Much has been written about how life will be after we are done with COVID-19 – some of it sensible, some of it mere hyperbole but one of the more thoughtful pieces I have come across is this one by Paul Kedrosky a venture capitalist who jotted down some thoughts in one of his in…
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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…
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In a crumbling edifice, a farce plays out. The hapless central character fawns on an aristocrat who turns out to be a conman. He then fails to disguise his unease when confronted with his European neighbours, doesn’t bother to mask a thorough contempt for the Irish, and enters a love-hate relationship with ostentatiously wealthy Americans.…
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The rise of China is remarkable. Hint – switch off the sound the background music is bloody irritating.
You’re a Russian criminal with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains but one big problem: Transferring slugs of money or carrying suitcases of cash will raise eyebrows. You need to “launder” the dough — make the dirty money appear to be the proceeds of legitimate enterprise. Then it can be spent anywhere in the world…
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Yet there is never a shortage of them of offering their opinion. Surely at some stage you would just give up and admit you were crap. President Trump likes to brag about the supposedly booming economy. So do other Republican politicians. Some journalists have gotten into the habit too, exaggerating the strength of the economic…
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In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek in the 21st century, creating the equivalent of a five-day weekend. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” Keynes wrote, “how to occupy the leisure.” This became…
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I came across this chart on LinkedIn – It is a comparison between the Baltic Dry Index and the S&P500. For those who dont know the Baltic Dry Index is a proxy for all dry shipping around the world. Fundamental analysts then somehow contort this is to meaning something about world trade and occasionally you…
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1 million seconds is abut 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years. I cannot remember where I heard the example above but it is a wonderful example of peoples inability to understand scale particularly when it involves orders of magnitude change. In part it relates to why people cannot understand why a loss…
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