MarkFord.net
The open-for-inspection half-way home for my writing…
From AC re my books on marketing:
“I am a college student who wants to break into marketing and advertising, and I am a huge fan of your books. I’ve read five of them. My absolute favorite is Great Leads.”
Editor’s Note: Readers of this blog can order most of Mark’s books – including Great Leads – at a discounted price. Click here.
Rancho Santana in the News
“A Central American Paradise with Surfing, Hiking, and Farm-to-Table Cuisine”
Another positive magazine review of our resort in Nicaragua. After 40 years of earning a living by publishing ideas, it gives me great pleasure to have built something in brick and mortar that gives so much pleasure to so many people. Click here.
What’s Going to Happen?
Joe Biden has stepped aside, which I’ve been predicting (for various reasons) since forever. But what I did not expect was his endorsement of Kamala Harris. The announcement was generally applauded by Big Media, and she received endorsements from many of her Congressional colleagues and commitments from convention delegates before the day was over.
Big Media seems to think that Harris’s nomination is firmly in the bag. So do some of the alternative conservative media. But I’m not sure that matters. As definitive as her position seems to be, there is good reason to believe that things could change between now and the Democratic National Convention in Aug.
So I’m going to make another prediction: that the convention will not be, as it seems likely to be, a rubber stamp of what the delegates are saying now. It will turn into an open convention in which all of them are free to vote for whomever they want.
It’s all a bit complicated, but here’s how it goes…
In the first round of voting:
* Pledged delegates usually have to vote for the candidate they were “awarded to” at the start of the convention.
* Unpledged delegates can vote for any candidate.
* Superdelegates in the Democratic Party cannot vote in the first round of a contested convention. But they can vote in the first round of a convention in which a candidate already has enough delegates through primaries and caucuses to get the nomination.
* In the rare instance that no nominee wins in the first round, the convention is considered “brokered.” The pledged delegates may choose any candidate in later rounds of voting. Superdelegates can also vote in these later rounds.
* Balloting continues until one candidate receives the required majority to win the nomination.
Could this happen in August? I think it can. And I think that if the most powerful Democrats really want to maintain the executive branch for the next four years, they are going to do whatever they can to make it happen.
Here’s why…
Kamala Harris has very little chance of beating Trump on the national stage. Even if she makes a good choice in selecting her VP – a respected politician from a swing state – she has too many weaknesses to overcome Trump’s growing strength.
What are those weaknesses?
Well, for those of you who didn’t believe me when I told you months ago that Biden was too senile to beat Trump (let alone run the country for four more years), you are not going to believe this either.
Harris is just too dumb to compete with Trump. She is ignorant. She is incapable of standing against and defeating Trump – either in debates, on the campaign trail, or even in the Big Media-controlled news.
How do I know? Because ever since she assumed her role as VP, I’ve been watching her perform. Her deficits as a competent leader and a trusted public figure are just as great as Biden’s were. It’s possible that Big Media will try to hide these deficiencies, as they did with Biden, but I’m not sure they will. Despite her blue-ribbon qualifications on the DEI agenda, Big Media knows what the true DNC decision makers know: She doesn’t have what she needs to convincingly answer the questions she will be asked.
And that’s not to mention her public personality. Between the way she presents herself as an entitled soul sister, her embarrassing attempts to portray herself as “of the people,” the well-publicized trouble she has managing her staff, the nonsensical “deep thoughts” she seems insistent on repeating ad nauseam, her complete inability to answer tough questions thoughtfully, and her very unpredictable and inexplicable habit of breaking into cackling laughter at the oddest moments – I don’t see her making a positive impression on undecided voters.
In fact, if she does end up as the Democratic nominee, I think it’s likely she will lose a not insignificant portion of voters that were committed to Biden.
The COPs (Clinton, Obama, and Pelosi) are smart, seasoned politicians. They know that keeping Harris on the ballot is a loser’s hand. Not only is she unlikely to beat Trump on the national stage, it puts the Dems at risk of losing control of the Senate and falling farther behind in the House.
I believe they know that despite the success they had in getting Biden elected in 2020, there is no way they can repeat that success with Harris in 2024.
I first predicted that Biden would step down from the race in Jan. 2023, and I’m predicting now that Kamala Harris will not be the presidential nominee on Aug. 22, the final day of the Democratic National Convention.
This just seems so obvious to me. But maybe there is something I’m missing. Maybe the COPs have a different plan in mind. Maybe they have already given up all hope of maintaining the executive branch and are focusing on bolstering their power in the House and Senate in order to stifle Trump for the next four years and give Gavin Newsom an easy victory in 2028.
I’ve said that I thought Gavin Newsom could beat Trump (especially if he could persuade Michelle Obama to be his running mate). But he recently made a decision that would make it nearly impossible for him to win the country in 2024.
I’m talking about his signing into law a statute that grants the state control over the lives of its citizens’ children. It makes it a crime for any California grammar or high school, public or private, or any teacher in such a school, to notify the parents if their children have said that they are claiming a new gender.
The California school system will continue to mandate classes in gender fluidity for prepubescent children and teens, and will pay for in-school counseling of children who are wondering if the bodies they were “assigned at birth” are not really who they are. But now the state has mandated that all this will go on behind the backs of the parents, with legal consequences, including jail time, for any employee of the school that lets the parents know what sort of possibly life-altering process their child is going through.
If you get your news from the NYT, The Washington Post, or Corporate Media, you have probably heard nothing about this legislation. And if you are inclined to trust the information you get from those sources, you may be inclined to shrug it off as another example of conservatives making a scary mountain out of a perfectly nice little molehill. But most of the rest of the population doesn’t see it that way. A sizeable percentage of voters will see it as downright evil. And my guess is that many of those who are fully supportive of the right to identify one’s gender as one wishes will not support the idea that, when it comes to their own children, they should have nothing to say about it.
So this decision by Newsom was a serious political mistake that could take him out of the running now as a replacement for Kamala Harris. It makes him an easy target for Trump and the Republican Party. They would portray him convincingly as an ideological extremist. And if he tried to defend himself with obscurities and falsehoods, as he’s already been doing since the law was enacted, it wouldn’t help.
If it seems like I’m happy about Biden dropping out and Harris stepping in, you are mistaken. I would much rather see Trump take the victory in the 2024 election. But Trump is in several important ways just as bad as Biden has been. Another four years of Trump in office will result in trillions more dollars of debt for the US, which is already over $33 trillion – an amount that will eventually cause the US dollar to lose its position as the world’s most trusted currency and will make the US, and all its citizens, much, much poorer.
I’ll end with this clip from R.F. Kennedy Jr. – who is running for president too (with only 4% of the population behind him) – explaining what America needs, desperately right now, to get healthy again.
I’m Not Gloating, but…
You heard it here first (and again and again). For more than a year, I’ve been predicting that Biden would drop out of the 2024 presidential race in order to allow someone with a better chance of defeating Trump to take over. I predicted that it would happen sometime between Thanksgiving of 2023 and the new year to give his replacement time to build momentum – but despite increasing pressure, he refused to do it.
It’s already past my deadline to post today’s issue, so I won’t say anything more right now about Biden’s decision to step down. But tomorrow, I will tell you why I thought it was inevitable so long ago, and what I think is going to happen next.
Worth Quoting
“Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.” – Sydney J. Harris
One Final Thought on Japan? Hardly!
Today, I want to dig into one of a half-dozen thoughts that have stuck with me since coming back from this trip. Thoughts that I’m pretty sure will lend shape to Wealth Culture, the book I’m writing about why some countries and cultures are indisputably much better than others at achieving certain goals.
So, picture this…
I’m in Japan, and it’s 11:00 at night. I’m on my way somewhere, on foot, approaching an intersection completely devoid of moving vehicles. And nearly devoid of people, except for one middle-aged Japanese businessman (I can see that he wears a blue suit), stopped ahead of me at the red light, waiting to cross this narrow, noiseless, utterly unoccupied two-lane road.
He knows, as I do after being in this city for only a few days, that the traffic lights don’t change quickly. If they stay red for a full minute before turning green, you are lucky. Most stay red for what seems like an eternity.
What I want to do, as I near this patient man, is walk quickly past him to cross the street and continue on my journey. But as the distance between us shortens, my resolve disintegrates. When I finally arrive at the corner, I stop and stand next to him. And the two of us stay there like programmed automatons for the next 90 seconds.
I can think of a few plausible explanations for his behavior – much having to do with the respect for order and compliance that is so much a part of Japanese culture. But how can I explain my decision to stop and honor the electronic signal? Never, in the US, would I NOT just jaywalk to the other side.
Before I give you my not-yet-baked theory, I should admit that this very same situation happened to me once before, years ago, late at night, at an entirely deserted crossroad. But that was in Bonn, Germany. And that time, I did hesitate for a moment at the red light, standing next to the only other person visible in that part of the city. But several seconds later, I came to my senses and jaywalked on my way.
I’ve been thinking about why I ignored the red light in Germany and respected it in Japan. The superficial circumstances were the same. But there was a difference. And that difference speaks volumes about Japanese culture, and why I think it is the best and possibly the most enduring national culture that exists today.
Chart of the Week: Small Caps Rebound?
I’m halfway through a piece I’m writing on what I’m calling “the state of the US economy.” I’m looking at it from the perspective of what I see happening among my friends and acquaintances – those that have small companies (with revenues of less than $500 million) and those in the real estate business as well as the luxury goods and fine art markets. The outlook, as you will see when the piece is published, is not positive. But history tells us that the ups and downs of the stock market are not always corelated to the economy, including the market for low cap stocks, as Sean explains in his column this week. – MF
Individual stocks typically swing up and down with unpredictable caprice.
But in aggregate, when you divide them up into industries or sort them by factors, stocks do seem to obey the simple physics of a pendulum swing.
We’re seeing that right now with small cap stocks. That is, shares of smaller companies with market capitalization of between $250 million and $1 billion.
While the major stock indices like the S&P 500 and Dow recovered from the 2022 bear market, small cap stocks, like those in the Russell 2000 (the purple line in the chart above), did not.
And that’s despite the fact that, historically, small caps tend to offer better long-term returns than the market overall.
Forbes, in June, even pointed to this as evidence of “extreme divergence” in the stock market, which can be an early sign of a faltering market.
The wealth management firm Pathstone points out that small caps had “their worst first half of the year compared to the S&P 500 on record. As interest rates have remained higher for longer, earnings for smaller and less growth-oriented businesses have been more heavily impacted.”
However, we’ve finally seen this start to change with the Russell 2000’s 3-year returns finally breaking positive. Even though the rate of corporate bankruptcies has been high and rising since 2023 as the cost of debt has exploded.
This raises an important question: Why? What’s leading small cap stocks higher?
Surprisingly enough, the answer is small regional banks, which have just spiked in a big way over the last few weeks.
Small regional banks have dragged down the performance of small cap indices since (1) interest rates spiked and the yield curve inverted, (2) the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic Bank, Heartland Tri-State Bank, and Citizens Bank in 2023, and (3) Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s assertion that “There will be bank failures” caused by exposure to commercial real estate loans.
But now that interest rate decreases are increasingly likely and the yield curve is looking just slightly less inverted compared to where it was at the start of the year, the future prospects for smaller banks are looking a little brighter.
Does that mean one should rush out to buy small caps or regional bank stocks right now?
No. The time to do that was December 2023, when these stocks were still cheap, hated, and at the beginning of an uptrend. And with all the other potential problems facing small banks right now, we don’t yet know if this growth is sustainable.
But if we take this data and combine it with the recent selloff in large growth stocks, we seem to be at the beginning of a big “churn” in the markets.
Money is on the move.
And I think this is foreshadowing quite a bit of volatility in August and September.
I have my trailing stops set for some of my positions that I don’t want to hold forever. I’m also amassing a war chest of cash and bonds to take advantage of any big opportunities that come up in the coming months.
I suggest you consider doing the same. Stay safe out there.
– Sean MacIntyre
Check out Sean’s YouTube channel here.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
By Ernest Hemingway
Originally published in 1940
480 pages
After reading The Hemingway Stories, the collection I reviewed on May 13, I pulled an old copy of For Whom the Bells Tolls from my home library, read it over the weekend, and was not the least bit disappointed.
I know a few smart people that don’t like Hemingway. One of them restricts his reading to non-fiction books and considers fiction largely a waste of his time. When I convinced him to read a Hemingway novel a decade ago, he complained that he found Hemingway’s style “irritating.”
An otherwise well-read woman friend says she doesn’t like Hemingway’s fiction because it is too “macho.” She equates his machismo to an aspect of toxic masculinity – i.e., talking endlessly about things (such as fishing and hunting and bullfighting) that are, from her perspective, “irrelevant and superficial.”
On the one hand, I am perfectly happy to excuse their Hemingway-phobia as a case of each-to-his-own. On the other hand, I secretly believe there is something missing in their literary sensibility that is worthy of condemnation or pity.
But never mind. I’m recommending For Whom the Bell Tolls to everyone that either enjoys Hemingway or is undecided because they have never read him.
The Plot
For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of Robert Jordan, an antifascist American volunteer fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It is based on Hemingway’s experiences as a reporter during that war for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
What I Liked About It
What I always like in Hemingway. His prose style, which includes his unique way of composing sentences and paragraphs. His characters and their development. The way he establishes the mise-en-scene. The precision of his diction, the detail of his descriptions, his discipline of showing not telling, and the way he is able to put the reader into the action as a sort of invisible eavesdropper. I even like the way Hemingway makes dialog spoken in Spanish sound foreign by using antiquated English adjectives and pronouns.
What I Didn’t Like
As with all my favorite novelists – C. Dickens, M. Twain, J. Austen, W. Cather, Dostoevsky, V. Nabokov, G. Orwell, J. Conrad, F.S. Fitzgerald, D. Hammer, E. Waugh, R. Chandler, R.P. Warren, J. Steinbeck, G. Greene, and M. Amis, to name more than you wanted to hear – there is really nothing in Hemingway’s writing that I don’t like. (And I have a much longer list of novelists I like very much, but with reservations.)
Critical Reception
“If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.”
Widely considered to be one of the best war novels of all time, the Pulitzer Prize committee for letters unanimously recommended For Whom the Bell Tolls be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1941. The Pulitzer board agreed. However, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and ex officio head of the board at that time, found the novel offensive and persuaded the board to reverse its determination. As a result, no Pulitzer was given in that category that year.
Five Quick Bites
* Interesting. One of the things I was writing about while I was in Japan is how incredibly efficient the Japanese are. Here’s a perfect example: an airport that hasn’t lost a single piece of luggage in 30 years.
* Fun and Interesting. In the heart of Paris, there’s a new museum – the Musee du Fromage – dedicated to the ages-old craft of cheesemaking in France. Visitors can learn about the history of cheesemaking, see cheese made, talk to real cheesemakers, and, yes, taste the cheese. Click here.
* Fun. 16 animals with delightfully obvious names. Click here.
* Fun? Has social media expanded the number of oddball things people do for fun and entertainment, or has it simply exposed how many crazy things people have been doing? Here’s an event that apparently amuses some people greatly – running trucks off the side of a cliff. And here’s another one (considerably more benign) – the Annual Coopers Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake in Gloucester, England.
* Fun and Interesting. Ten of the most creative TV commercials you’ll ever see. Click here.
A Musical Puzzle
I played the French horn for three years. And I won second place in a music festival of some kind when I was about nine years old. Therefore, I was very disappointed that I didn’t ace this quiz. In fact, I was right on only 16 out of 20.
From RS re “Lessons Learned” in the July 19 issue:
“Happy to report that I’ve been doing my shoelaces right. What unnerved me about the video is that he holds his first loop in his right hand instead of his left, so maybe he’s left-handed?”
My Response: Good question. As a right-hander, it took me a few weeks to adjust my coordination to tie the new knot. It was worth the effort.
From PN:
“I just read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of success: ‘To laugh often and much; to win the respect of the intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.’
“As I read this, I thought that you check all of the boxes. I am certain Ralph would agree.”
