We can expect the announcement of GDP growth for the second quarter to be lousy—around 1 percent or so if we’re lucky, less than that if we’re not. Why is this, and what does it say about the rest of the year?

The short answer is that we got what we asked for at the start of the year. If you remember, back then we had the fiscal cliff and a record, uncontrollable deficit. Some wanted higher taxes, others wanted reduced spending; everyone wanted a lower deficit.

The other day, a Commonwealth colleague of mine who works outside of the investment groups asked about a point I had made a couple of years ago—that Washington, DC, had become the financial capital of the United States, in addition to the governmental capital. “Is that still the case, post-crisis?” he wanted to know.

I believe it is, and for reasons that extend beyond those that obtained in the crisis. While DC has largely exited the banking system and the auto industry, the role of the government in the economy has only grown. Part of this is politically driven, and therefore subject to debate, but part is structural, reflecting a growing change in how the economy works.

Today is Nora’s and my 10th anniversary. We got married on July 26, 2003. It was a great wedding. To celebrate, last night we went out to No. 9 Park—a very nice restaurant in Boston—and tried the tasting menu, which I highly recommend. We also went to Tiffany’s, despite my protests that I had already bought her a ring. You can imagine how effective the protests were, and, well, she’s earned it. I can honestly say that I love her even more now than when I married her. Thanks for 10 great years, sweetheart, and I look forward to many more.

Part of our conversation last night was about where we were 10 years ago, and how much has changed. It occurred to me as we spoke that this was a conversation we rarely have—one that explicitly looks at longer periods of time, rather than having an incessant focus on the now. Looking over a decade, events that seemed so important at one time become less so, while events that may have seemed insignificant turn out to be major.

Short answer: no. Detroit is an exceptional situation, which was telegraphed well in advance, and investors and portfolio managers had lots of time to relocate their money if they were paying attention. Retirees, of course, may not be so lucky.

In today’s post (the last in this series, for the moment), we’ll look at the U.S. stock market.

We are in the middle of a very significant bull market—up almost 150 percent since the bottom in 2009—and the question right now is whether the run can continue. I was on a CIO panel at Financial Advisor magazine’s alternative investments conference yesterday, and the views of my fellow panelists—a really impressive group, in which I was flattered to be included—ranged from major declines to consistent, multiyear advances. Even the pros disagree. My own views, as you know, are cautious. Why that is will become clear.

As regular readers know, I’ve been a long-term China bear. This attitude has become mainstream recently, but I still believe there’s value in thinking about China. First of all, I could still be wrong, and second, looking at China as an investment gives us another chance to ask some of the questions I posed the other day.

First, of course, is do we understand what’s going on? Earlier in the Chinese story, the answer was yes. China was using very low wage rates to attract manufacturing, the products of which were then sold to Western markets—a simple, well-proven business model. Recently, though, that model has developed cracks. Chinese wage rates are no longer as attractive, while demand from the West has dropped off.

I was going to touch on China and the U.S. markets today, but something happened over the weekend that’s such a good illustration of the points I made on Friday that I have to talk about it first.

Saturday afternoon, my dad forwarded me an investment offer he had received from an oil and gas sponsor in Kentucky. They wanted to sell him a 1/64-of-1-percent interest in oil and gas wells there for $2,500, for which they believed he could receive a payout of about 90 percent of his initial investment in year one.

Per yesterday’s post, I want to start off by defining my terms. “Hedge fund,” for purposes of this discussion, means “currently fashionable investment that everyone wants because they think they will make a lot of money.” In this sense, “hedge fund” could mean housing in the mid-2000s, tech stocks in the late 1990s, commodities or the Nifty Fifty stocks in the 1970s, or—well, you get the idea.

At any given time, there will be a hot investment idea that is valid. (That’s probably how it got hot in the first place.) There will be well-established managers executing successfully in that space. They will understand the market, know what they’re doing and why, and will be very unhappy to see the rest of the world showing up in their niche.

One of the more, shall we say, interesting magazine covers showed up on my desk yesterday. Not, as you might expect, the Rolling Stone cover, which is simply a contemptible bid for publicity. No, I’m referring to the Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover, which displayed a somewhat graphic, at least on an implied basis, picture and graph.

The headline on the cover is “The Hedge Fund Myth,” and the cover story spends quite a bit of time excoriating hedge fund managers for making lots of money and not deserving it.

So my wife, who is the more organized thinker of the two of us, wanted to continue last summer’s research project in a more structured way. Rather than just randomly looking for lobster rolls to try, she researched which local restaurants had received accolades for them, with the idea that we’d work our way through the award winners.

As I have learned to do over the years, I bowed to her superior wisdom, with the result that we tried the lobster rolls at the Clam Shack, a small place right by the bridge in the center of Kennebunkport, Maine.