Caroline Ritchie
Skin kissed tarmac this week. First proper bike crash to draw blood.
I thought my front carbon wheel had snapped, seeing dollar signs as I hit the deck. But no, it was only Miss Ritchie, cranking herself over the bars when the chain jumped off hitting a bump.
It was the last thing I was expecting. When you are having the time of your life, chasing triathlon blokes around the countryside, getting smashed up is always the last thing on your mind. You are too busy having fun.
And holy teaspoons, we are having fun on equity markets, aren't we?
Every day when I wake up, seemingly unable to resist, despite telling everyone else to, I check the markets.
I look at them in the middle of the night, too, and while cycling, reading, eating, jogging and talking to my mother on the phone.
Now, each morning, before I throw back the covers and launch myself at Hawke's Bay, I see green.
It is everywhere as markets shoot up on their new drug. How much more can it take?
Well, as I get ever-fonder of saying, nobody knows. The truth is that no gal can tell the future. But in the short term, oh boy. The man in charge is sending out a cast iron signal that he's gonna spend the coin, wedge open that Capitol Hill wallet and spray the subway walls with greenbacks.
Stocks like that, a lot. It hits all the market's dopamine buttons at once.
Telling the world's largest economy you are going to throw heaps of money around gets investment advisers very excited indeed. (Not sure about the 99.99 per cent rest of the population).
You may be (quite rightly) wondering exactly where all this magical folding stuff is going to come from. Well, they're going to borrow it. This isn't the party line, of course; saying you are going to kick a loaded can further down the road rather than come up with any intelligent ideas of your own is never a popular position, but that is how it is going to turn out.
The public has a short memory, right? And if you still live and breathe in a land where your fiat currency is the effective global reserve, why wouldn't you? As Mr Alan Greenspan (KBE, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006) said "The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default".
So you can understand why markets are having such a good time.
The current Federal Reserve is also extremely hesitant (don't even GET ME STARTED about these reasons) to raise interest rates. So, what you now have is a metaphorical teenager, prone to showoff-ery, who has been handed a rather large unlimited credit card with an unusually low penalty rate.
With every speech, he runs it through that giant cash register in the sky: swipe, swipe, swipe. Ring it all up, dude! This sends stock prices wild with delight. It is, as we call it back here in the provinces, sitting at our wooden desks with our pencil sharpeners, old school, a bubble.
The kind that may pop, without warning, just as you are starting to enjoy yourself.
*Caroline Ritchie is a former AFA, sharebroker & portfolio manager. She runs Investment Stuff, a sharemarket based investment coaching service. Visit her at www.investmentstuff.co.nz This column is not personalised financial advice.