Paul McBeth is the editor of The Bottom Line and Curious News, having worked at BusinessDesk for 15 years.
It was fitting for US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to channel ‘80s icon Ferris Bueller in noting that life moves pretty fast.
Of course, he was using it to couch how the Fed can take its time to assess what latest fad the White House has come up with in its blitzkrieg of announcements and off-the-cuff comments before he has to reach for the giant interest rate lever that President Donald Trump wants him desperately to pull.
And it’s hard to miss the droll hint to the movie’s droning lecture on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that’s been doing the rounds on social media explaining how bad tariffs are.
But the world’s most central of central bankers kind of misses the point of Bueller’s quote – and the movie – by cutting off the second half: “if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”.
Sure, it kind of fits with his wait-and-see approach to setting dry monetary policy, but it misses the sunny optimism of the 1986 John Hughes classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which celebrates the seize-the-day mentality that underpins the notion of American exceptionalism and sledgehammers in the idea that all work and no play definitely makes Cameron a dull boy.
Not really the message of Armageddon we’re getting on every headline lurking in the next doomscroll swipe.
But as with everything Ferris did in his brief 103 minutes, that lesson is itself instructive.
Because while there’s been much handwringing and arm-waving over Trump 2.0 doing the unthinkable, there are people out there just getting on with things and trying to adapt to the new world order.
Brave new world
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare began its search for other places to manufacture after Trump’s first term as president raised the risk of its Mexican manufacturing, and rubber goods maker Skellerup started investigating shifting more production to the US last year when the threat of growing protectionism was becoming more real.
More recently, transport hardware and software maker Eroad is doing the same as it works out how best to soften the impact of a world of tariffs on its North American business.
And before Trump’s tariff exclusion that’s not an exclusion was announced for various consumer electronics, Apple and HP had decided to stop importing Chinese made goods to the US and instead use their Indian manufacturing bases.
Nothing remains in stasis when things are going on.
Someone in the local investment scene who’s probably channelling the spirit of Ferris Bueller is Eden Bradfield.
He’s made a name for himself at BlackBull Research by storming on to the local investment scene with a pithy newsletter and entertaining TikTok trying to make some of the most impenetrable jargon of the finance world more accessible to the swelling legions out there with an online trading account.
Unafraid to challenge sacred cows, he has delighted in offering frank assessments with an infectious enthusiasm that’s built up quite the following, which is obviously something his old boss Chris Swasbrook is keen to capture at Elevation Capital, where Bradfield's now a portfolio manager.
And while Bradfield can opine at length about most companies, he’s channelling uber-investor Warren Buffet in his approach to picking investment opportunities in that he wants to buy great companies at good prices, aptly describing them as the inevitables.
Atlas shrugged
Some businesses just go out there and make money irrespective of what the rest of the world is doing.
They may not be sexy and it might take time before they get going, but there are some industries that tend to defy the ebbs and flows of the world.
In fact, that’s exactly what New Zealand’s first billionaire, Graeme Hart, did in building his Reynolds Packaging Group Holdings empire through the 2000s and 2010s.
The products were never sexy, but Reynolds came within cooee of toppling Switzerland’s Tetra Laval as being the world’s biggest food packaging group before Hart started hiving off bits and pieces.
Importantly, Hart built up his packaging empire at the height of the global financial crisis, taking on eye-watering amounts of debt to mount leveraged buyouts of the Pactiv and Graham Packaging companies, which were both listed in the US at the time, and describing the former deal as the most frightening period of his commercial life.
Which brings us back to Ferris and his words of wisdom.
It would be very simple to sit back from the relative safety of our thousand-mile moat in New Zealand and watch Rome burn, but there’s a whole world out there beyond the flurry of White House missives and ensuing outrage.
There’s no doubt that Trump moves very fast, but the more time we spend staring mouths-agape at him, the more the rest of the world will pass us by.
Image from Curious News.
