New Orleans and Different Perspectives

I return from my spring vacation a bit rested and with a few new perspectives on the world.  We went to New Orleans, a city that I visited when I was ten but of which I remembered little.  I also passed through on a mission trip back after Katrina and I can say that at least externally the city has recovered.  I'm not smart enough to know whether all of the other wounds have healed.    In terms of new perspectives, here are a few that I took away from being there.  

We tend to view New Orleans as a southern city and one who's star has been eclipsed by other cities in Dixie.  On more than one occasion I was told down there that New Orleans is perhaps better viewed as the northern most city in the Caribbean basin.  When seen that way a lot of the city's history, beliefs and views of the world make more sense to a northern and  mid-west yankee like me.  The folks in New Orleans are obviously Americans but I think they have much more situational awareness of what goes on in the countries around us than perhaps the rest of us.  New Orleans is home to one of the largest ports in the US so much of their economic livelihood depends on the basin, whether that be for trade, navigation or oil exploration.  Their lives also depend on it because that's where much of the bad weather comes from.

They also have a different perspective on death.  It's much more out in the open down there than anyplace else in the United States.  Tomorrow I'll post some photos I took on one of New Orleans' famed cemetery tours.  

They also have a different view on who's to blame for the debacle that was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  The people I talked to about this down there place almost all of the blame for the poor response after the storm and after the levies broke on the slow, chaotic pace of FEMA and the Federal Government.  Press reports at the time from the north did not mitigate that aspect but also focused on, as they painted it, the almost incompetent response by local officials as Katrina approached and in the early hours after the storm passed.  That view is not the view of the folks I talked to down there.

I bring all this up because we all have different views of the world and that will affect our perspectives on things.  Somewhere in all those perspectives lies the truth.  The investor class came into 2016 perhaps as bearish as I remember seeing it in several years.  This perspective was rewarded with about a 10% decline from December to mid-February.  Parts of the investor class was and remains more bearish than the markets, which rebounded since then to wipe out all those gains.  What happened?  Likely reality.  The world was not as rosy and growth not as strong as investors thought back in the fall, but it also has turned out not to be as bad as the doomsayers predicted.  Now it seems as if sentiment is changing much more for the positive. Some of those folks that were so negative six weeks ago have given up that view.  I would remind all that markets are overbought and while we have seen a nice rally off the lows, we are more or less break-even for the year, have traded back to that level of peak resistance we've repeatedly pointed to in our chart work and have now spent over 16 months trading in place.  That doesn't mean that I necessarily think the markets are now headed back down.  I don't know.  I just think that one needs to be a bit more jaundiced in one's outlook when the perspectives of investors are as blasé and optimistic as we've seemed to become recently.  

Go to New Orleans.  If for nothing else go for the food.  Don't be surprised if you come back with a few new perspectives yourself.