• April 28, 2006

To Pause, or Not To Pause

Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it. This week we look at a more transparent Fed, Japanese monetary policy, the powerhouse rise of gold, and a rather important op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal , with a theme of seeing how they all impact the dollar. There is more than a little intrigue in the markets, and we try and make sense of it. We are going to quote a number of friends who each give us a piece of the puzzle, and see what it all means. But I'll give you a...

• April 21, 2006

Islands of Stability

"Year after year, economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data without in any way being able to advance, in any perceptible way, a systematic understanding of the structure and the operation of a real economic system." - Wassily Leontief, 1982

Have we improved since 1982? Was Wassily being a little...

• April 14, 2006

Richard Russell’s Wisdom

It is Good Friday, and I am going to take the writing day off. Next week we will delve further into the rich mines we began to explore last week on complexity theory and fingers of instability. But I am going to give you something better than my poor missives. Today we look at the chapter by Richard Russell from my book Just One Thing . To find out more about the book, you can click on the book cover nearby or go to www.amazon.com/justonething.

What can one say about my friend Richard...

• April 7, 2006

Fingers of Instability

"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none... The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear ...." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Any explanation is better than none." And the simpler, it seems in the investment game, the better....