Everything Is Broken
Broken Credit
Broken Retirement
Broken Stocks
Broken Data
Broken Unemployment System
Puerto Rico, Vaccines, and Some Good News
Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds
—Bob Dylan, “Everything is Broken” from the album Oh Mercy, 1989
I was on a client call earlier this week with Steve Blumenthal. The gentleman is at that stage in life where he needs cash income and not risk. Steve commented, “The bond market is broken.”
And indeed, the traditional fixed income bond market is broken, thanks to the Fed. We were able to suggest some alternatives (they are out there) that could help solve his problem.
But it got me to thinking… What else is broken? And the more I thought, the more I realized that the data that we use every day, the very systems that we are forced to work with, are indeed in various stages of being broken.
There is a great scene in the fabulous movie The Princess Bride where the criminal “mastermind” Vizzini keeps uttering the word “inconceivable.” After the nth time, Inigo Montoya turns to him and says, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
Today we are going to look at data from the standpoint of Inigo Montoya. I don’t think that data means what you think it means. Indeed, much of the data in the way we use it is simply broken.
(In a few weeks, I will do a letter on things that aren’t broken, which are in fact incredible. I am an optimist, but I’m also realistic. I am “long” on the human experiment. Government? Not so much…)
Our economic and financial systems are badly broken in multiple ways. Some of the cracks are enormous, maybe beyond anyone’s ability to repair. Step one is admitting they are broken.
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