Putting out something outstanding is difficult for most people. When it comes to sell-side strategists, the burden of having to be both rigorous and some semblance of articulate is usually too much and when you throw in time constraints, you’ve got a recipe for notes that are bland, that state the obvious, or worse, both.
True, there are some folks who do manage to deliver outstanding analysis, but you only hear from those folks every so often. The time between notes is likely at least in part attributable to the fact that for mere mortals, putting together something that’s all at once eloquent, accurate, and relevant takes a while. That’s why you only hear from Citi’s Matt King about once every quarter (or at least that’s what it seems like). And that’s maybe why Albert Edwards’ “weekly” missives aren’t actually “weekly” (of course Albert has probably earned all that time he spends “warming his weary bones” on the beaches of Barbados).
But again, those are mortals we’re talking about. Deutsche Bank’s Aleksandar Kocic, on the other hand, is somehow able to paint the sellside note equivalent of the Girl with a Pearl Earring on a weekly basis (Kocic may not be a Vermeer fan, but you get the idea – we’re talking about masterpieces).
Friday is no exception and indeed, this week’s missive finds Kocic revisiting several of his previous notes, including our personal favorite, the “Fourth Wall” analogy for the interaction between markets and central banks.
The gist of what you’ll read below is that the reflexivity “problem” (and that assumes you think it’s a “problem”) may have made this whole thing inextricable. We may, at this juncture, be stuck in what Kocic calls “a permanent state of exception” in which the goal posts are constantly moved in order to ensure that the battle is never won.
