weekend notes

Hope all goes well. I haven’t had a proper vacation for yrs. Sometimes you just need to be told to take a break. We get another mth or two like this and ya know, Frankfurt, Paris, London, and DC politicos may shut mkts for a little time-out. I got my beach chair dusted off, reading list picked out – just in case. Overall: Hey bro, keep your head down. Kaboom! Oooh, there goes another one. Ka

Hope all goes well. What a freakin’ circus. Spotlights swung wildly. Skinny little Obama, shouldering a $15trln economy, stood frozen high on the wire, looking right, left, but mostly down. Far below, Bernanke frantically inflated his leaky whoopee cushion (not a single trampoline remains). Some Fed clowns threw dung at Ben’s promise of 0% rates though mid-2013 (7-3 vote, most contentious since 19

Hope all goes well. Snuck up to our family homestead in NorCal. It’s a farm. The kinda place you go to chill when things are real good, or hole-up when things get real bad. Tempting as it is to stock it with shot-guns, Jack Daniels and baked beans, we’re pretty calm. No one ever built a fortune by succumbing to panic. But no doubt, gears of change are in motion, exciting times lay ahead, big oppor

Hope all goes well. I woke in a sweat. 4am. Nightmare. Happens sometimes. Won’t bore you with details; basically, I’m afraid of time. Granddad dropped at 53. That gives me 9 more yrs. Got so much left to do. But at least July moved real slow. Felt like I lived a lifetime – France, Switz, Chamonix, Seqouia Forest, Euro crisis, US crisis. Overall: See the news? You musta. Jihadists clashed wit

Hope all goes well. Yeah, camping was great. Thanks for asking. Below freezing at night, food/fuel shortages, over-populated shanties, no running water, crying children with filthy faces. Old-school family bonding. We may head to Pyongyang for Christmas vacation. I refuse to have soft kids. Overall: Damn bro. What a ride, a white knuckler. Things almost changed. We narrowly avoided a paradigm shif

Hope all goes well. I’m off camping. Mara, 4 kids, a dog and a tent. Be back next week with full weekend notes. Week in Review: Mon: EU contagion hits Italy – 2y +70bps (2008 levels), Norwegian Jun CPI -0.4%, S&P -1.8%; Tue: BoJ unch since Dec08, India IP softer, UK Core CPI lowest of the year, Moody’s dngrds Ireland to Junk, Fed Mins as expected, S&P -0.4%; Wed: Mkt interprets

Hope all goes well. I made a big mistake. Asked the funniest guy I know (old college buddy) to write this week’s w/e notes in my absence. He didn’t give me quite what I’d hoped. Tore me to pieces. Just brutal. Should have known better. But I live life by lots of rules. And one is, never take anything too seriously (particularly yourself). Another is, if something’s really f

Hope all goes well. Summertime. Off to Paris, Zurich, Geneva, Chamonix. Bringing Mara, Jackson, Olivia. The Karamazov brothers are tagging along too, we go way back. In Mont Blanc’s shadow my old climbing partner and I will watch our kiddies hop from boulder to boulder. We’ll recall our adventures, near misses – hoping they’ll someday share that kind of bond, explore the edge, survive, Live. You w

Overall: A Mon rally on China’s FX flexibility failed miserably, setting a “sell-rallies” tone for wk. Ozzy presented an austere looking budget — said the right things. Japan’s Kan pledged to cap spending for 3yrs, the German cuts thru ’14 look to be 80bln Euros. Austrians in; Keynes out. Soros warns Germany leading EU down deflationary funnel (The Economist, Krugman and his ilk agree). US h