degringolade

Impressionism / Pieter Wenning/ Buddha with two vases

Slept in until 08:00 today. That hasn't happened for a long while. I am in no way complaining. I did a minor pick-up in the kitchen and put the beans in the slow cooker. Now I am reading the news, seeing that nothing of substance has happened in this lovely solstice day.

Will head over to Vantucky later today to do my shopping for the upcoming Saturnalia. It isn't going to be all that hohoho this year. Small presents and hugs are what I have on offer. I am thinking that my big mental celebration will be tonight, when the road to spring starts going downhill.

Screed:

It seems to me that everyone is telling me that everything is fine. Now granted, the Demo's do qualify the statement with "everything is fine as soon as we get rid of Donny-boy". Donny boy is telling us just how good we are doing if the Dems would just get off his back. I am coming to believe that the Republicans would just like to get back to the business of looting the country behind the scenes.

But I sense something out there getting ready to go wrong in a bad way. I have been leery of the American economy since 2008, when the fix was roughly akin to throwing a piece of plywood over the hole in the road and putting up a couple of traffic cones around it.

Nope, I am hoping that I am wrong, but I don't think that 2020 is going to be a year that we will remember fondly. Something large and unfriendly is circling below the lifeboat. I think that it looks hungry.

I am kinda thinking that as a country, we are just trying to keep up appearances. Like your broke uncle who still wears his Rolex and three-piece to the family reunion.

Right now I am looking at the Repo market in treasuries and while doing so I am getting quite nauseous. On has to remember that I bailed out of private industry twelve years ago and became a low-level bureaucrat for the security of the damn thing. I plug away 15% of my income and have a smallish nest egg built up for my retirement. But when one looks at the US treasury market, thing just aren't looking that good. Matter of fact, I think that things look just plain bad. There is 4.5 or so trillion dollars in US Treasuries that will need to be rolled over in 2020. Since The fed monetized over 50% of bonds in the last couple of months, that just doesn't bode well.

I am trying to figure out a way to stay low and ride out what looks to be a bad storm.

Because right now, I can only pray that my string of wrong conclusions and incorrect analysis continues.