I generally send out two letters a week. The letter that arrives in your inbox over the weekend is Thoughts from the Frontline and is written by me. The second letter, which is called Outside the Box, generally comes in the middle of the week and is an article or essay written by someone else that I think merits your time. Quite often I disagree with the sentiment or analysis being expressed, but I find the writer makes me think about alternatives to my personally favored presuppositions. It is always good to listen to the other side of the story, especially when we are talking economics and finance and our investment portfolios!

Over the last month, most of my selections for Outside the Box have leaned to the bearish side of things. Jawad Mian, who writes a global macro letter called Stray Reflections for Mauldin Economics, has been gently chiding me about those bearish sentiments from his perch in Dubai. So today in Outside the Box I’m going to let Jawad offer his views, which are of a decidedly more bullish nature. (I should note that here at Mauldin Economics we pay attention to Jawad’s out-of-consensus forecasts, even when we don’t agree. Some of the team are circulating a PowerPoint presentation that he did almost eight months ago to a CFA group in Michigan. He was spot on with every one of his main points.)

Jawad has shown me how macro thinking and money management can be gracefully and profitably intertwined. He likes to approach the world of global macro investing like a poet contemplating an epic in progress – conjuring up battles in his imagination, inventing and discarding subplots, balancing reason and rhyme. His guiding principle is to help investors understand and navigate through all the complexities of an unstable, inflation-prone world.

Today his bullish macroeconomic forecasts launch from a surprising source: Pink Floyd’s epic album The Wall. He finds similarities between the torturous journey of the album’s protagonist and today’s battle-scarred (or maybe I should say bear market-scarred) investor. Taking license with some of the lyrics, he even weaves Dick Fuld and Lehman Brothers into Pink Floyd’s writings.