America's Lost Luggage

So, the country’s tenuous grip on an economy is slowly being pried away finger by finger and all I can think about is Delta Air Lines. I recently flew with Delta. They left almost an entire plane’s worth of bags at a different airport in a different country. Their promise after much griping from our collected group of disenfranchised passengers was that our bags would arrive at said airport 24 hours later. This was explained with a certain sense of triumph for the efficiency of their problem-solving. Seeing as my wife and I and many of the other passengers would no longer be on dry land in eight hours, it meant we would all be without clean clothes for the next four days. Somewhat paraphrasing Caddyshack’s Ty Webb, or Basho, solutions that have the same result as no solution are not solutions.

I want you to remember this story as a metaphor. When a resolution about the debt ceiling is announced in a few days, which no one will really be happy about. Please think of our lost luggage. When you are told that the the jobless rate jumping up to 10 bps is a good thing because it means more unemployed people are confidently looking for jobs, remember this. And when the CMBS delinquency rate is down 23 bps last month, but we’re told you probably should worry a little bit about that, because it’s not exactly representative of the market, remember my bags.