Midnight Candles
A cold wind from the future blows into my nighttime bedroom, more often than not during those midnight hours when fear dominates and hope retreats to a netherworld. This wind is a spectre, an oracle of darkness and eventual death, not easily dismissed. Once merely a whisper, its decibels intensify with the advancing years. It will be heard, this reaper – this grim reaper, yet in the nights when it howls the loudest I fight back, silently screaming for it to get out, to leave me alone, to let it all be a bad dream. It never is. Shakespeare’s Macbeth expressed it more subtly: “Out, out, brief candle!” Yet the finer words provide no solace; the final act is always the same.
So Bill Gross begins Midnight Candles. Is this a horror story? Perhaps a bit of fantasy fiction? Neither. Midnight Candles is the November 2009 installment of Investment Outlook from PIMCO, home of the world’s largest bond fund.
If you’ve thought investment writing is stuffy, jargon laden, put you to sleep reading you may wish to read the monthly column from Bill Gross. It’s very readable and highly informative. As the lead paragraph shows, he knows more than the numbers of finance.


