December 22nd Edition

Good Morning All,

As there appears to be a veritable dearth of earth shaking news to report or comment upon at the moment, I will only seek to remind you of the obvious and the understated. This is the beginning of the holiday season and the end of the tax loss selling that accompanies year end. In 28 years of writing this letter in one form or another, I do not believe I have ever either quoted or paraphrased the present Queen of England. Now, as so many others have likely noted, may be the time to do so, as this past year has surely topped all others in recent times as being the true annus horribilus. Yet, as many on the Obama team have stated, "we must not waste this opportunity to bring change" and I would humbly suggest that this national goal of the future President become both that of the world and of ourselves.

Permit me to once again iterate the following; market indexes have traded 40 to 50 % off their highs of either early 2008 in the case of Canada or October 2007 most everywhere else. Commodity prices from metals to energy to food have fallen much farther. The financial, and thereby the currency world is in turmoil while the physical world is less safe than it was eight years ago. So by the numbers, all of the above are definitivly cheaper and therefore better buys than they were 40 or 70 per cent higher. There are of course remaining pitfalls and potential failures and yes, just maybe the expectations lent to the incoming administration are wildly inflated. But just maybe they are not.

I have often thought that 1968 was a pivotal year in 20th century history with the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King being crucial to the rebirth of Richard Nixon. The Nixon effect was a powerful one and it did not end with Watergate because his legacy went on to include, not just the tragedy of Vietnam but the advancement of the careers of Rumsfeld, Cheney and George Bush the Elder without whom there would have been no George the younger. The Ford pardon of tricky Dick also had far more important and long lasting effects than first thought for it essentially led to excesses of the outgoing administration whose members have always felt protected from prosecution or even impeachment by this rule of precedent and during the next few weeks we are likely to see much evidence to support this arguement.

Sometime ago I wrote of an interesting way of regarding the passage of time by comparing times past to the present in terms of their relativity. This is sometimes known as the farther now nearer then phenomena and since everyone is talking and thinking depression, let's do the math. Choosing our pivotal year of 1968, first think of where you were, if you were a were at the time, and subtract 38 years.....ta dah the start of the Great Depression. Now flash forward to our present circumstance and note that we are 40 years from the outset of the Nixon era. You can have fun or fear in doing this with a lot of stuff, but for history buffs such as I, it does seem to bring some perspective to life and to its brevity.

Happy Holidays to all.