(2017-08-23) Hunt Always Go To The Funeral

Ben Hunt: Always Go To the Funeral. Going to the funeral is part of the social contract we have with our families, our friends, and our tribe, both immediate and extended. It’s part of the social contract we have with ourselves. It’s part of the personal obligation that we have to others, obligation that doesn’t fit neatly or at all into our bizarro world of crystalized self-interest.

Understanding the obligations we share in life and in death is the greatest lesson I’ve learned (and I hope passed on to my girls) from life on the farm. Because our obligations aren’t just to our human tribe, but to our animals, too.

On the investing side, the lesson is that every discretionary investment needs a proper funeral at some point.

On the economics side, the lesson here is that central bankers today are grieving the death of the so-called Great Moderation

there’s another death I want to talk about in this note, one connected with neither investing nor monetary policy. It’s the death of cooperative game-playing in American politics. I wrote a full note about this, too, titled “Virtue Signaling … or Why Clinton is in Trouble”, but after the events of the past two weeks, particularly Charlottesville and its political aftermath, I want to update those thoughts here. ((2016-09-29) Hunt Virtue Signaling Or Why Clinton Is In Trouble)

I’m thoroughly despondent about the calcification, mendacity, and venal corruption that I think four years of Hillary Clinton™ will impose

But I don’t think she can break us, not as a society, anyway.

Donald Trump, on the other hand … I think he breaks us. Maybe he already has. He breaks us because he transforms every game we play as a country — from our domestic social games to our international security games — from a Coordination Game to a Competition Game (Competitive Game).

Case in point: the current “debate” about Confederate war memorials

No one cares about Confederate war memorials.

But frame the issue in terms of “THEY are coming to take your statues away from you”, show some pics of Antifa goons and campus goofballs, and absolutely people are going to care.

If getting rid of the statues is framed as capitulating to these idiots — and that’s exactly the narrative that’s been created — then every elected Republican in the South who wants to stay in office must now come out in favor of keeping the damn statues. They must be seen as opposing the idiot outsiders who are DEMANDING something that no one cared about a month ago, because that’s what it means to play a Competition Game.

what the tweets and the narrative really are — and this is what Steve Bannon understands perfectly — is a dog whistle for the Democrats and an obedience collar for the Republicans. It creates a Competition Game where none existed before, and it forces every elected politician, regardless of party, to play their appointed role,

It’s a political meta-game

What’s happening today isn’t new in theory.

It’s what Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew did with their “Silent Majority” narrative

But what’s happening today is very different in scale for two reasons, I think.

First, it’s different because of the unprecedented effectiveness of the technology and social media systems that drive what I call fiat news — highly political statements constructed and presented as apolitical fact.

Second, it’s different because of the goals of the political entrepreneurs themselves. Richard Nixon was a professional politician. Being president was his lifelong ambition, and he used the Silent Majority narrative as a means to that end. He didn’t want to blow up the System.

once a Cooperation Game becomes a full-blown Competition Game, it never goes back to the way it was before