Tag Archives: On Economy

Image credit: Tesla Motors Tesla Goes Fishing Tesla Motors is up to something remarkable.  But what it is, exactly, is unclear.  According to the Tesla Motors website, the company’s mission is: to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transport. Tesla Model 3: the company’s first “mass market” entry so to speak, which is supposed to help the world to reach the nirvana of  “sustainable” transport. On the side, it is helping a number of Wall Street firms to increase their...

Not Just Wrong, but Monumentally Wrong Massive flaws at SUNE (Sun Edison) + VRX (Valeant) were somehow missed by both of these high profile/ well resourced hedge funds. Photo credit: Brendan McDermid, Eduardo Munoz / Reuters David Einhorn (Greenlight Capital) and Bill Ackman (Pershing Square) – both fund managers had a terrible year 2015 (down about 20% each), but while Mr. Einhorn has changed his way and righted his ship so far in 2016, Mr. Ackman stubbornly stuck (and at one point...

  It’s all in your head…and that’s where it shall remain! Illustration via thesurvivalchannel.com Who Cares What Voters Want? BALTIMORE, Maryland –  There were two newsworthy developments last week, neither of them really important – the first because it won’t happen, the second because it won’t matter. First, the Fed let it be known that it has “normalcy” once again in its sights. “Prospect of rate rise grows as U.S. moves closer to passing Fed tests,” reported the Financial Times on...

Is the Economy a Machine? A Science Goes Astray Human beings have a strong tendency to look for patterns. The natural sciences have shown that the universe is governed by laws, the effects of which are observable and measurable in an objective manner. Mostly, anyway — there is, after all, the interesting fact that observers are influencing measurements at the quantum level by the act of observation. (For our lives in the “macro” world, however, this is not relevant. An engineer does not...

Ye olde tattered Crash Alert flag… should it be unfurled again? Image by fmh Black-and-Blue Crash Alert Flag Let us  begin the week “on message.” The Diary is about money. Today, we’ll stick to the subject.  Old friend Mark Hulbert has done some research on the likelihood of a crash in the stock market. Writing in Barron’s, he points out that the risk – or, more properly, the incidence – of crashes, historically, has been very small: “[…] consider that the 1987 and 1929 crashes were...

  Originarios on the march… Photo credit: cta.org.ar  Alarming News BALTIMORE, Maryland – An alarming email came on Tuesday from our ranch in Argentina: “Bad things going on… We thought we had the originarios problem settled. Not at all. They just invaded the ranch.” To bring new readers fully into the picture, Northwest Argentina, where we have our ranch, has a revolution going on. Some of the indigenous people – that is, people with Native American blood – believe they have a claim on...

  Scratching the Surface Problems, as people commonly perceive them, require solutions. Broken shoelaces must get fixed.  Regrettably, in today’s democracy this means the candidate who offers the most fixes – in the form of goodies – to the most people wins the election. The Gallup poll reported earlier this week that 18 percent of U.S. adults believe the “economy in general” is the most important problem facing the country.  This was followed by 13 percent who believe “dissatisfaction...

Don’t Plan on Living in St. Petersburg… GENEVA, Switzerland – When we left you last week, we were describing why neither democracy nor planning works on a large scale. Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek described the problem with great thoroughness in his book The Fatal Conceit. The Fatal Conceit: central economic planning is literally impossible – there can be no centrally planned rational economy. Individual planning is distinct from central planning, in that the many...

Trump Is Right PARIS – On Wednesday, brick-and-mortar retailers – such as Macy’s – led U.S. stocks lower. The Dow lost about as much as it had gained the day before. Nothing much to talk about there… Macy’s Inc. NYSE + BATS Macy’s on the way to Zool. Macy’s Inc. NYSE + BATS – click to enlarge. When we left off yesterday, we posed two questions: Shouldn’t your editor (under torture, of course) confess his sins, renounce his apostasy, and register to vote before it is too late? And…...

  Hacks and Has-Beens NORMANDY, France – What has happened to TIME magazine? Henry Luce, who started TIME – the first weekly news magazine in the U.S. – would be appalled to see what it has become. Time cover featuring the sunburned mummy heading the globalist IMF bureaucracy (which inter alia advocates that governments should confiscate a portion of the wealth of their citizens overnight, even while its own employees don’t have to pay a single cent in taxes). Once you see the list of the...