The Daily Feather — Quelle Surprise!

Did you have a Sister Agnes? If you did, you’ve already answered, likely out loud, Pavlovian style. For five years at Mount Sacred Heart in San Antonio, that “nun” ensured that I didn’t confuse my accents aigu with my accents grave…by way of a ruler rapped across my knuckles. YES, it hurt. And NO, I did not mix up my accents in my French studies. Sister Agnes’ teaching “methodology” persuaded me to perfect my diction precision. Even after I escaped her veiny-handed, cruel reach in the public school system, I carried forward with my study of the language of love. In 7th grade, I won a writing and speaking competition as the best in district in original French poetry. Go figure as later in life, I absorbed the Spanish language while living in Venezuela to such an extent I was dreaming in both languages for a short period before my brain ditched French (nearly) forever. Unlike multilingual geniuses, who hopscotch from one language to another, my brain only has room for one romance language at a time.

This said, French does come back to me in times of need, as would an old friend. The occasion was my bachelorette party in frigid Montreal in the winter of 2002. Knowing Vegas had nothing on the French province in the sin department, I quickly surmised where my dear friend Annie was taking me after a brief chat with my taxi driver. If not prude, I am an aesthetic purist who chose to demur the fine opportunity to see more of the opposite sex than a lady need see. I found myself reminiscing about that night Thursday morning when news hit that Canadian Gross Domestic Product had shock contracted, by -1.1% in the third quarter. As if that wasn’t enough, at the same time, it was brought to my attention that France’s GDP had also shrunk, by an appreciably smaller -0.1%. Both announcements elicited the same response in the corner of my brain cells relegated to a younger me: “Quelle Suprise!”

While automated rebalancing flows for Target Date 401k funds are no doubt responsible for some of the violent reversal we’ve seen in Treasury yields, the “Quelle Surprise!” factor is playing more than a bit part. The Citigroup Economic Surprise Index has been at one end of the see-saw while the opposite seat on the playground has been occupied by the same bank’s Fear/Greed Index. The worse the economy is, the greedier investors become.