Agora Financial’s Rude Awakening

The Rude Awakening

Taipei, Taiwan – Laguna Beach, California

Saturday, October 17, 2009.

Joel Bowman, signing off for The Rude Awakening from Taipei, Taiwan…

This is the end,
Beautiful friend.
This is the end,
My only friend, the end.

– The End, The Doors

For many, Jim Morrison’s lyrics were pure poetic genius. To his fans, he was THE American Poet, The Lizard King, the epitome of artistic beauty and romantic tragedy. For others, he was just a glorified, rambling gypsy man in leather pants who suffered an unhealthy penchant for peyote. He was out to corrupt daughters, they said, and to spread perversion of every stripe.

Others  argue that he was really a bit of both and that neither side could exist independently of the other. In his song, The End, Morrison sings about “weird scenes inside the goldmine,” and how “the west is best” before drifting into a kind of murderous Freudian nightmare. One is left to wonder where the genius stops and the peyote begins? Or are the two really one and the same?

Perhaps Morrison himself summed it up best when he said, “There are things known and there are things unknown…and in between are the doors.”

We wax lyrical today because, you see, Rude reader, we have arrived at our end. Today is the final ever issue of The Rude Awakening. As of this Monday, your editors will begin publishing our missives from over at The Daily Reckoning.

Now, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t at least a little sentimental at the thought of lowering The Rude Awakening into the cold, hard earth…

But all things die, Rude reader; grand empires, mighty bull markets and, yes, even fringy, independent financial publications; all eventually run their natural course. It is a phenomenon that requires neither joy nor sadness, and one that will surely persist in the absence of both.

Besides, we can’t complain. We’ve had a good Rude run. We reported from Wall Street when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was en route to its all-time high. We bubble-hopped from Southern California to the U.K. and on to Dubai, watching with amazement as the world built castles on sand then packaged, re-packaged, rated and sold off their promises to the each other as if they were real.

We brought you our thoughts from more than 30 countries over the past few years, under the influence of enough espresso to resurrect Lazarus. We’ve searched for wireless Internet connections from Baltimore to Bahrain, Melbourne to Mumbai, Carthage to Cairo, Taipei to Tallinn. And from the North East to the Middle East and across to the Far East, we’ve watched the mighty fall and the world economy turned upside down.

And all the while, Rude reader, you were right there with us.

You woke us in the night with questions…and sat patiently by our side while we tried to find the answers. You laughed when we missed our flight(s) and scolded our frequent typos. You became our friend in Dubai and then threatened to cancel your subscription from Ha Noi. You invited us to your home for dinner in Phuket, encouraged our writing in Vancouver and kept us company at the bar when our plane was delayed in Doha. You read the local newspapers with us around the globe and raised a skeptical brow when we fell for their tricks. You always demanded more from us, but never hesitated to indulge our requests…

And though the future was uncertain…and the end always near…you were always there by our side.

So to you, Rude Reader, we raise our glass.

Thank you for reading and for keeping us company along the way.

Signing off for The Rude Awakening…

Cheers,

Joel Bowman and Eric J. Fry

aussiejoel@the-rude-awakening.com

P.S. From this Monday onwards, we’ll be taking on publishing duties at The Daily Reckoning. If you haven’t already signed up, here’s a free link to do so. We hope you can join us, along with the rest of the “DR” cast for the next phase of the journey.