History doesn’t always repeat itself but, as Mark Twain reportedly once said, it often rhymes. Looking across the investment landscape, we find ourselves facing events and conditions that have been experienced before but are hardly worthy subjects for song or poetry: a debt limit standoff reminiscent of 2011 and 2013, interest rates not experienced in 16 years, inflation rates not seen in 40 years, levels of U.S. debt as a percentage of GDP that now exceed the 1945 peak, a 100-year pandemic, the 25th instance in 123 years of divided party control in Washington, a 1,000-year rainfall, and now a possible repeat of the 2020 presidential contest.

Things are different than they were at the start of the new year. Several banks have failed, with SVB and Signature now listed among the top four U.S. largest bank failures of all time when measured by total assets. The Federal Reserve launched yet another new rescue program and Pew Research reported that 56% of Americans say banks and other financial institutions have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country these days.

It was with a pen, not a buzzer, a 21-gun salute, a balloon drop, fireworks, or confetti parade, that the President signed congressional resolution H. J. Res. 7, ending the COVID national emergency on Monday. He signed the bill behind closed doors without ceremony, bringing no new attention to the execrable pandemic that disrupted and devastated virtually every life on the planet over the course of the last three years.

It was fifty years ago on April 3, 1973, when Dr. Marty Cooper made the first public cell phone call from his clunky, personal, handheld, portable prototype as he stood on a busy New York City sidewalk. The 44-year-old Motorola engineer thought it would be amusing to make that first call to his company’s chief competitor at Bell Labs, Dr. Joel Engel. He punched in his rival’s number on a DynaT-A-C device that was roughly the size of a brick.