Bye Bye Britain

It was another one of those things that no one saw coming. Pollsters and bookmakers alike all said, Don't worry, this will be yet another one of those things that the media gets you all whipped up for only to give you an ending that makes you wonder why you bothered.

Not this time.

After watching the stock market soar all day Thursday, gold drop, if not precipitously, people out there trading "risk on" as they like to say, comfortable with the pollsters and the bookmakers predictions that, by night's end, sensible people would carry the day, sensible meaning the ones who listened to the urgings of Prime Minister David Cameron, the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, the Canadian Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, a "Eurosceptic" going way back, whose leadership as a Remainer was desultory, not exactly passionate, but a Remainer he was said to be, we were told, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the party that was supposed to do better in the last election and, had they, would have had the power, governing as a coalition with Cameron's Tories, to veto David Cameron's election promise to an increasingly loud and unruly faction of his party to hold a referendum, which would have gotten Mr. Cameron of the hook, except that Mr. Cameron did better than he figured he would and thus had to keep his promise and hold a referendum, on whether or not Great Britain would leave the European Union. Within hours of the tally being finalized, with Brexodus coming out on top, Mr. Cameron was standing in front of 10 Downing Street resigning his office, effective soon. According to the Onion, or perhaps it was the Financial Times, he and his wife are going to open a pie shop somewhere in the hinterland, far from the madding crowd.

The U.S.  President Barack Obama also thought Great Britain should remain in the European Union. As did Hillary Clinton and all the smart people advising her. As did the head of the International Monetary Fund, as well as many big hitting investors like George Soros, who, years ago, made a fortune betting against the pound, which, not surprisingly, dropped like a stone on Friday, along with stock markets around the globe, when all the people at The Club—smart, respectable folk, who know what's best—realized they were wrong.

I was at a bar Thursday night taking part in a quiz show when the tide began to turn. Gold went up $80 USD in the two hours I was there as a member of Team Alone and Drunk at the Bar (4th place; we needed my wife there to answer questions related to anything that happened after 1979; also, someone who can recognize Taylor Swift's voice). Earlier in the day my old friend and former guy at Morgan Stanley texted me and said they, the Brits, were going. So there was one. He was right. My gold guy also had a feeling things were going to go to the Brexodus Bunch. He admitted, being a gold guy, that it might be wishful thinking on his part, but it turned out he was right. Jim Rickards, who was educated at the same school as Tim Geithner and appears frequently on Bloomberg and CNBC, was also right. He has been saying for some time that gold will hit $10,000 USD before our current democratic nations of the world zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP) slouching toward negative interest rate policy (NIRP) plays out to that full-stop one finds at the end of the sentence.

I guess we'll see.

Donald Trump, meantime, flew into the Scotland, which voted resoundingly, along with London and Northern Ireland, to remain in the European Union, to check on one of his properties. Perhaps not understanding that Scotland hadn't been in favor of the outcome, perhaps forgetting that Scotland had recently held its own referendum in 2014 to leave not the European Union, but the United Kingdom (it narrowly lost, and might not next time), Mr. Trump praised, in Scotland, Great Britain's brave decision to, as he put it, take back their country. Not surprisingly, not all cheered. An older woman, standing beside a shrugging police officer, held a sign proclaiming: "Trump's a Cunt!"

Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve who was a rock star when stocks were going up and then became a cunt when they suddenly went down, says this, Brexit, is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, who are we to listen to? The kooks, the cranks, the goldbugs and cunts, or the people who tell us to stay the course, to not get sullen and ridiculous, that all will be fine, the cheerleaders who, six months ago, predicted the Fed would raise rates four times in 2016, this despite Europe's malaise, Japan's malaise, the opaque slowdown in China, despite wage-growth being at a 40-year standstill, credit expansion having reached its outer limits, a majority of Americans, marketed to death their entire lives, following the tune, most of them, with no savings at all outside of their still-mortgaged homes and home-related credit lines.

Where is the Back to Normal part of that picture? Being greedy little fucks, most of us, we'd get behind the smart people and imagine that we too might one day be Club Members if more of the spoils were trickling down our way, as it seemed they were for much of the nineties, when Greenspan was God and regular people without a lot of money started to turn into greedy little fucks talking about taking a cash advance on their Visa Card to buy Tyco, or Enron, or WorldCom, or Global Crossing, or any number of soon to be smashed dot.com stocks. Instead of all of us getting laid at the end of Caddyshack, as Rodney Dangerfield had proclaimed, we would all get rich! Instead, it's been more like getting invited to come play poker with the guys who have been playing together for years. Once in a while you get the cards and you win; but for the most part, your money added to the pot just means that the regulars are going to walk with more at the end of the night.

Sooner or later, however painful it is, enough of those who got fleeced wake up to the fact.

And the pitchforks are starting to come out. Not just on the right, but on the left as well. We here in North America are not as imperiled, yet, as our friends in Europe—as we like to say in Colorado: one doesn't have to outrun the bear, just the rest of the people running—and the Brexit vote is not a harbinger of a coming surprise vote for Trump in November. He'll be lucky to get 30%.

But his thirty and Bernie's better than thirty add up to something that isn't likely to bode well for the folks all confident and pleased with themselves at The Club.

And don't count Hillary and the Democrats out when it comes to taking their, The Club's, warm, seemingly sensible advice—the kind that will tell her to pick some middle-of-the-roader like Tim Kaine to be her vice-president, rather than someone like Elizabeth Warren or ... Bernie himself (why not?), the guy out on the left, the Scandinavian-style socialist who no one expected to give her much of a run, who—surprise!—nearly beat her, and has the hearts of more folks than Trump. It's going to be a tough decision for her and her people to decide whether to invite those folks in and risk upsetting Club Members, notably her Goldman peeps, but also, possibly, national security stalwarts, now in, or nearly in, support of her candidacy, guys formerly Republican like Brent Scowcroft—how is Trump going to call her a Loser when she has Brent Scowcroft, one of old man Bush's boys, who flew over to China after the Tiananmen Square slaughter in 1989 to calm things down, assure China, get things back on track for global trade, in her camp?—or go to the comfortable center and assume all those folks who went for Bernie will accept the advice of the smart people and vote Hillary, so they don't get that cunt Donald.

Thursday's Brexit vote might be telling us that what we think, based on what the smart people think, may not be so. And if it is for the moment, it might not be for much longer.