The Morning Line

Anyone who has played around with ChatGPT knows that it is just dumb enough to succeed wildly. It harbors no opinions, grudges or wit, and it can talk a blue streak without saying anything interesting or exceptionable. This kind of artificial intelligence seems perfectly suited to mimicking the rote tasks that lawyers charge clients hundreds or even thousands of dollars an hour to perform.  And not just churning out boilerplate, either. Put a voice-activated bot in a courtroom and, without a mote of prejudice, it will prosecute or defend whoever is in the docket by drawing on the entire, vast library of U.S. jurisprudence. Will we even need judges to decide cases or instruct juries when machine intelligence can split hairs of precedent down to inarguable singularity? These thoughts occurred to me as I reviewed a lawyer letter for which I had paid a South Florida attorney $1,000.  He made a novel argument concerning why I would be suing the officers of a particular company personally rather than corporately. Their lawyer responded with two thousand words that said, basically, you can't do that, and here's why.  These shysters would still be slinging legalese at each other for $450 an hour if I hadn't pulled the plug on my guy.  I'd paid him $2500 as a retainer; his invoice -- including time spent tallying up the bill! -- was for $2469. A coincidence, I'm sure. The invoice was stamped 'Paid in full', but I had to remind him that he still owed me the $31 difference. Small wonder that lawyer jokes are so vicious:  What's brown and black and looks good on a lawyer? A Doberman. The ABA's Turf There can be no doubt that a lawyerly version of ChatGPT will soon enable litigants to cut to the chase, and for

Well, they finally indicted the proverbial ham sandwich last week, adding to our long list of worries that the world really is falling apart. It’s as good a time as any to trot out William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming as a reminder of where things are headed. This is arguably the most powerful poem in the English language, so let your imagination run free as you read it: The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Opinions differed as to what the criminal indictment of our former president might mean politically. For The New York Piece of Shit Times, it was “a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.” The Zapruder Awakening For fully half of the nation’s voters, however, the Manhattan grand jury’s decision to charge Trump with paying hush money to a former mistress was just more Theatre of the Absurd from the same people who would have us believe Hunter Biden was framed. But there were no allegations of Russian disinformation this time, so perhaps the nation is making progress, however tiny, toward restoring civility and sanity to public discourse. Both last obtained until the early 1960s, before the Zapruder film raised questions about who killed JFK. ​For better or worse, the stock market’s wildly erratic brand of sanity held constant last week as shares rallied strongly into simultaneous threats of global war, a run on regional banks, a drag-queen putsch in the nation’s cafetoriums, and an increasingly woke military leadership

When I refer to Fed chairman Powell or to the Fed governors, collectively, as morons, I'm not suggesting that readers take this characterization literally. Indeed, most of them have IQs that are probably twice the 51-70 range that would categorize a person clinically as a moron. (It is only when casting aspersions on politicians, some of whom demonstrate persuasively and often that their IQs are in the 26-50 range, that the term "imbecile" may be construed literally.) To give economists their due -- even economists like Powell and 'Easy Al' Greenspan, who were elevated to positions of leadership by, mostly, political imbeciles -- the men (and woman: Janet Yellen ) who inventively script U.S. monetary policy are intelligent and well-schooled. It is only when they attempt to bend their knowledge toward the running of the economy that we see clear evidence of impaired thinking. How else to characterize the moronic idea that the more we borrow, the richer we become? And yet, so devoted are economists to this crackpot scheme that they would set it aside only temporarily when it appears to beckon disaster. They tighten, that is, only to set up the next phase of easing. This has been the Fed's MO since the central bank was created in 1913 as an instrument financiers could use to steal from the rest of us without detection. The ruse has succeeded to a degree that even the greediest of them may never have imagined, but at the cost of creating increasingly devastating boom-and-bust economic cycles over the last hundred years. We're All Bozos We are all complicit, to be sure, since the Fed is able to 'manage our expectations' only because tens of millions of Americans think and act like economic morons. For instance, we borrow against inflated home values to

To pivot, or not to pivot? That is the question Fed Chairman Powell will have pondered over the weekend while tending chicken breasts, franks and burgers spaced meticulously on the grating of a 148,000 BTU grill. If conscience doth indeed make cowards of us all, we might expect him to act boldly. But how? Does he risk gutting the American Dream for a generation or longer by staying the course? Recall that his last utterance, on March 7, implied not merely that credit tightening would continue, but that it would accelerate. The stock market reacted like a concertgoer sitting in the middle of a row who has just felt the first gurgle of food poisoning in his bowels. Sellers panicked with spasms that quickened as the week wore on, and it was fully five days before fears appeared to recede. Investors opened their air locks last Monday and cautiously drew a lungful of what they hoped would be oxygen. It was, with just enough helium to make the broad averages frolicsome at times, if not quite giddy. One could almost forget that the U.S. economy is in shambles as some of the biggest multinational companies continue to scale back growth and axe workers by the tens of thousands. Biden’s tax proposal threatened to beggar what remains of America’s middle class; the nation’s military preparedness was being exported to Ukraine; and our three worst enemies -- China, Russia and Iran -- were making nice to each other.  Although GDP growth was officially reported most recently at around 3%, pundits were unofficially speaking of recession as though it were an entrenched reality, not merely a threat. The Haymaker If the picture were not already grim enough, the haymaker came last weekend with the failure of two large banks that cater to tech

[This week's commentary was written by  David J. Isham a longtime subscriber to Rick's Picks. A real estate investor and trader, David lives with his family in Marin County.] For Americans eager to embrace socialism, China's take on the so-called 15-minute city will warm your hearts. As an urban planning concept, the 15-minute city aims to put all of the usual neighborhood amenities within easy walking distance: grocery stores, parks, urgent care centers, banks, movie theaters, etc. Sounds like a great idea, right?  However, in the Peoples Republic of China, the government has been adding a digital innovation that Chairman Mao would have loved: scanners that require one to submit a QR code in order to move around. If you live in one of the newly wired cities and have criticized government policy on social media, or you haven’t received your latest booster shot, your impaired social credit score will prevent you from leaving your neighborhood zone. Could it happen in the U.S.? Arguably, the idea had a test run when many Americans and their elected leaders clamored for vaccination passports and all kinds of access restrictions for the un-jabbed.  Fortunately, the former never came to pass and the latter did not spread into the American heartland. However, if implementing a social credit system were to be placed on a national ballot, does anyone doubt that it would garner almost as many votes as Biden supposedly received in the 2020 election?  Tune in to the discussion at @songpinganq on Twitter if you want a glimpse of what you may someday be up against. Seeking Out Good Neighbors Although a grim future is not set in stone, I've thought about a time when my children might not be allowed to work, to attend college or even enter a grocery store without

Americans grew effortlessly richer last week when a two-day rally in stocks and bonds added many hundreds of billions of instantly spendable dollars to the economy. Most of it would have dropped into the hands of traders, speculators and portfolio managers. However, enough will trickle down to sales reps at Bijan, Dolce & Gabbana and Bulgari that the big-ticket binge eventually will turn up as GDP growth.  AAPL, a Bellagio fountain of liquid wealth, added perhaps $90 billion all by itself when it rose 3.5% on Friday. Not too shabby, considering the rally stemmed almost entirely from short-covering rather than bullish buying. How do we know this? Simply because the fleeting, shallow pullbacks the entire way up evinced the mini mood-swings, from hopefulness to despair to capitulation, that bears exhibit when things are not going their way. Glimpsed on the intraday chart above, the rhythms of the water-drip torture they endured for two days are as distinctive and ominous as atrial fibrillation on an EKG tape. AAPL's rally was more decapitation than torture, with at least 80% of it occurring in the first hour on gossamer volume.   Exhaustion Spike   We continue to view the uptrend as a bear-market fake, implying it is incapable of achieving new all-time highs. But it could get close enough to scare the hell out of bears, and that's exactly what it will do if they continue to fight it. Such battles tend to end with an exhaustion spike, followed by a headline reaction to the downside. The sudden revival of the bear market begun in January 2022 promises to be a doozy. Although Papa Bear's initial phase, which lasted ten months, lopped 22% from the value of the Dow Industrials, it lacked the climactic selling that would have signaled that the worst was

Uranium investments topped the list of exciting takeaways from the Mines & Money conference held in Miami last week. Keynote speaker Chris Temple, editor of The National Investor, dispelled nagging doubts about atomic power's future when he noted that Greta 'How-dare-you!' Thunberg has been distancing herself from fellow activists who remain vociferously opposed to nuclear energy. She may be an insufferable scold, but there is no denying that she is also a top global influencer of environmentalists. Try Googling just 'Greta' if you need to be convinced; it is not fellow Swede Garbo whose biography pops up. Thunberg has very publicly urged Germany not to decommission its few remaining reactors this year as planned. She is hardly alone in having recognized belatedly that nuclear power is the only economically viable alternative to carbon-based fuels. With the Fukushima disaster of 2011 receding from memory, Japan and South Korea have finally seen the light, joining the U.S, U.K., Belgium, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and others in their growing appetite for reactor-based power. Two Growth Pathways Look for the nuclear industry's growth to unfold mainly along two pathways created by 1) burgeoning demand from industrialized nations for large power stations in the 1000-gigawatt category; and 2) correspondingly robust demand from hundreds of cities and communities for small, modular N-plants that can recycle radioactive fuel pellets. John Borchoff,  managing director of a company called Deep Yellow [OTC: DYLLD] that is focused on Namibian ore, sees his firm as particularly well positioned to benefit from these trends. As demand for uranium grows, he says, buyers will seek out the biggest, most reliable producers to meet their needs. Smaller miners will get bought up by the relative handful of companies capable of delivering at least two million pounds of uranium per year. Deep Yellow is

Get AAPL right and you get the stock market right. That has been our mantra for years, and it has never failed us. Apple shares and the broad averages are unlikely to go their separate ways because so many portfolio managers regard the stock as they do their Patek Phillippe wristwatches: something to pass on to the next generation.  Even the Sage of Omaha, who reportedly moved back into AAPL in a big way recently, seems to have a jones for the company. So what is AAPL saying now?  Fix your eyes on the chart above and it’s easy to imagine the steep, 25% rally since January reversing when it hits the trendline. That's the way picture-perfect channels are supposed to work. The resistance will come in at around 167 this week, a daunting 16 points shy of early 2022's summit at 183. Suspect the Obvious However, any time a chart speaks so clearly, alarm bells should go off. For what looks like a simple picture is often more devious and complex than a three-way showdown in a spaghetti western. Were it otherwise, every chartist would retire rich at 40.  So whenever we look at a graph that seems to spell everything out for us, realize that the stock is calculating how to screw everyone.  In this case there would appear to be three distinctly different possibilities: 1) the rally fails right here or perhaps somewhat above, giving way to the ruinous implosion of a $2.5 trillion company; 2) heedless buyers impale the trendline within the next month or so , launching AAPL into the firmament; or 3) the stock wanders in the desert for 40 years, or at least until no trader cares about the channel any longer. A bullish outcome or even a lengthy period of indecision seem

Only on Wall Street is fake news celebrated with such shameless hubris as we've seen lately. In the last few weeks, flouting a torrent of lousy earnings reports, investors have gorged themselves on stocks.  This resurgence, doomed by recession and a grim outlook for earnings, was strongly supported by fake, or at least meaningless, employment data showing strong payroll growth. Never mind that most of the newly re-employed were waitresses, shoe store clerks and cruise-ship saxophonists who got laid off during the pandemic. Now they'll be able to pay the rent again with their own money rather than with taxpayer handouts -- a modest gain that economists, Biden and his remaining few stalwarts would herald as evidence of boom times. Let's not dwell in the meantime on the fact that high-paying tech jobs have been shrinking at a disturbing rate -- by 32,000 in just the last month. None of this was even faintly on Biden's mind, such as it is, when he served up a State of the Union address last week telling us why it is once again Morning in America. In reality, U.S. data alleging 3% GDP growth in the last two quarters conflicts sharply with widespread perceptions that the economy remains mired in a recession begun early last year. The eggheads are so deeply in denial about this that they have returned to laughable speculation about whether America can 'avoid' recession. Signs of Decline But no matter how many jobs are added, and however inflated the stock market and real estate become, the things that determine our standard of living will continue to erode or disappear, just as they've been doing since the 1970s. Who doubts, for one, that the day is coming when the last department store closes its doors, leaving us to do most