Divisions. Divisions. Divisions. Divisions.

They’re everywhere and they’re deeper than ever.

Such are the times.

It was like this when the civil rights movement reached fever pitch in the 1960s.In and around that same time frame Cubans experienced similar divisions as they debated the disparity between rich and poor then after Castro toppled Batista, started a new debate about whether Castro wasn’t what the country needed after all (and Ed Sullivan welcomed him onto his live television stage as Americans cheered). Not long after that, the Cuban missile crisis had the entire nation biting its nails about the prospective annihilation of the entire human species because that same man applauded on American live television had made a home for Soviet nukes in the Western hemisphere aimed at the entire U.S. Eastern Seaboard.

In all these cases of deep division, which eventually extended to the Vietnam War, to the emergence of rock music, long hair, LSD and pot smoking, to the availability of birth control, and a hundred other things, what eventually became apparent was that debate and discussion lost their usefulness. The divisions were too deep. Opposing sides had become too entrenched. Persuasive arguments no longer mattered.Nobody making those arguments was listening to anyone else’s arguments. Only the divisions, not understanding or compromise grew.

This kind of division dynamic can happen in loud and boisterous and dramatic environments like the ones above, or it can happen in subtler and more treacherous environments too. And for their lack of visibility, the latter may be worse. Like the black ice, we don’t see until the car we’re driving slides off the bridge. It all depends on your vantage point. What you see, that is. And if you’re standing in the spot from which visibility of something is occluded, you’re not going to see it until that occlusion is removed, no matter how eloquent the argument, how bright the light.

In reviewing Sofia Coppola’s wonderful film about the times leading up to the French Revolution with Kirstin Dunst portraying Marie Antoinette, this was the one point that got across. She was the focus of hate to be sure, but it doesn’t take much sympathy to realize that she wasn’t deliberately trying to cause suffering among the French people. She was totally unaware of that suffering. The song “Girls Just WannaHave Fun” comes to mind. Indeed, in the waning moments of that film, she becomes aware of the masses gathered in the front yard of Versailles and comes to the window to observe the sea of lighted torches with a look on her face as if to say “Why are they so upset? I want to understand. How can we help?” Not a scintilla of  “What did we do wrong? ”When somebody told her about the bread riots, and she responded with “Let them eat cake,” it wasn’t a put-down. She really didn’t have a clue.

The divisions were so deep that debate didn’t and wouldn’t have mattered. The vision was too fundamentally occluded by the embedded point of view. But the learning experience by which Me. Antoinette was to travel from total ignorance to fully informed at light speed was but moments away, delivered in the form of a sharp blade traveling towards the nape of her neck at 9.8m/sec².

The problem, of course, was that as effective as this learning technique may have been, at the exact moment the lesson was at last learned, the capacity to make use of the newfound knowledge was, alas, simultaneously rendered moot.

I think we have reached a similar inflection point in financial history where the divisions are so deep that neither side’s vocabulary nor powers of persuasion will prove sufficient to convince their respective opposers of their positions. Again, division and entrenchment reign so supreme that it’s the point of view making each side unable to see the position of the other. And I’m also pretty sure there will be a culmination much like the learning curve Marie Antoinette finally managed to climb but then was, to coin a phrase, all dressed up and no place to go.

The bulls and bears are out there and they are very divided, very entrenched and very unable to see the other side’s point of view but they almost always say they do see the other side’s point of view before then promptly ridiculing/trashing/dismissing it and reasserting whatever their position is.

What I think is most remarkable at the present time is the depth of the division and each side’s conviction, and I also think that is worthy in itself of more discussion than it gets, as opposed to which side is right.And here’s why I think that’s true: people are riled up.All over the globe. Whether economic, financial, geopolitical, cultural, social, technological or any other category, just about everything is in a state of vehemence. Nothing is laid back or calm. Everything is dynamic, even in places known for “being the same as they always were.”Like Iceland, for example. Iceland was always a calm and collected place of enduring peace and prosperity where the nature of both the country and its citizens was consistently happy and stable. But now it is in the throes of change, and the people of Iceland are experiencing levels of uncertainty in their lives not known for a very long time. They were crushed by the mortgage meltdown of 2007-2009, and the country is not even a financial center. The repercussions of this have been reverberant, multifaceted, complex and have rippled through every aspect of this country’s existence, from how they live to how they work to what the economy consists of to a new reliance on tourism and associated investment and development that amounts in the end to the country opening its doors to outside invasion of both foreigners and their capital. Stable sleepy places are usually closed off to the outside world, so this is an upending of the country. And if you talk to Icelanders, and I do, you can hear it in their voices, and they are very self-conscious about it as well, grappling with things they have never had to think about previously. And a major part of this is their consciousness of financial matters and how Wall Street pinstripes hold sway over their lives and their futures. They accept it and they understand it; Icelanders are strong and they are not reality deniers. But they know this is not their game. They know this is an imposition. And even though they are not complainers, they don’t like it, and they know they don’t like it, even if they don’t say it. They have been robbed of their defining trait, the fact that what made Iceland Iceland was the fact that they were removed from a world that they are no longer permitted to be removed from.

Things like this are happening in different ways all over the world. It is not a single disruptive tumult but rather a thousand points of tumult, thousands of “Icelands” big and small, and for the most part they are not being paid attention to, and that’s another thing that has people upset. People don’t like to be ignored, and people especially don’t like to be ignored when they’re in trouble. And when they feel that way, just like the French folk who showed up at Marie Antoinette’s front door, they are not in the mood to be sympathetic to the idea that the expensively plaited Monarchess was unaware of their concerns and that, had she been so informed, she would have happily and generously “let them eat cake.”

These many underobserved monads around the world are thus full of tense people who aren’t used to being tense and who don’t want to be tense. They’re not New Yorkers, after all. But they’re tense and distraught because no one is listening. And I think a lot of them aren’t even sure what they have to say or what they’re tense about, or what they would have others listen to about their complaints, or what those complaints are or who they would have listen to them. It’s like a big collective Freudian id out there—as Freud himself described it, a seething cauldron of teeming desire. Vague, but certainly not nonexistent, or something to pass off as unimportant.

Back in “Financeville,” the talkative crowd—those who write blogs, pen articles and in general shoot off their mouths about the direction of markets—have decided that this all comes down to a kind of Hatfields and McCoys shooting match that basically amounts to the bond guys vs. the stock guys.It is an interesting and entertaining debate, and quite spirited and creatively executed. It is often predicated on the idea that the bond guys are smarter and richer. Ironically, the guys who state that last point most explicitly tend to promote a bullish case, even though in taking the bond guys’ side they are taking the side of folks known to be traditionally bearish.

Because these are New Yorkers, these enthusiastic debaters are saying too much and doing so in far too complicated a manner. But that is fine and to be expected because if they didn’t they would never get the ridiculously large paychecks they get. But their arguments are really very simple and there is no reason to listen to more elaborate versions than the precise that follows.

The bears are totally straightforward and predictable. They see danger and dilapidation everywhere. There is too much debt, too much consequent interest. There is too much sovereign debt, there is too much consumer debt, and there is too much corporate debt.Not only is there too much debt and too much debt service, but the borrowers thus obligated are not worthy of it and getting less worthy with each passing moment. Delinquencies are rising and defaults will follow. On top of that, when it comes to individuals, in the categories of debt that most matter, the underlying fundamentals are stagnating or worse. So there is not only rising levels and deteriorating quality of mortgage debt, but current and prospective home sales don’t look so hot in a lot of markets. Similarly, auto sales are slowing and inventories are building; channels are being stuffed, auto loans are being given out to anyone who can hold a ball point pen, and trillion dollar masses of auto loans are being bundled, securitized and passed off into the bond market, yet concentrations of such loans are also on the books of certain problematic banks who specialize in originating them.

Then you’ve got diplomatic matters such as the breakdown of the European Union, focused on Brexit but also chock full of speculation on which continental nations might follow suit, and abandon the currency. Italy, it is said, is a nation whose citizens feel completely cheated by the trading in of the lira for the Euro, and correspondingly resentful of the Germans’ benefiting from their trade of the Deutschemark for the Euro at Italian expense. Of course, the Greeks hate what they feel is exploitation at the hands of the Germans as the Germans complain they lied their way into the alliance. Then there is the fact that even as it falls apart the EU has taken on new member nations, as has NATO, and these expansions are creeping up alongside the Russian border. Which leads us to geopolitical worries, not only with the aforementioned Russia, but also throughout the Mideast, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Korean peninsula, as well as the powder kegs of Latin America now very potentially spreading beyond Venezuela and to a lesser but still major extent in Argentina, Brazil and beyond, especially if Venezuela devolves into wholesale civil war and that spreads beyond its own borders, about which a very credible case can be made.And this is just the bare outlines of the bearish case, and there is still the huge subject of the Deep State, the encircling tentacles of central banks and reams of other matters yet even mentioned. Also, no bull market goes on forever and this one’s gone on long enough.

The bulls have a very creative comeback to this. You would think it would have to be rather complex and labyrinthine to address all these bearish concerns but it’s not. And it’s pretty much just turning the bears on themselves. To wit, “there’s too many of you bears, and you’re all in cash.” Based on this, the bulls argue, the market can’t be overbought because the bears are sitting it out and therefore the only flow possible is an inflow and subsequent melt-up. Yes there’s a problem with debt but nobody is threatening liquidity, least of all central banks, so no need to worry about that—the bond market’s declining rates are telling you that. Corporate stock buybacks may be stupid for shareholders but not for CFOs’ or CEOs’ incentive agreements, so that’s not about to go away. Put it all together, and we’re about where we were in, say, 1998-1999 when the bears of that era were saying the same thing and the market still had another 50% left to run. Yes, we know about all the problems, say the bulls. Don’t lecture us. This is how economic and investment cycles work. If the bull market were done, there would be less cash around and more euphoria. The best is yet to come. We agree that stocks can be shown to be ridiculously valued, but the thing they are priced in (dollars?) is a less desirable alternative.Stay in stocks. You are better doing that than expecting a meltdown and an opportunity to scoop up battered equities at a bargain.

Conclusion? Seems like all this chatter is too complicated from my point of view. There are only two issues to examine. Are stocks a better value than the currencies they are denominated in? That’s issue number one and it’s a good one. I don’t see much examination of it. Issue number two: we can’t be overbought because there are too many bears and they’re all in cash? Really? Again, show me the money (and where it is). Nobody seems to be able to state in a very plain way how it’s possible to have 17%+ CAGR from the low point of 2009 without somebody buying stocks. I’d like to hear that case.