Pennies from Heaven

(Editor’s Note: This was the opening paragraph of the November Investment Outlook of William H. Gross, the managing director of PIMCO, the global investment firm. The content is unchanged but, for reading ease,  the large chunk of prose has been broken into smaller, more digestable bites:)

“?Ranking right up there with the myths about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy is the legend that pennies fall from heaven. This can’t be true, a priori, because God wouldn’t save pennies – nobody does!

“I know this for a fact because every weekend when (my wife) Sue and I walk the neighborhood there is a fresh supply just waiting to be picked up on the blacktop. Here a penny, there a penny, everywhere a penny penny. Perhaps, I figure, it rained copper last night instead of H2O but no, they’re just on the street, lying there like a bunch of cigarette butts that someone obviously didn’t want to bother with. I will.

“As a matter of fact Sue and I compete for them. ‘Just think,’ she said after beating me to the first on a three penny walk the other day, ‘there might be twenty or thirty thousand of these just lying around the street in this country right now. Think of all the good luck someone could be having.’

“And that of course is why someone should believe in pennies instead of the tooth fairy. They bring good luck: more than horseshoes, four-leaf clovers or even betting on birthdates when you’re playing Lotto. Very, very lucky!”

(Several more witty paragraphs on pennies follow, dovetailing into a weightier discussion of whether a debt crisis can be eased through creating more debt and the role of economic growth in the equation.)