I’m at the airport on my way to the Commonwealth President’s Club conference, so this will be a brief post. As I’ve written many times before, I love these conferences for a bunch of reasons—the venues, the events, and, most of all, the people.
From a news perspective, this actually looks like a good time to be out of the office. Reviewing the papers today, I was struck by how, well, normal the headlines seemed—all about foreign policy and politics, nothing about economic or market crises. Even the business news was back to company-specific events.
For a while now, I’ve been talking about how the economic stats are normalizing. We’re not back to where we need to be, but we’re significantly closer, to the point that the recovery’s trajectory has started to flatten out and normal market mechanisms are coming into play. Some housing markets are hot, some not. Normal. Some industries are doing well, others not so well. Normal. Some states are booming and creating jobs, others aren’t. Normal. Europe is squabbling, and the Middle East is a mess. Normal.
We’re not completely back on course—Ukraine, China, and the European situation are all issues that will continue to rattle things. But the tendency toward normal (and much more the old normal than the new) can’t be denied.
This is very encouraging. It’s what we’ve been working toward for the past five-plus years, and it’s nice to see it finally start to take shape. Hopefully nothing unusual will happen in the next week or so.