerful shinigami. They never say what Kouga's previous social status was, but given that they emphasize what an accomplished dude he is, I think he was chosen for his skills, not his lineage, to strengthen the Kuchiki bloodline, except it backfires. Then Soujun dies, too, a few years later.

Ginrei strikes me as the type of leader who thinks he can control everything. He manages his clan with an iron fist. He is pragmatic, not sentimental. He’s not bad or mean, but he can see that he does not have a lot of room for missteps, and he takes his role very, very seriously. Despite this, he’s lost the generation under him, and all that he has left is Byakuya. There are cousins and branch families, but to the pride of the Kuchiki is its main line, descended from great generals and heroes and the very founders of Soul Society. Byakuya, in a lot of ways, hearkens back to the great Kuchiki of old, and Ginrei sees that he has the potential to reclaim the power and glory of his house. He’s hard on Byakuya and has high expectations for him. Ginrei loved his son and he loves his grandson, but after Soujun’s death, he often wonders if he was too soft on him because of his health, if Soujun would have lived if Ginrei had just expected more of him. Byakuya is the last hope of the Kuchiki and Ginrei knows he can achieve great things, and Ginrei is determined to do everything in his power to make sure Byakuya achieves his full potential.

And some ways, Byakuya is the perfect Kuchiki. He’s strong and he’s hard-working. He’s principled. He’s working on his self-control, and he’s very good at when it comes, to say, sword practice, he’s just not so good at in when it comes to interpersonal relations, but he’s coming along. Then he meets Hisana.

Hisana is absolutely unacceptable to Ginrei. Byakuya needs a marriage with a woman with strong spiritual pressure and a noble lineage so that he can gain some alliances from the marriage and then she can pop out some strapping young heirs while also managing his social life for him, just like Ginrei’s wife did for him. Hisana obviously isn’t going to check any of these boxes.

I headcanon Byakuya as demisexual, in the sense that he doesn’t experience sexual attraction very often, and if he does, it’s only to someone he’s already got strong feelings for. He was sort of okay with the vague idea of marrying someone for the purposes of procreating until he met Hisana and realized how much that would pale in comparison to actually being married to the love of his life.

Up until this point, Byakuya has had some minor rebellions against Ginrei, but they’ve never really gone at it, but this is one time that Byakuya stands firm. Ginrei is super-pissed. He lets Byakuya marry her because he figures she’s going to die soon anyway, but he’s mad about it. He never comes around to Hisana and he’s mean to her and this is really the nadir of Byakuya and Ginrei’s relationship.

Finally, we are getting around to what you asked. Hisana dies and Ginrei softens a little toward Byakuya in his grief. He retires and turns the clan and Squad 6 over to B, hoping it will be a distraction and that Byakuya will finally turn his focus over to what matters. This seems to be going well for about one year and then BAM! Byakuya acquires an orphan.

I am guessing that Ginrei didn’t know about Byakuya’s promise to Hisana to take care of Rukia, but even so, I think if you asked him, he would have regarded Byakuya’s duty to his clan and promise to his parents as more important. It’s not that Ginrei isn’t an honorable man, it’s that his concept of honor doesn’t necessarily extend to a dead peasant in comparison the Noble and Ancient House of Kuchiki. So Byakuya adopts Rukia and Ginrei’s immediate reaction is panic. What is Byakuya doing? Is he going to marry this girl? Is he going to name her his Heir? Has he cracked? And it turns out to be none of those things, he’s just going to keep her around as this sad ghost that haunts his house, but Ginrei’s initial reaction toward Rukia is that of interloper. He thought this Hisana nonsense was overwith, but no, we’re still doing this.

When Ginrei first meets Rukia, she is in her overwhelmed, lonely stage of first becoming a Kuchiki. Ginrei also criticizes her for being small and meek and basically useless. She’s a mediocre shinigami. She’s not beautiful or talented, so Byakuya can’t even marry her off for political gain. The real issue, though is that Rukia is just emblematic of the fact that Byakuya doesn’t intend to move past his grief and remarry. He works his ass off as Captain and Clan Head, but other than that, he’s just gonna be a sad widower and sit in his big house and write letters to his dead wife and the Kuchiki are going to die off. There is really nothing Rukia could do, no way she could be different that Ginrei would approve of, because it was never really about her in the first place.

Fast forward a few years, and now we come to Renji. I also headcanon that in his retirement, Ginrei has moved out to a scenic portion of Rukongai, so he doesn’t interact with Byakuya much on a day-to-day basis, but he hears stuff through other family members that come out to visit him. He’s never actually met Renji, all he knows is that Shirogane retired, and Byakuya hired some tattooed goon from Squad 11 instead of one of the dozens of Kuchiki cousins that are lying around. In my fanfic Call Me Back When the War is Over, Byakuya explains to one of his aunts that the reason he did this was because he didn’t have a relative who was capable of passing the Lieutenant’s Exam. She replies that he just should have pulled some strings so that someone (preferably her own son) could pass, assuming it’s a mere formality. Now this is exactly what Ginrei would have done. This is a problem, though: it involves choosing sides. I’ve got the top seats of Squad 6 set up as follows:

- 3rd Seat Ohno is the Heir to the most powerful Kuchiki branch family. His father is arguably the next in line for Clan Head, based on power terms - 4th Seat Kuchiki Choei is an actual Kuchiki, but he’s a younger son and he’s a clown, meaning that he got bored standing in line for Clan Head and wandered around the corner to vape - 5th Seat Kuchiki Takehiko is the actual closest of Byakuya’s relatives to him, and is arguably the next in line for Clan Head, strictly on family line terms

Pulling strings to help any of these three become the next lieutenant would be a very political move on B’s part, tantamount to anointing his successor. Ginrei assumes that B picked an outsider for the purposes of recusing, of saying “I shall simply refuse to die and remain Clan Head myself, forever’, with the addition fuck you of picking the Actual Worst Person Byakuya Could Find for the job, instead.

This really isn’t the case at all, it is literally that Byakuya feels that you shouldn’t be a lieutenant if you can’t pass the exam. He’s basically a rule-follower, and also it’s a good rule, and also his dad died as a lieutenant and I think he thinks a lot about how that could have been avoided through actions, whereas Ginrei tends to think of it more of a thing that could have been avoided if Soujun was better.

So, that gets us up to the beginning of canon. I am (in theory) working on a fanfic that takes place in the 17-mo timeskip where Ginrei comes to visit and actually gets to know Rukia and Renji and (spoiler alert, but is anyone really surprised) he ends up liking both of them a lot. Part of it is just Ginrei has chilled out somewhat in his retirement and realized that it’s okay to have parts of your life that are not completely devoted to the Good of the Clan. Part of it is that Ginrei loves Competence and Rukia and Renji are so, so competent. Part of it is that Byakuya is obviously doing a lot better than he was, and it’s just really obvious why. Like I said, Ginrei does and always has loved Byakuya, he just wants what’s best for him. It’s just that if there is one thing Kuchiki are terrible at, it’s expressing their love for one another in a positive and healthy way.

As to Ginrei’s feelings about Renruki as a ship, he’s for it, actually. Conniving family members have been trying to marry Rukia for years in hopes of getting an in with Byakuya, and I’m sure they’re setting their sights on Renji, now, too. Ginrei likes them well enough, but he can imagine what a shitshow this could turn out to be, and he finds it very convenient if they were to just marry each other.

I’m rather fond of the idea of Byakuya appointing them as a branch family to the Kuchiki, because I’m not super keen on them going full-Kuchiki if Renji married in, but I think Byakuya would be upset if Rukia married out and he wasn’t able to provide her with the lavish lifestyle he thinks she needs (she does not). It’s a nice compromise that lets them be a part of the family, but out of the limelight. In any case, I think that was Ginrei’s idea, thanks Granddad!

[thegloober]

Ask Me Anything: which trade would shake up the NHL season?

Every NHL season has phases. Late October brings us the almost-justifiable-fan-panic phase. Teams’ sample sizes are small, but they’re just big enough that slow starts might feel like something more than slumps. Many of the (great) questions in this Ask Me Anything Mailbag, the first of the 2018-19 season, concern teams and players struggling out of the gate. Let’s do this!

Disneybound Marty (@martin_14) asks…

Is Connor Hellebuyck going to turn into a goalie who struggles with consistency?

Hey Marty. What’s fascinating about your question is…if there was one thing Hellebuyck did better than pretty much any goalie in the NHL last year, it was play consistent hockey. He posted a save percentage of .911 or better every month en route to his runner-up finish in Vezina Trophy voting. I’ve said it before: of all the players I’ve interviewed, Hellebuyck ranks right up there with the most relaxed, confident and poised. I marvel at his calm. I often say I wish I had what he had. That’s how laid back he is. With his size and mental makeup, he strikes me as a goaltender who will have a long and consistent career.

That said, he hasn’t been at his best to start 2018-19, I know. He got beat on a few stoppable shots against the Toronto Maple Leafs in Wednesday night’s big showdown. Last year, he had great protection from his defense, facing one of the league’s lowest concentrations of high-danger chances at about 15 percent in 5-on-5 play, and that trend has actually continued so far at just 19 percent. Theoretically, since the chances coming Hellebuyck’s way aren’t typically wide-open looks, he should start stopping more of them, and that SP will rise north of its current .907 mark. An eight-game sample size is too small to use as a barometer of what to expect from him this year.

Also, a 2.99 goals-against average and .907 SP don’t necessarily mean what they did even a year ago. Scoring is way up, and save percentage has plummeted with goalies wearing the streamlined chest and shoulder pads. Typically, the numbers smooth out over the course of the season, but for now, the league average of 3.09 goals is the highest in 23 years. Goalies’ average SP has also dropped to .909, the lowest in 10 years. So we should be careful judging Hellebuyck’s numbers against his own from last year. He’s been at least league-average good so far, and we should expect him to improve. He did struggle in 2016-17, for sure, but that was the anomaly in his career going back to his prospect days. He was always projected to be a high-end NHL starter, so I believe the good, consistent version of Hellebuyck is the “real” Hellebuyck.

Russell Hartman (@russellhartman1) asks…

What will be the trade that shakes everything up this season?

Hi Russell. The easiest place to look for shakeup trades is, of course, the pending 2019 UFAs, particularly those playing on teams not expected to make the playoffs. While the Ottawa Senators have started better than anyone predicted, they’re a long-shot to sustain that competency, so we’ll likely see Mark Stone and Matt Duchene dominate the trade rumor mills in the new year. Both would be high-impact additions to contender teams, Duchene for his speed and positional versatility, Stone for his hands and superb two-way play on the right wing.

We have to watch the Blue Jackets closely with pending UFAs Artemi Panarin and Sergei Bobrovsky, too. Sources close to the situation told me shortly before the season started that, regardless of both players’ reported interest in testing the open market, Columbus wanted to hold them all year to push for a Stanley Cup and perhaps convince them to stay. But Bobrovsky’s struggles and periodic benchings early this season certainly spike the odds of him getting moved.

Still, if we’re talking about a league-altering trade that would shock everyone and really shuffle the NHL’s deck…my pick would be a William Nylander deal. Gun to my head, I still think the Leafs get him signed, but we’re down to just five weeks now before he’s ruled ineligible to play in 2018-19. Any team landing him would significantly boost the speed and skill in its attack. The Minnesota Wild and Carolina Hurricanes stand out as teams that could use another scorer up front and have a surplus of good right-shot defensemen. A Leaf lineup with, say, Mathew Dumba or Justin Faulk added to it would look very different.

I’m not saying I believe deals like those will happen – I don’t – but if we’re talking trades that will significantly impact the league, it would be tough to top one involving the RFA Nylander, who would likely sign a long-term extension with his new team. Still, I’d bet on him wearing blue and white in the weeks to come.

Ville Pennanen (@V__pee) asks…

What’s wrong with St. Louis? First they lost Vladimir Tarasenko to scoreless limbo and now Jaden Schwartz and Brayden Schenn. Are the Blues the graveyard for goal-scorers?

Who knew Tarasenko would long for the “run and gun days of Ken Hitchcock,” eh? The Blues are a true head-scratcher, but it seems every season yields a team like this, one predicted to bust out after a summer of flashy moves. The Dallas Stars added Alexander Radulov, Martin Hanzal and Ben Bishop last summer and still missed the playoffs, for instance. The pieces don’t always fit together exactly like they’re supposed to on paper.

Per the outstanding Blues beat writer Jeremy Rutherford, the Blues have the third-fewest points in the league, have won once in five home games and have a head coach in Mike Yeo who openly wondered if his job was in jeopardy after the Blues squandered their third 2-0 lead of the season in a Thursday loss to Columbus. Things look grim, no doubt.

It’s still October, though, so in a situation like this I always like to check first if we can rule out luck as the culprit. Tarasenko and Schwartz, both highly accurate shooters in their career, are converting at career-low rates right now – by a mile. That will obviously normalize. Also good news: both players are getting more shots per game than their career averages, so it’s not like they’re failing to put pucks on net. Theoretically, we should see a goal surge from the Blues’ two most important offensive players, while Schenn is scoring at his normal rate of accuracy and getting more pucks on the net than normal.

The Blues’ best forwards, then, are probably not the problem. It’s the supporting cast, which was supposed to be vastly improved for a team that finished 24th in offense last year. The Blues rank 26th in shot attempts generated per 60 minutes in 5-on-5 play. David Perron and Ryan O’Reilly have contributed, but Patrick Maroon and Tyler Bozak have combined for one goal in nine games. Those two and Alexander Steen have four goals total for $12.5 million of cap space.

That said, being a “graveyard for goal-scorers” isn’t even the real problem. The Blues are 14th in goals. They’re 30th in goals allowed at an even four per game. They allow about seven more shot attempts than they generate at 5-on-5 per 60 minutes. Jake Allen, who gets a million chances to prove he can be St. Louis’ No. 1 goalie, is struggling again with an .876 SP. The Blues allow the eighth-most high-danger chances per 60 minutes as well. Last year, they allowed the fourth fewest. They’ve become a far more porous defensive team. That, not the offense, is the real problem. It’s a legitimate concern.

Ralph wiggumn (@ralph_wiggumn) asks…

Is Vegas this year’s Ottawa, making Max Pacioretty Matt Duchene-West? What’s wrong with Sergei Bobrovsky in Columbus? Favorite X-Man?

Since this is a three-pronged question, you get more of a lightning round of quicker answers, Ralph. I absolutely worry Vegas is this year’s Ottawa, a team rendered overconfident by one year of unexpected success. The Pacioretty trade cost the Golden Knights Nick Suzuki, one of their top three prospects. More worrisome than that deal, however, are the long-term contracts GM George McPhee is tossing around like Halloween candy.

The extension for Pacioretty was one thing, as he’s at least a proven 30-goal threat, but the shiny new deals for Nate Schmidt, Alex Tuch and Shea Theodore involve a lot of projection. Each guy arguably belonged in bridge-contract territory, not lucrative extension territory. If the salary cap stays the same next year, Vegas only has $7.3 million in space with William Karlsson left to sign as an RFA. McPhee is playing a dangerous game blowing all his money for a team that may or may not be able to sustain last year’s effort. It hasn’t so far, but Vegas also does have the league’s lowest PDO, a stat that combines shooting and save percentage to approximate luck. It’s as if the hockey gods are correcting everything they did for Vegas last year.

As for Bobrovsky – there’s some reason to worry. He was bad in the playoffs last year, and he’s struggled to start this year. Like, really struggled. He lapped the field in goals-saved above average last year, whereas he’s second last this year. He probably would be last had Mike Smith not endured an all-out assault from the Pittsburgh Penguins Thursday night.

There’s a decent chance Bobrovsky is a distracted man right now. Not only is he without a contract for next year – a factor that affected Ben Bishop a lot in his ugly final season with the Lightning, remember – but the Jackets are turning to Joonas Korpisalo more than normal so far, including their season opener. It almost feels like posturing, an attempt to show Bobrovsky they don’t need him, which can’t help his confidence. Coach John Tortorella said publicly this week that “Bob has not been Bob.” If he doesn’t find a rhythm soon, we could see a mid-season trade situation arise. Korpisalo’s numbers haven’t been great, but he’s won all three of his starts, indicating the team has played better in front of him than it has in front of Bobrovsky. Coincidence or not?

As for the X-Men: I’m a hairy, 5-foot-9 Canadian. I pretty much am Wolverine already. He was my Halloween costume two years ago, and I barely needed any special effects – my real hair and real beard sufficed. Heart-wrenching backstory, healing powers, general angry badassery…he has it all. Easy pick for me.

Jake Lahut (@JakeLahut) asks…

Obviously the discourse around “tanking” for picks has changed drastically over the past few years, but at what point are the Red Wings doing themselves a disservice by being this bad? Basically, just how bad are the Wings?

I actually disagree with you on this one, Jake. Red Wings fans should be absolutely ecstatic with this start to the season. I understand that seeing a stream struggle this mightily is a foreign feeling for Detroit. The Wings haven’t finished last overall since 1985-86. There are 31-year-old Detroit fans out there who have never experienced a real dark age of half-full buildings and embarrassing blowout defeats. The Wings haven’t picked first overall since tabbing Joe Murphy in 1986 and haven’t even picked in the top five since selecting Keith Primeau third overall in 1990. The current state of affairs has to feel like another planet for Hockeytown.

The 25-year playoff streak was a marvellous feat for a proud franchise, with four Stanley Cup wins baked in, but it became a curse in its later years as GM Ken Holland piled on the expensive veteran contracts for the likes of Justin Abdelkader, Frans Nielsen and Darren Helm, helping the team wheeze along on the bubble, no longer good enough to make the playoffs but not bad enough to bottom out and land some franchise-altering stars.

Well, finally, this team is bad enough. It’s as devoid of talent as any roster in the NHL. It’s weak at every position. We should expect this inept start to become an inept year. And that’s great news. The Wings nabbed arguably a top-three talent sixth overall when Filip Zadina fell to them in the 2018 draft, and they’re trending toward having a lot of lottery balls this June, putting them in the mix for a Jack Hughes or Kaapo Kakko. With the exception of the 2011 Boston Bruins, nine of the past 10 Stanley Cup champions were built on the backs of high first-round picks: Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Drew Doughty, Anze Kopitar, Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom and so on.

When I spoke with Holland near the end of the playoff streak a couple years back, he casually mentioned that the idea of rebuilding was odd to him because he’d never had to do it before. That’s why I preached patience from the fan base. He literally had to learn how to rebuild, having never done it before. Now this team is finally set up to bomb out in the standings. Players and coaches don’t have tanking in their DNA – so the tank is always the GM’s job. He can’t control the on-ice effort, but he control the talent pool of personnel the coach has to choose from. And the pickings are slim for Jeff Blashill.

Tags: columbus blue jackets, detroit red wings, free agency, st. louis blues, toronto maple leafs, trades, vegas golden knights, winnipeg jets

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About the Author

Matt Larkin

Matt Larkin is senior content producer at The Hockey News and has been part of the team since 2011. He’s your one-stop shop for deep-dive player interviews, predictions, statistics, fantasy player rankings, player safety and hair tips. Catch him weekly as host of The Hockey News Live and The Hockey News Podcast.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/ask-me-anything-which-trade-would-shake-up-the-nhl-season/

[giancarlonicoli]

By Tim Price

27 June 2018

MAGAZINE ARTICLE This article first appeared in Issue 39 of Master Investor Magazine. Click here to download the article as a printer-friendly PDF

The US corporate earnings season for Q1 was impressive. The stock market reaction… not so much. Whereas first quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies typically grew by almost 24% year-on-year, Bespoke Investment points out that the average company reporting earnings saw its share price fallby 0.30% on the day of the release. This suggests that investors may now be anticipating an imminent turn in the business cycle. With that may come a downturn for US stocks.

This has already been one of the longest economic expansions in US history. It has also been one of the longest stock market rallies in US history. Notwithstanding the fact that all good things must come to an end, are there other reasons for being at least sceptical about the likely longevity and robustness of further market gains? Well, there’s one giant one, and it’s called the bond market.

The iron law of investing

One iron law in investing is that if interest rates go up, bond prices go down. This is intuitive, to the extent that most bond instruments carry a fixed interest rate – called a coupon – and therefore if deposit and short-term interest rates rise, those fixed coupon payments become relatively less valuable, so bond prices fall to compensate their investors. (The bond market is nothing if not relentlessly logical.)

But the global bond market, of which that of the US is the largest, also dwarfs the value of all listed stock markets, so what happens to bonds (and especially US Treasury bonds) inevitably matters to other asset markets as well. And there is growing evidence that the US bond market has decisively turned.

Monetary policy by the US Federal Reserve – the US central bank – certainly has. The Fed has been raising its monetary policy target rates since 2015. This reverses a secular trend in (declining) interest rates that goes back to the early 1980s, and which has arguably been one of the main drivers of the global bond and equity rallies of the last several decades. Again, all good things must come to an end. But from a behavioural perspective, note that there is now effectively nobody at work in a dealing room who has ever seen western market interest rates rise.Not until now.

The millennial generation may well be in for a shock. The editor of MoneyWeek magazine, Merryn Somerset Webb, recently tweeted a photocopy of a mortgage statement from 1990. The principal sum: £35,000. (Which looks, admittedly, trivial today.) Monthly payment: £447.10. (Which doesn’t.) Initial rate of interest: 14.75% per annum. (Which certainly doesn’t.)

That is not to say that UK mortgage rates are suddenly going to shoot back up into double digits. Rather, investors should be alive to a more insidious prospect – that the primary factor that has driven stock markets higher as a secular trend for over 30 years has now gone into reverse.

The US bond market has noticed. Two-year US Treasury notes, which are acutely sensitive to the direction of policy rates, have seen their yields shoot up from just 0.50% or so, two years ago, to 2.50% or over today. (As bond prices fall, their yields rise.) Much more of this, and the stock market will be forced to respond. It is unlikely to do so in any particularly constructive way. Its main asset competitor – the bond market – has suddenly got dramatically cheaper.

The US earnings season, as already stated, was surprisingly strong. As John Authers for the Financial Times asks:

Just how close are we to the end of the cycle, and how can we know? This question has overshadowed all others in the past few weeks. It explains why stock markets have failed to put in a rally despite historically good earnings in the US. Much hinges on the answer.

With 417 S&P 500 companies now having reported, the picture for the US is unlikely to change much. Even after accounting for tax, the results are very good, and surprisingly so….

To be clear, these were not just good results, but surprisingly good. Wall Street had known about the tax cut for months at the time that it published the final forecasts for the first quarter, and yet the results still came in far better than expected….

Authers speculates that the top of the market cycle could have arrived late in 2017 as President Trump’s tax bill was passed, and US earnings multiples peaked. There is a case that exuberance in the stock market, as demonstrated by high price/earnings (p/e) multiples, put in a high at pretty much exactly the same time as the price of bitcoin did, just before Christmas.

Either way, time, as always, will tell.

House of cards

Other reasons for mild (or not so mild) concern are largely anecdotal. One of them has been the acute focus of market interest in the so-called FAANG family of tech and internet stocks that have driven all else before them. Tesla, admittedly, is not a member of the original FAANGs, but as a high concept glamour stock it is something of a fellow traveller. And in early May we had an object lesson in its owner’s casual disregard for shareholder representation.

Tesla’s Q4 2017 conference call for investors, held on May 3rd, was nothing if not lively. Toni Sacconaghi of the brokerage firm Bernstein had just asked an entirely legitimate question about the company’s capital spending when CEO Elon Musk cut in:

Excuse me. Next. Next. Next. Boring bonehead questions are not cool. Next.

No sooner had another analyst raised a question than Mr Musk interjected again:

We’re going to go to YouTube. Sorry, these questions are so dry. They’re killing me.

The conference call then moved, bizarrely, to some questions from a blogger called Galileo Russell hosted via his YouTube channel.

Unfortunately for Mr Musk, there is a somewhat awkward precedent for his conference call faux pas (which you can listen to, here).

In April 2001, on a conference call for then glamour stock Enron, Richard Grubman of Highfields Capital asked (quite legitimately) why the company was the only financial services business that was unable to provide shareholders with either a balance sheet or a cash flow statement with its earnings. Enron CEO Jeff Skilling replied as follows:

You, you, you… Well, uh… thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Before terminating the call, Skilling made one final vocal outpouring. He called Grubman an a**hole. (You can hear that particular shining gem of public relations here.) Within a matter of months, Enron was bankrupt, and its stock was worthless. Baiting Wall Street analysts may be fun, but it may also highlight that your cash-burning concept business is a house of cards just waiting for its share price to collapse down to its intrinsic value of zero.

But compared to the giant that is the bond market, all tech stocks combined are puny pixies.

The reckoning

One of the reasons our current situation is so precarious is because of that long, effortless bull market in interest rates and inflation. It has conditioned an entire generation of investors, and perhaps more than one, to believe that bonds are safe havens, the perfect complement to a portfolio of otherwise ‘risky’ stocks. But after years of monetary interference from governments and their agents, the central banks, most bond prices have become entirely decoupled from any underlying market reality.

Bonds are, by and large, so outrageously overpriced – and dependent on sustained deflation to justify their current valuations – that they now represent the closest thing we will ever see to return-free risk. This is doubly awkward given the extent to which they form a significant share of the assets held by pension schemes and individual investors. As and when we see a true bond market correction, the outcome for many investors who have outstayed their welcome at the interest rate party will make for a grim reckoning.