Ode to Bill Gross, as he leaves Pimco

“Was Bill Gross the last star manager?” The Wall Street Journal asks. Which cannot but suggest that the age of optimism and gilded wealth which Gross — Wall Street’s “Bond King” — singularly represented, is drawing to a close.

“The idea of building an organization around an individual as a cult of personality, that’s going away,” Brian Posner, a former fund manager and fund-company chief executive told the Journal. But already the search is on for the “new Bond King.”

{mosads}Gross’s sudden departure from Pimco may seem on the surface incidental, but it is likely to shake the financial markets, and in its turn, the world. Because Gross was an archetypal figure; one who egged on the others to action and passions with the promise that it was all just around the corner, and at the time, it was.

The importance of Gross to his times might be seen in an analogy to a former era. It is widely said that the Sixties started when Bob Dylan switched from a wooden folk guitar to an electric one at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Then rumors flew that the new era he awakened was coming to a sudden, terrifying end, when Dylan wrecked his Triumph on Striebel Road near Woodstock. The best of the Sixties was still ahead but the handwriting was already on the wall. It was the end of the beginning. The trickster did his work, then retreated to the forest, leaving the world to others. So departs Bill Gross.

And as others in London, Washington and New York talk in cryptic and impenetrable cords, Gross talked straight. On Oct. 25, 2012, he wrote in The Washington Post: “U.S. risks falling off a global cliff.”

“The popular TV series ‘Breaking Bad’ may be an appropriate analogy for the U.S. ‘fiscal cliff’ and ongoing debt crisis. In the show, a chemistry teacher is lured into producing crystal meth. As the title indicates, his middle-class life turns from a temporary high into something much worse … Washington, it seems, has a similar story.”

What stayed in my mind was an essay a year before in which he declared, “But while our debt crisis is real and promises to grow to Frankenstein proportions in future years, debt is not the disease — it is a symptom. Lack of aggregate demand or, to put it simply, insufficient consumption and investment is the disease.”

What distinguished Gross from the others in these pieces was the full recognition that the stairs that go up are the same stairs that go down. I noticed in his writing that he would quote the folk poet Kris Kristofferson; possibly he recognizes the phrase “the going up is worth coming down” in Kristofferson’s homage to Dennis Hopper, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and musician and songwriter Funky Donnie Fritts. The others on Wall Street will tell you every time that the stairs only go up.

Here at the end of Rosh Hashanah we might ask how the people who celebrate this turning have lasted 5774 years. It is perhaps the Torah-based wisdom that allows for progress rising in the external world and at the same time allows for “returning.” That is, for every thing there is a season. Likewise China, said to be 4,000 years old, has a model of ascending in Confucianism and a model of returning in Taoism.

Wall Street and Washington offer only a model of karma rising; then it is crash and burn. Bill Gross gave us fair warning.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.