Motoring Through France – Fat Tail Daily | Australian Markets

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Like a homeless man in search of a half-eaten sandwich, we vary far and broad right now. The declining empire, the magic of marriage, and the approaching stock market collapse – they’re in each dumpster.

“You are no longer two people,” stated the priest at Saint Jean de Malte after he had accomplished the wedding sacrament. “That is the magic of marriage. You are now ‘one flesh.’”

The cross of Malta was on the partitions and within the stained glass. It can be a favourite of America’s Secretary of Defense, both as a result of he sees himself as defending Christendom from the infidels…or as a result of he bought drunk on shore go away and woke up with it tattooed on his chest.

The church was constructed within the 13^th century by the knights Hospitallers, of the Order of Malta. The knights have been fierce troopers. In 1565, a group of 500 of them held off an Ottoman drive of 40,000 as Suleiman the Magnificent tried to take the island of Malta from them. After 4 months and large losses, the Turks gave up and went home.

Sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn’t. In a marriage it tends to work in phases. A pair faces challenges of their connubial life. As they rise to satisfy them, the bond goes stronger.

As our buddy Nassim Taleb would say, the wedding is ‘fragile’ to start with, but it surely turns into ‘anti-fragile’ with time. We noticed many of these older, anti-fragile {couples} among the many vacationers in Aix-en-Provence yesterday. They held palms. Or they merely wandered by means of museums collectively, assured that the partner with which they entered can be the identical one with whom they departed.

A teenager is usually anti-fragile. He doesn’t need no stinkin’ covid shot, for instance. Injuries and colds slide off of him like a child-wipe. Later in life, as an previous man, he turns into as fragile as a teacup. Even climbing out of a bathtub may do him in.

Fragility might be cyclical too. When the stock market is low, unhealthy news is anticipated; it does little injury. But on the prime virtually something could cause a crash…whereas there may be virtually no ‘good news’ that may ship stocks larger. They’ve change into fragile.

And when the feds undertake to guard a fragile market – by chopping rates of interest, for instance – they solely make it more fragile. Markets, like marriages, and youngsters, need challenges. They need setbacks. They need to be taught from adversity. And that which doesn’t kill them, as Nietzsche put it, makes them stronger.

A stock market is more healthy after the money-losing, badly managed, hopeless memes and jokes are washed away, not earlier than.

These ideas have been on our thoughts as we took the highway from Poitiers to Aix-en-Provence. In days passed by, the drive would have taken two days, with many stops in small cities alongside the route.

Those have been the times of ‘motoring’ by means of France, the times earlier than the construction of the community of ‘autoroutes’ that now race visitors all through the nation.

The autoroutes cut by means of principally empty countryside. You could drive at 70mph for hours and probably not see a home, a lodge, or a actual restaurant. Even driving by means of cities, you see little however roofs or concrete abutments. And in the remaining areas, very like these alongside the New Jersey Turnpike, you may get a cup of espresso, snacks and fast food. Not a lot more.

Our buddy, Warren Trabant, had been a photographer for LIFE magazine. He lived in France within the 50s and 60s and loved it when it was in all probability at its best – earlier than it grew to become over-taxed, over-regulated, and over auto-routed. Back then, France reached some form of post-war peak. It had some of the world’s best vehicles – notably the Citroen DS. It additionally had the best eating places (equivalent to Maxim’s in Paris…during which Brigitte Bardot prompted a scandal when entered with naked ft.) France even had a model of the web – the minitel – fifteen years earlier than it was constructed out within the US.

But in 1981, Francois Mitterand was elected. He launched many of the labor guidelines, subsidies and rules that that make doing business in France troublesome and costly. Since then, (though not essentially as a result of of him) many of France’s gifted, nicely-educated and impressive innovators have left the nation. And right now, the French buy their vehicles from Germany, Japan or China. And McDonald’s and KFC franchises are hither and yon.

The freeway system is glossy and trendy. But on the final weekend of the summer time trip, the centralizing visitors backs up. On the highway between Clermont Ferrand and Aix, vehicles have been backed up for what appeared like fifty miles.

France, maybe like America, appears to have change into previous and fragile.

More to come back…