The Funniest Article You’ve Ever Read About Bon Jovi And The Everything Bubble

“Yeah, it was like, even though Bubbles was Bubbles, he was two people at the same time as bein’ Bubbles. He was trying to be this other person that wasn’t Bubbles, but he was still Bubbles.” – Trailer Park Boys

What was Schrödinger’s favorite Bon Jovi song? Wanted Dead or Alive.

Euphoria. The name even sounds good. It comes from the Greek “Eu” meaning “quite slippery and frictionless” and the Greek “phoros” which means “wet”. A direct translation is “Slippery When Wet,” as noted by the great Italian philosopher, Giovanni Bongiovi.

If you’ve ever been to a college party you’ve seen the application of euphoria over common sense, especially in the hours between 11 P.M. and 1 A.M. It’s at that time that the liquor has hit several partygoers like a Canadian baboon on a yak crotch. They have ambition. They have a limitless lack of common sense.

There is no tomorrow! Party on!

And euphoria has had several pleasant outcomes: more than one happy accident of a child has turned up nine months after the euphoria ended. Let’s face it – if every child was planned, there’d be six or so people living in the United States.

Justin Trudeau’s parents decided they don’t want kids anymore. Who is going to tell Justin?

Euphoria has even allowed people to exceed what they themselves ever thought possible. When throwing common sense to the wind, sometimes the outer limits of human performance are defined – we find out what it is that we can really do.

More often than not? We end up flat on our faces. That can be its own victory, but it’s often part of a longer story.

The real interesting part is when euphoria meets money. That’s when we get stupid, and we start convincing ourselves of crazy things.

The biggest crazy thing of my life was the Dotcom Bubble. That was amazing. Companies were formed in days and then ended up being “worth” ten million dollars a week later, without ever producing a product. Heck, it wasn’t just producing a product – they didn’t even know what product they were going to produce.

Spanish coders like to use Si++.

Several of my friends were caught up in the front end of one Dotcom venture. They were flown to a kickoff party. The band at the kickoff party? Hall and Oates®. Sure, Hall and Oates™ were 20 years past their prime, but, still, the kickoff was for the idea of installing some fiber optic cables.

It wasn’t even that large of a project. I’m not sure if they ever built any fiber optics. But when I asked if I could be at the party my boss said, “I can’t go for that.” (Sorry jokes aside, they really did hire Hall and Oates© for the party.)

How much oat could Hall and Oates haul if Hall and Oates hauled oats?

Another friend sold his website for a total of $50,000,000. The website was making a profit – about $1,000 a month. Of course, the kicker was that he sold his website for $50,000,000 in Alta-Vista® stock that he couldn’t sell for a year.

Oops.

Don’t cry for him – he didn’t have enough money to retire, but he had enough that he took three years off to hike and relax.

Euphoria makes people do crazy things.

The second crazy thing that happened in my life was the Housing Bubble. When I was looking for one loan, I was told that I qualified to borrow ten times my annual income.

“Why would you offer me that kind of money? I could never pay it back.”

The Loan Officer responded, “Yeah, I know, but you qualify for it. So the computer tells me I have to offer it to you.”

We all know how well that ended.

Thankfully they allowed me to finish the “Alan Parsons Project” I was working on.

Through this, Citigroup® has maintained a panic/euphoria model. The idea is that there is a way to measure what investors think about the market. Are they panicked? Or are they as giddy as drunken freshmen at their first college kegger.

If investors are skittish, the idea is that stocks are a bargain. People are afraid of stocks and would be happy to sell them to you. It’s the idea of buying when blood is in the street.

But if investors are euphoric, then the prices for things are too high. How high? Double-digit high.

Looks like party central!

Right now, Citigroup’s® panic/euphoria model is flashing “Slippery When Wet and Three Tequila Shooters.” It’s higher than the Dotcom® Bubble. It’s much higher than the excesses of the Housing Bubble.

It’s the Everything Bubble. And investors are still three sheets to the wind, knee-walking, too-loud singing, drunk.

This makes sense, too. Presidents love to pop the bubble in the first year of their first term. It’s not like people will remember the pain three years from now, if they’re able to manage growth and restart the economy. Besides, you can blame the pain on the last guy.

I guess he swallowed a few on that “steel horse” he rides.

There is ample incentive for Biden to crater the market. There is ample incentive for him to crater employment, too. In both of those things, he can restart the clock and claim growth from worst that 2021 or 2022 brings to us.

If we’re lucky, all we get is a hangover. I don’t think anyone wants this baby.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

27 thoughts on “The Funniest Article You’ve Ever Read About Bon Jovi And The Everything Bubble”

  1. I don’t think most people understand how crazy the mortgage crisis was. We were loaning anyone any amount if they could fog a mirror. I had one woman come in to look at her options and her current mortgage was sort of interest only but the catch was her minimum monthly payment was less than the interest that accrued so each month her principal balance was going up. When the bottom fell out, people were stunned to find out that they were multiple six figures underwater on their mortgage.

    1. We knew it was time to hurriedly get out of the SoCal market when they were offering 125% mortgages and house prices were higher than what dual professional incomes could afford. We technically got out 4yr early.

      Amazing the idiots of the Fed still claim the whole housing bubble blindsided them. And yet we could see the mess 4 years before it hit. Of course the Fed is made up of all Keynesians that refuse to see it is a corrupt system.

    2. Dad (he was looking for me) found me a condo that was within walking distance of work during the mortgage…thing.
      It was a foreclosure but it seemed to be a decent buy at the time, so of course I had to “pre-qualify”.
      I was given a number I “qualified” for, and it was the entirety of my pre-tax income.
      I asked the lady about that (am I going to save the dust bunnies for supper?) and she said “well, that’s just what you qualify for. You got a second income, right?”
      Nope, just me myself and I, I’m not married.
      At the time I wasn’t paying as much attention but it raised even my notice.
      And a few years later the crash happened.
      Its funny though, hearing folk on the right blame people for taking loans, well the banks then sold them as toxic investments knowing that Bob and Jed, when the “variable rate mortgage” went up, would be defaulting.

  3. We bought our previous house the day the banks failed. The first bank didn’t show up at morning closing, because they went under over night. We had a second bank lined up, and closure scheduled for the afternoon. That bank went under around noon. We had a third bank lined up, just in case. They showed up to the evening closure. They went under and got bought out that night.

    Our house lost 75% of its value within 30 days of us purchasing it. We sold it 12 years later for 75% of what we paid for it. But our kids grew up in a stable home in a good neighborhood, with decent schools in walking distance. (And deer, and bears, and the occasional cougar to chase off the coyotes.)

    1. That’s what we went for as well, Mr. McChuck. But creeping crud from the cities is getting closer and closer. We had a good community, but between the Narrative and immigration it’s being swallowed up. People who can leave to consolidate with family elsewhere are doing so…

      I was forced to up roots and travel ‘cross country every few years growing up, but I thought I’d found the place that made my heart sing. It brought me neighbors and a (local) husband and a child.

      And it’s all being systematically corrupted.

      I know God is good, and in the end, we win; they lose. But still…

      (And if you want to know what it looks like, visit Churchi)

    2. Yup. And losing money on a house (like we would here at Casa Wilder if we sold) can happen. And that’s not a bad thing.

  4. Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but I think the key trend is that in 2008 people couldn’t afford to stay in the houses they had managed to get in (particularly due to ARMs), and that in 2021 they can’t afford to get into a house in the first place because they just don’t have the income to chase the year-after-year rising house prices. The main problem is Fed money printing and the associated general asset price inflation from their continuing ridiculous chase of “2% overall inflation rate” when it is already MUCH higher in key areas like housing.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trapped-another-housing-bubble-rapid-050108615.html

    https://wolfstreet.com/2021/01/26/most-splendid-housing-bubbles-in-america-dollar-purchasing-power-swoons-january-update-house-price-inflation/

  5. I guess people like the nasty old uncle. He keeps saying: “Here, pull my finger.” and people keeping falling for the joke.

  6. Change is the only constant in life.

    Can’t tell you how often I’ve ignored that hard fact, most often to my detriment. We always want to keep the party going, but all things, good and bad, invariably end. In curmudgeonly middle age, I’ve become the patriarchal wet blanket of the family, forever butting in and harshing everyone’s mellow with my cautionary tales of woe. “If it looks too good to be true, it is,” would be a fitting epitaph for all those euphoric party-goers who get caught sans pantalon when the bubble bursts.

    If there is a word in the lexicon any more reprehensible and overused than ‘deserve’ (as in, “I deserve this indefensible self-indulgence, because reasons”) it is ‘should’. Yes, of course, everything should work and nothing should ever slip sideways/run off the rails/go t!ts up. But everything has to go somewhere, and were it not for ‘up’ where would all those t!ts go?

    Perhaps Porky Pine knew best when he quipped, “Don’t take life so serious, son…it ain’t nohow permanent.”

    1. Can and might
      And could- and should-have
      Never work
      And never will.
      They’ll bind your hands
      And shut your will down:
      Self-pity’s vinegar
      Distill

    2. I agree 100%

      Deserve was not a word any of my children could ever use growing up without a five minute lecture.

      Horrible word.

  7. I remember the 2000 dust-up quite well. I had a manager two levels above me tell me that he needed to break out of the company 401-k because none of the mutual funds offered enough “zip”. I had been following some of the funds. One of them, Fidelity Aggressive Growth had racked up 105% gain in the previous 12 months. Totally unheard of.

    “Whadday mean? Doubling your money in a year isn’t enough?” Apparently not.

    A few months later my boss told me that he had “broken out” of the company 401-k and invested roughly $120K in individual stocks. Of the three stocks, two no longer existed and the third was down to $14k and was still dropping like a rock.

    The markets are doing crazy, crazy things and I have a BAD feeling about how the next 12 months will play out.

    All that said, I still have about 35% of my portfolio invested in US equities.

    1. I have a friend who has a trusted advisor that has been rolling him out of things as they mature. No panic, but rolling out.

      “This is not a time to get into the market.”

      (And I am NOT a financial advisor.)

  8. I am not sure Beijing Biden can afford to pop the bubble. The pension funds would not be able to pay their obligations. The drop will have a real impact on the real economy. The tax receipts will drop. Corporations with high debt will not be able to pay their debts. Tesla would have went tits up long ago without the stock pump. Tesla shares outstanding for the quarter ending December 31, 2020 were 1.124B, a 27.01% increase year-over-year. (I believe that is split adjusted).

    Certainly the kleptocrats will inform their sponsors before pricking the bubble. Or maybe that will be the prick. What will all the CEO’s with millions in stock option think about their boy hitting them in the pocket book? Where will the sponsors put their money? Likely in assets held in foreign currency … USD flight will drop the value of the dollar.

    Kleptocrats got us in quite the precarious situation. Interest rates cannot be allowed to rise or the debt interest cannot be funded. If the dollar falls too fast, foreigners and US money interests will unload their dollars. Look back what foreign powers said/did when the dollar dropped after the great financial crisis. They concluded that the Eurodollar/petro-dollar system had to go. Nobody wants to price their goods in a weak dollar. If the petro-dollar system collapses we will get hyper-inflation. Recall what the German citizens said during the Weimar inflation. They thought prices were going up. They had no idea that what was happening is the currency was going down. I personally think we may already be in hyper-inflation. The dollar is just pumping up asset prices and when the time comes the money changers will exchange out their dollars for a foreign currency. In Weimar Germany the money changers got wealthy.

    All we have to offer for the oil, metals, medications, electrical components, etc is the USD. We don’t have the industrial capacity to actually make something that we could provide the world in exchange for what they have to offer.

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