Trump’s Stop the Steal fraud-fraught lost cause is not unique. To understand this grievance-driven lost cause, look at similar cults elsewhere and their statues and shrines (the Cyberninjas fraud is unique to the Trump Cult).
Why believe a title that says I’d know how to tell dumb from smart money? Because I’ve been both and learned from financial scars accumulated since 1987. I’ve also taught a behavioral investing course called “The History of Human Financial Stupidity — Including Mine”. I had no shortage of my own dumb money cases to give students.
In Liar’s Poker Michael Lewis defined Wall St as a system designed to transfer money from the weak to the strong. Inserting dumb and smart money into this definition makes sense. My dumb money cases have certain features in common. …
Meme Stock Reddit Revolution Edition
More than a few friends and former students have asked me about the Gamestop short squeeze saga and the Reddit retail meme stock revolution. Having taught a behavioral investing course for four years, I viewed this case of usually docile punters using Reddit to take over the casino as potentially profitable, as any example of the market’s bipolar mob psychology should be.
Debt Zombie Haleynomics: Britain’s Buffett vs the Austrian Austerian
How the Information You Don’t Have Can Take Your Money
Anyone reading the title must think the writer believes he’s smart money. I confess to having been both, though not simultaneously. My purpose here is to show how dumb money can become smart money, because being at the wrong end of information asymmetry is the very definition of dumb money.
Giulio Andreotti, postwar Italy’s Machiavellian prince of power politics, coined this aphorism: “power exhausts only those who don’t have it.” Similarly, information can exhaust the finances of individual investors because they don’t know about the catalyst that institutional investors may…
After WWI Britain inherited this small slice of the Ottoman imperial pie as a League of Nations mandate, along with Trans Jordan and what is now Iraq. Its policy choices to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine and appease pro-Nazi Arab leaders were driven by its elite’s anti-Semitism (Lord Halifax, Neville Chamberlain) and the geopolitics of oil and defending the Suez Canal.
The French got mandates over oil-poor Lebanon and Syria. None of the five former Ottoman territories could be considered nation states in the western sense. All had artificial empire-drawn borders that cut across historic confessional and ethnic boundaries:
Shia…
Antisemitism hides in plain sight in mainstream politics, on the anti-Zionist, “solidarity with Palestine” left and the Great Replacement anti-globalist populist right. As always, Jews can’t choose which target gets put on their backs.
“What to do in solidarity in the meantime? Find targets nearby. Find where these Zionist fools live, and where there (sic) offices are, and act!” — decolonizethisplace.org , Pro-Palestinian activist organization in New York endorsing a pogrom.
Avi Abraham Benlolo, Canada’s foremost historian of the Holocaust, tweeted this after pro-Palestinian demos:
A teacher of students with multiple cultures, nationalities, and languages will inevitably step on some communication land mines. Students from different cultures and native languages may misunderstand your communication style and, therefore, your content. This article is a land mine locator and a how-to defuse guide.
But, as with any presentation, you’re wondering, “who is this guy and why should I listen to him?” Here’s a quick summary:
- I taught investments, entrepreneurship, and history courses at Riga Business School for four years until 2016.
- I taught 3–5 day entrepreneurship courses on exchanges at seven universities in Riga, Berlin, Stuttgart, Katowice…
The financial undead returns
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. — John Maynard Keynes
Now the Blowback Movie Rerun
US Afghanistan intervention is one more in a long line of ugly choices between bad and worse. Read the The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk to understand how this movie’s a rerun:
”All roads ultimately led through Afghanistan, whatever route an invader came by….After crossing Afghanistan, they could approach India via the Khyber Pass. This…was the route which Peter the Great had hoped to use to make contact with India’s Mogul rulers.” (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138299.The_Great_Game, page 73).
Like Latvia, Panama and Israel, Afghanistan is a corridor country, the hinge of geopolitical door that opens the way to bigger more lucrative empires. Afghanistan…
