The cockroach theory in Wall Street contends that for every one cockroach you see, there are 100 hidden in the woodwork. We saw four Big Tech cockroaches in this earnings season: Microsoft, Alphabet, Texas Instruments and Meta, which can be classified as a super cockroach. The US recession has not even begun, but the profit recession is definitely upon us. There are none so blind as those who refuse to see and the bullwalas must now act or forever lick their self-licking ice cream cones while their cockroaches emerge by the millions in the twilight zone of the global economy.

My weekend reading was once filled with the sensual literary delights of Tolstoy and Proust, exploring the Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk, the Dublin of James Joyce and the Paris of Papa Hemingway/Scotty. It is now consumed with mountains of equity research, strategy and Bloomberg intel analysis. Yet Boaz Weinstein’s macro views sent a chill up my spine. Boaz is one of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers and his Saba Capital flagship fund is up 31% in 2022, a tad better performance than the stock and bond indices, let alone the structured excreta peddled by private banks in town.

Boaz believes that the combination of high inflation, Europe’s energy shocks, central bank tightening, Fed’s QT horror show and the collapse of the Chinese property market are the prelude to one of history’s longest and most vicious bear markets, akin to the 32-year disaster in Nikkei Dow.