A little more than a generation ago, a stealthy revolution swept America. It was a dual changing of the guard: Two tribes, two attitudes, two approaches to a good society were simultaneously displaced by upstart rivals. In the world of business, the manufacturing bosses gave way to Wall Street dealmakers, bent on breaking up their…
With worries about a currency war growing and bond yields collapsing, investors have reached for their usual haven of gold. Only this time it has a friend (as my colleague Tim Culpan wrote this week): Bitcoin. Gold’s dollar price has risen 7% this month, Bitcoin’s by 18%. This apparent use of the two commodities as companion…
It’s a fact. Your level of income will rarely exceed your level of self-development. But most of us are going to retire broke. Don’t believe me? Listen to these chilling facts: The average superannuation balance in Australia is only $70,000 (Cooper Review into Superannuation). Only 7% of retirees are financially secure. (Association of Superannuation Funds).…
Apparently, 1 in 4 adults in America did not read one useful book in 2018. They didn’t develop a skill, focus on their mindset, or read something that wasn’t for the purpose of entertainment. Fiction doesn’t count. It’s a pass-time. A guilty, page-turning pleasure. But it’s not a source of education or inspiration, and it…
ELIAS CANETTI IN ‘The Human Province’ states “One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.” We think we’ll live forever, and that we’ll always be the age we are right now. We make the mistake thinking we have time. Even though at an intellectual level…
MONEY GOES WHERE it feels the most welcome. Money moves to the people who persuade it that it will have a productive home with them. None of us actually create wealth. We don’t print money. However, we do encourage it to visit and stay. We attract it. We multiply it because our actions are deemed…
OK….YOU’VE SUFFERED a huge loss. What makes it worse is you know, at a deep core level, that you did this. You DID this. Your actions made this happen. But I’ve been there. I’ve been struggling for breath as the 50 foot waves sent me tumbling, fighting, unable to control what was happening. I’ve felt…
Patience may be a virtue, but it could also be a key economic indicator. Economists are interested in values like patience, altruism, and trust because they play key roles in how people behave. Those individual and collective behaviors can have wide-ranging effects on a nation’s propensity for armed conflict, trajectories of per capita income, and…
Should investors care about a fund manager’s relationship status? What kind of car they drive? Ask them if they’ve won any poker games lately? Research points to yes. A recent outpouring of academic papers links the investment performance of professional fund managers to their characteristics as individuals — how they grew up, their personality traits,…
I had been toying with the idea of binning my LinkedIn profile since it seems to consist of little more than people with odd titles posting random motivational pictures and the occasional bit of crap about their cat. But it does seem to be the gift that keeps on giving in terms of the nonsense…
I am always interested in the relationship between the level of compensation for a CEO and their level of shareholder return. Full graphic here – howmuch
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked…
In a House hearing on monetary policy last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell made a telling confession in response to a question from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The topic was the so-called natural rate of unemployment: the idea, believed by many economists and policymakers, that there is a rate at which unemployment could get so low…
