Happy Sunday everyone.

Before I get into it, my niece sent me the sweetest picture of my great niece and nephew today…

Pure joy.

Onwards…

My friend Ben Hunt wrote another great piece that I wanted to share titled ‘Yeah, It’s Still Water‘ that does a good job of getting the juices going about the financialization.

Here is classic Ben on financialization:

What does Wall Street get out of financialization? A valuation story to sell.
What does management get out of financialization? Stock-based compensation.
What does the Fed get out of financialization? A (very) grateful Wall Street.
What does the White House get out of financialization? Re-election.

In the piece Ben takes a look at the last decade of Texas Instruments to make the case that it has never been a better time in the history of the world to be a senior manager of a publicly traded company.

Ben notices that while we argue and stew over WeWork, Softbank and Adam Neumann that:

My unpopular opinion: the Adam Neumann story is repeated in a non-infuriating and non-obvious way every day in every S&P 500 company. And it’s been going on for a DECADE.

Dimon, Iger, Cook, Nadella, Pichai, Fink … they’re not founders like Gates or Bezos. They’re not investors like Buffett or Dalio. They’re management. And now they’re billionaires. And all their captains and lesser brethren are centimillionaires. And all their lieutenants and subalterns are decamillionaires.

And everyone is perfectly fine with this. No one even notices that this is happening or that it’s different or that it’s a sea change in how we organize wealth in our society. It’s not good or bad or deserved or undeserved. It just IS. This is our Zeitgeist.

It is no wonder that indexing is all the rage, because no sane person can figure out the math in this era of financialiaztion.

As the S&P and Nasdaq close the week at all-time highs, Ben’s analysis is easy to dismiss. I won’t.

I will continue to try and enjoy this era of financialization, because the other side of it is going to be hellish.