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…
Follow the Money, ’Cause This Movie’s a Rerun
Asymmetry in Minority vs Majority Narratives
Whose Narratives Count?
In the hinge episode five of the Netflix series Dear White People a fight breaks out at a party at elite Ivy-like Winchester College between two black and white student friends — over the power of a word — ni***ah — and who has the right to use it:
“Just don’t say ‘nigga,’” Reggie tells his white friend Addison while they’re dancing to “Trap Niggas.”
“I guess it just kind of felt weird to censor myself,” Addison responds after insisting he’s not racist for repeating the word when it’s in a song.
A perfect illustration of the narcissistic sociopathy of wealth that assumes absolutely everything can and should be bought. He ignores a single and fundamental moral symmetry: you get what you give. He wants to get the emotional high from discovering, young, innocent feminine energy that gives life, while giving nothing of himself but money, which he has beyond excess, in return. The Financial Times just published a piece on why billionaires make pathologically litigious neighbors about trivial stuff like trees that block a view and other superficial nonsense. Last September 26 Wired published “Why Rich People Are So Mean”. This…
The Austrian-British-Jewish social historian E.J. Hobsbawm said it best: “capitalism saws off the tree branch upon which it sits.”
Lector caveat emptor: I’m an angel investor in nine startups — a card-carrying capitalist. Except for a four year stint teaching investments, entrepreneurship and history in several European business schools, for the last 30 years I’ve been self-employed in Italy and then Latvia. I’ve failed at several businesses, but one took 20 years to fail. One insight from this experience: the percentage of any human population with my level of risk tolerance and appetite is tiny. …
Fake History Fuels Bojo’s Blitzed Battle of Britain Brexit
The Common Thread in All Nations’ Mythologized War Stories
Great Britain is the fourth stop on our WWII myth demolition tour, after WWII east vs west, Italy and the Netherlands. A common thread links all the stops on our tour: a narcissistic nationalism that evades uncomfortable, evidence-based truths. These threaten victimology if the nation was defeated and occupied, or an emotionally satisfying glorious victory if it was on the winning side. The latter is the keystone of national ego in WWII’s victors: the UK, the USA and the former USSR. For example, this populist t-shirt version of WWII:
Cure Deadly Management by Man-Children by Hiring Globally
A modest proposal for fans of REALLY free markets. As is clear from the images above, COVID19 has exposed the divorce between competent governance and geopolitical power. Germany excepted, the female-led COVID management competents are all geopolitical midgets, while the geopolitical giants — the USA, Brazil, Russia, India — are all led by hydroxi-popping or vaccine research-hacking alpha male narcissists. Testosterone and toxic governance are highly correlated: “A new study published by the World Economic Forum now confirms what many have suspected: “Being female-led has provided countries with an advantage in the current crisis….“Nearest neighbour analysis clearly confirms that when…
Lester Golden
From Latvia I write to share learning from life in 6 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal & Spain in 1974 and 1976.
