Less Bad is Good until Less Good is Bad or as Barnum would opine...Snap!... you've been had

'Hit the engine
but she ain't turnin'.
We're the same sad story
that's a fact
One step up and two steps back.'
-Bruce Springsteen

'Better read it first, for if one drinks much from a bottle marked "Poison", it's almost certain to disagree with one sooner or later.'
-Alice

'Like strength is felt from hope and from despair.'
-Homer (not Simpson folks!)

'If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.'
- Thomas Pynchon

'The Black Swan is a sucker's problem.'
-Nassim Taleb

Addition through subtraction is a solution that ignores the problem.

Let's increase the 'inflation target', let's increase the 'optimal unemployment rate', let's increase the first-time unemployment claims threshold that, hope upon hope, represents underlying job growth...

Anything that falls under 'less bad is good' becomes leading, anything that falls under 'less good is bad' becomes lagging; tis easy to ignore the fleas on the dog if all you trumpet is the hopeful wagging.

Once upon a time, a nationally known smartypants on an island told me that THEY would keep the bulls and bears off balance as THEY went from room to room in the burning building putting out fires.

Truth that.

That is what the code word 'trading range' really means.

Analysts opining that we all will be 'surprised by the market's strength' is code for the Federales winning, i.e., these folks are embracing the tragedy.

Analysts that suggest a 'crash is inevitable' are pining for reason before farce.

Vice before virtue, farce before reason, the question vexing? Duck or Rabbit Season?

The answer both ... in due time.

Hobbes first law of nature is that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.

The dollar is the bullet, the Fed is the weapon. The key to the gun cabinet is for Members Only.

At this point at the end of the trend - 2009 low besting the 2002 low breaking a line of lower lows from 1897 up- our prosperity is now in the hands of Fleck's battle of unarmed combatants (currencies) where the U.S. is the dealer (reserve), at least for the near term.

We speak of a mild outcome to all this, a new normal, as we stuff the pig on the scale of fate. We are so far down the rabbit hole Alice, so arse over tit, that it is quite plausible that the power law being applied here is masquerading mild as wild as well as its' converse.

What if the mild prognostication is deflation or hyperinflation with either A cascading to B or B cascading to A?

What if the Black Swan is just, hope upon hope, muddling through?