I have this uneasy feeling. I wouldn’t call it despair. It’s not even a really negative feeling per se. It’s more like a mixture of excitement and confusion. I’m looking at the world as we open back up from these unprecedented global restrictions against, well, life, and I have this uneasy feeling that we are all living right on top of a fault line in history that is about to crack wide open, forever isolating the past on one side of it, from the future on the other.

It looks like life is returning to “normal”, or at least something a little bit closer to what we all remember before humanity’s coronavirus response shut down the world. Sports are coming back in the United Kingdom with Project Restart. Casinos are opening back up in the United States. Visits to Macau appear to have bottomed out at last, down 99.7% in April year over year. Yup, that’s nearly a 100% decline, so I’d say we can’t really get much lower than that. Economic statistics are going to start coming back to life all over the world over the next few months. News junkies, which is most of us these days, are going to move from doomsday thoughts to blooming flower thoughts of recovery.

And so it feels like we are about to go back to the way things were, that we’re about to travel back across that historical fault line into the past. I don’t believe that’s true. The engine is about to be restarted, yes, but the transmission is all out of whack now. I don’t know exactly what is going to happen as economic activity gets back into full swing, but one thing I’m quite sure about is that the lockdowns in the real economy were only phase 1. Phase 2 is going to hit the financial economy, a banking crisis. Exactly when it starts I do not know, but it’s coming.

2008 started in the financial economy and then bled out into the real economy. The coronavirus crisis started in the real economy, but so far it has not bled into the financial economy, at least not in an obvious way, yet. It’s now about to do so as the lockdowns are lifted, and as it does, investors will unfortunately begin to realize that we are not going back to the way things were. We are headed into something different, and sadly not as pleasant for most. That’s the uneasy feeling I have, because I don’t know exactly what the thing is that we’re all headed into now. I just know it’s not going to be like it was before.