How To Give Effective Feedback; And Welcome To The Bear Market March 12, 2020March 11, 2020 Feedback often doesn’t connect. Here, in four minutes, a simple 4-step formula to address that. (I’m not saying you give ineffective feedback . . . but if I were saying that, these four steps might enable me to say it to you better.) And here’s a little feedback for the Supreme Court, which will be deciding whether Trump is truly above the law. The feedback comes from George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum writing in The Atlantic. Will the Kavanaugh / Gorsuch court join the Attorney General in being loyal personal lawyers for the man who appointed them, rather than for the taxpayers of the United States? Read Frum’s argument and see what you think of the case. . . . By all rights, these cases should end in the kind of defeat for Trump nicely described by a favorite joke of Chief Justice John Roberts. When asked how a certain case could have been decided against a petitioner 9–0, Roberts is said to have replied: “You must remember, there are only nine justices on the Supreme Court.” But this is the Trump era. The courts are partisan and getting more so. Although Trump lost every previous round of this litigation, one appellate judge did agree with him on the merits: his own appointee to the D.C. Circuit . . . Welcome to the bear market. The world moves faster and faster, but it’s instructive that the Dow first topped 1,000 in 1966 yet 16 years later, in 1982, clocked out at 777. One big drag on stocks in those years was the upward trend of interest rates . . . just as a great tailwind for stocks in the decades since has been interest rates’ downward trend. With rates now close to zero, one has to think that tailwind — whatever others may come along (like a massive long-term investment in revitalized infrastructure) — is no longer at our backs. Could it be 16 years before we see the Dow back at 29,551, the all-time high hit just a month ago?