The financial world is a buzz with the Fed raising the discount rate a quarter point stealthily right before options expiry and it is just the start of a very dangerous careening job.

If you’re not familiar with careening, here’s a quick primer:

As is well known, as ships cruise the ocean, their bottoms quickly become covered with barnacles. These barnacles affected the ships speed and mobility. These two characteristics were highly respected among pirate captains, for they knew above everything else that if they were to be pursued in would be speed and mobility that would save them above any amount of firepower they might possess.

Barnacles posed another problem. If they were not removed, periodically, they would also cause irreparable damage to the hull by eating away the wood or weakening the seems between planks. This meant that if the ship were at sea, far from land, it could go down. The threat of barnacles was taken very seriously.

Often ships are dry docked after a long ocean voyage, in order that the hull can be scraped free of barnacles and repaired.

Pirate rarely had the opportunity to dry dock. When a ship could not be dry docked, sailors had to devise other ways to clean the bottom. It was practically impossible to clean the bottom of a ship while in the water. The best alternative was careening.

Careening involved finding a suitable shallow bay where the ship could safely be run aground, thus exposing as much of the hull above the water line as possible. Then the ship would be unloaded as much as possible. The crew would then need to careen or turn the ship over on one side using block and tackle, and manpower.

The crew would try to pull the ship over enough to expose the keel or bottom of the ship. Then they would commence scraping that side of the ship, free of any barnacles. Then any damaged planks would be replaced or repaired. Following this step, if possible the bottom of the ship would be covered with paint, pitch or some kind of proctectant.

Once the one side was done, the crew would careen the ship to the other side and repeat the process.

The task was labor intensive and time consuming. Pirates were sitting ducks while careening their ship. They were often not armed well enough to stand a major ground assault and with their ship run aground they could not take on another ship.

So Barnacle Ben is careening the Federal Reserve (a.k.a Titanic) and this pirate is going to make himself vulnerable on multiple fronts:  the economy, banks, Goldman Sachs traders, grand standing politicians, and perhaps the world.    In the meantime, I’m hoping to cash in on my UUP call options ;)

Aarrrrrr matees!