Prologue: This column was submitted to Restaurant Finance Monitor on March 10th, and the financial world has changed dramatically in the intervening 10 days. We’ve predicted that the Fed would back off from their tightening routine, but could not forecast that a crisis in the banking industry would be the catalyst. We have repeatedly quoted Warren Buffet: “When the tide goes out you find out who is swimming naked”. After twenty years of money printing and over a decade of interest rates suppressed to near zero, the tide has just begun to go out. We can’t tell you what the capital markets are going to do because lots of unpredictable distortions can take place in the short run. We can, however, predict with certainty than the current fiscal/monetary volatility will be a fact of life. There cannot be a sound economy without a sound currency, and that prospect is a very long way off. In the meantime: the sun will rise in the east and set in the west and people have to eat. 🙂