Hello, folks. I’m back. From now on, you can follow my musings on that which annoys, amuses and confounds me here in CrunchedEverything. I look forward to continuing to engage with my readership. Please don’t be shy about telling me that I am ill-informed analytically weak, or just plain silly.
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It’s Golden Turkey Awards Time, Folks!
Our Turkeys are a little late this year but hey, we’ve been busy worrying about the collapse of the world’s economy. This is the 10th edition of our Turkeys and much thanks to our disorderly, often dysfunctional, regularly inscrutable and absurd government, polity and marketplace for continuing to
Welcome, dear reader, to our annual Golden Turkey Awards. But for my commitment to absolute fairness and concern over the appearance of impropriety, I would have awarded the first Golden Turkey Award to Dechert for actually getting the Golden Turkey Awards done this year. What a crazy year end. The market is insane.
On the other hand, while time is short, there’s plenty to bloviate about. I remember last year we were absolutely ready for the end of the Trump administration because the Biden administration promised a “dull is cool” vibe. Well, dull has been a failure. The farrago of lingering Covid, a return to something which is clearly not normalcy, but something new and with a pond full of black swans flopping around, it is not dull. So, how’s that working out for you? The follies of 2021 at least make writing this column easier. So, we went digging for inanity for the purpose of making gentle fun of things that broadly annoy us and, shockingly, we found things to talk about. So, here we are once again.Continue Reading 2021 Golden Turkeys
So, once again, time for Dechert’s acclaimed (at least by us) Annual Golden Turkey Awards. It is rather a difficult time for comedy; we are in the throes of a completely unfunny pandemic. Sitting down to finalize this year’s list gave me some sympathy for our late-night talk show hosts who are very publicly pining over the end of the Trump administration and trying to find humor in the anticipated Biden administration, where the watchword is “dull is cool.” But perhaps looking for inanity and making gentle fun of it might even be more important in tough times than good. So, with that in mind, we went digging for gems in 2020. Nothing seems quite so risible as in past years, but here’s the best of a bad lot:Continue Reading 2020 Golden Turkey Awards
As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we award our Golden Turkey Awards. Once again, I must say that we are utterly blessed with so many worthy candidates. The truly deserving have once again wrangled with vision and astounding persistence to earn a spot on our acclaimed list. To
It’s that time again for Dechert’s CrunchedCredit Annual Golden Turkey Awards. In a year made most remarkable by the extraordinary performance of the US economy, idiocy, silliness, pigheadedness and stupidity have tended to be somewhat obscured by the economic good news machine. At the other end of the spectrum, the continued high volume of outrage over almost everything from both the left and right (and I’m sure the middle would do their fair share here if there was anyone at home) makes it harder to suss out the truly memorable and award-winning, but it’s our job to try. As we have said in the past, this would be really hard if the world actually behaved in a predictable, rational, Newtonian universe sort of way, but blessedly it does not.Continue Reading 2018 Golden Turkey Awards
As we look back each November to bestow the year’s crop of Golden Turkeys to the silliest and most annoying instances of regulatory overreach, legislative inanity, governmental misfeasance or the mere idiotic behavior of people without any help from the government apparatchiki, there’s always a glorious excess of candidates. This whole commentary thing would be really hard if the world made sense and behaved in a predictable, rational, Newtonian universe sort of way, but blessedly it does not.
So, as we get ready for the season of cheer, the season of desperate efforts to close yet one more deal and the nice calculation of bonuses, and before we imbibe too much good food and drink to be at all disciplined, here is our list for 2017:
Continue Reading CrunchedCredit.com’s 8th Annual Golden Turkey Awards
As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we present our Golden Turkey Awards. In a year of monumentally bad surprises, we truly had difficulty narrowing our list down to only the exceptionally worthy candidates. Voters, governments and regulators sent shockwaves throughout the world in 2016, upending markets and throwing much of what we thought we knew into the proverbial dumpster fire of society. If what we know now we knew when we last gave the Golden Turkey Awards, we may have taken a pass on 2016. It can’t get any worse, right? As we get ready to step into the unknown of 2017, here is our list for 2016:
Continue Reading CrunchedCredit.com’s 7th Annual Golden Turkey Awards
As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we award our Golden Turkey Awards. Once again, I must say that we are blessed, blessed with so many worthy candidates. Our government, our courts, the regulatory estate both here and in Europe and around the world and the political class in general have once again vied with verve and imagination and breathtaking persistence to win a spot on our acclaimed list. For those of you who we must disappoint, please accept our heartfelt apologies. Yes, you screwed up and did stupid things breathtakingly well, just not as well as this year’s winners.
Continue Reading CrunchedCredit.com’s 6th Annual Golden Turkey Awards
This is our fifth annual Golden Turkey Awards at CrunchedCredit. It just gets easier and easier. There are simply so many worthy contenders for an award this year. You know, we don’t stop and take a moment often enough to just say thank you to our government and its enormous regulatory apparatus for being such a reliable source of material for us. We read in awe at the breathtaking nonsense often emanating from our elected panjandrums and their regulatory cohorts and enabling self-appointed policy elites. I’m so appreciative of the studied, surely serious, perhaps well meaning, ham handed and ultimately self-defeating efforts of our government to micromanage economic outcomes. We here at CrunchedCredit spend a fair amount of time talking to the aforesaid. The poverty of understanding about how financial markets work is really stunning. You have to admire the willingness of our government, marinated in hubris, to weigh in, chest out and chin high on so many issues above their intellectual fighting weight. So let me take this moment to just say thanks.
But, of course, what makes our life as card-carrying members of the commentariat good, makes the life of those trying to actually conduct business in this regulatory free fire zone excruciatingly difficult. Our job is calling B.S., sussing out the inanity, stripping away the syntactic chaff behind or within which much regulatory product is hidden and trying to provide some helpful guidance about how to deal with this increasingly complex world along the way. Not to diminish that getting our fiscal and monetary policy right is a deadly serious business, but we can’t help but find some humor in all this.
So, here it is – our Golden Turkey Awards for 2014.Continue Reading CrunchedCredit.com’s 5th Annual Golden Turkey Awards