The Daily Feather — Goldfinger Galore
On-air chemistry is either there or it’s not. In 1999’s The Thomas Crown Affair, Rene Russo and Pierce Brosnan perfect the art. But it takes two to Tango, which the two did with sizzling precision. Alas, GoldenEye was as good as it would get for Brosnan as James Bond. The 1995 hit was the only of the actor’s four installments as 007 to crack the Top 10 Bond movie list. As borderline extremists at QI, we can recite by memory the remainder of the franchise’s best films, which are uncoincidentally portrayed by the first and eighth (and most recent) actors to say, “Bond, James Bond.” What Sean Connery achieved with panache, Daniel Craig matched with authenticity. The audience’s reverence was earned. As for the box office, that titleholder is 2012’s Skyfall, Craig’s third of five Bond films, which raked in $1.2 billion ($1.5 billion today) and earned the series its first Oscars since 1964, the year the best Bond film of all time was released. The psychotic and egocentric villain, his henchman Oddjob with that hat, the Bond girl with a name that’s as iconic as the movie and the line: “A martini. Shaken, not stirred.”
Dressed in pale gold for a Hedgeye event in Connecticut last Friday and asked what song I’d like played to welcome me to the stage, Goldfinger flew out of my mouth as if Pavlov himself had trained me. Settled in for the fireside chat, the first question I suggested be asked 24 hours earlier no longer rang sincerely: “How does it feel to be out on that ledge calling for recession to have started last October?”
It's one thing to throw out acronyms such as the QCEW and BED and refer to 192,000 job losses in last year’s third quarter with hard data in hand that replaced that produced by the Establishment survey. Any stock jock worth their salt will tell you revisions, even ones that erase the illusion of an economy in expansion, don’t move the needle for markets. If revisions mattered to markets or the Federal Reserve, for that matter, the alarm would have long since sounded.