Home » Posts tagged 'tim price'

Tag Archives: tim price

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

The Demon-Haunted World

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

  • Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

The White Sands Proving Ground sits in the Jornada del Muerto desert, southeast of Socorro, New Mexico. On July 16, 1945, it became the test site for the world’s first nuclear detonation. The Manhattan Project – the race to build the bomb – had started modestly enough six years earlier, but as it gained momentum would go on to employ more than 130,000 people and expend the equivalent of $26 billion in today’s money.

Among the scientists and military men in attendance, there was no consensus as to what the results might be. The physicist Norman Ramsey forecast that the bomb would fail to go off completely. Robert Oppenheimer predicted an explosive yield equivalent to 300 tons of TNT. The Ukrainian-American chemist George Kistiakowsky plumped for 1,400 tons of TNT. The German-American physicist Hans Bethe went for 8,000 tons of TNT. The Polish-born physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi chose 18,000 tons of TNT (he would win the bet).

But the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi proposed a different wager altogether. He darkly suggested two options: given that the atmosphere would ignite, would the blast destroy just the state, or would it incinerate the entire planet ?

Fermi’s prediction was not as outlandish as it sounds today. Earlier in the war, in the spring of 1942, German physicists approached Hitler’s Minister for War Production, Albert Speer, to discuss the possibility of their building a nuclear bomb…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Serious Advice

SERIOUS ADVICE

Given all this, what do MPs do all day? Media manipulation, not operational planning on priorities.

“Unsurprisingly, most senior MPs in all three parties are locked into a game in which they spend most of their time on a) launching gimmicks, and b) coping with crises. These two forms of activity are closely related. The only widely understood model of activity in Westminster (and one which fits well psychologically with the desire for publicity) is a string of gimmicks aimed to manipulate the media (given the label ‘strategy’ to make it sound impressive) which are announced between, and in response to, media crises, some of which are trivial and some of which reflect structural problems. Many, drawing perhaps only on the bluffing skills rewarded by PPE, have no idea what else to do.

“Powerful people rush from meetings about the latest gimmick they are to announce, to meetings about the latest cockup for which they need to try to dodge the blame (possibly caused directly by a previously announced gimmick), to the TV studio, to dinner parties, where they gossip about either a) the daily crisis, or b) vague speculations about the distant future (and give overconfident predictions that are usually wrong but which they later reimagined to have been right – ‘as I’ve always said…’). Ministers’ time is dominated by unfocused panic about the media environment – not focused urgency about the most important problems.

“These gimmicks have obvious costs in the form of money wasted and the ostensible goal unfulfilled. They also have indirect costs that are often higher. 1) They divert the bandwidth of senior people from serious issues. (For example, dealing with No10 gimmicks diverted DfE ministers, spads, and officials from focusing on serious issues such as child protection.) 2) Once announced, they can easily trigger a set of further stupid decisions as the system attempts to evade the humiliation of the gimmick failing. 

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Happy Anniversary

“They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.”
  • Attributed to Talleyrand.

Since everybody else in financial media has been indulging in an orgy of self-reflection, selective recollection and brazen virtue-signalling on the back of the 10 year anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in September 2008, and in steadfast keeping with our principle of ‘no bandwagon left unridden’, we reproduce below, word for word, our commentary first published on 1st October 2008. A brief update then follows..

Armageddon outta here !

“Last night, Mr Brown made it clear he was ready to increase the level at which savers’ deposits were guaranteed from £35,000 to £50,000 but indicated he did not want to act until the markets had calmed.”

– From The Financial Times, 1st October 2008.

As part of my O-level history course back in the mid-1980s, I wrote an extended essay on the topic of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. My teacher made the useful suggestion of comparing the Hiroshima experience and related issues with those of the Dresden fire bombings earlier that fateful year. Even now I’m not sure whether either action could be easily or wholeheartedly justified and as a non-combatant (and non-civilian, for that matter) of the time in question, it still seems somewhat presumptuous even to try. What I do recall is that I concluded my study with the words of historian A.J.P. Taylor:

“War suspends morality.”

I recall these words because I am now reminded of advice given me a year ago when the crumbling of the credit markets first became manifest to a financially less literate world. While I was personally wrestling mentally with the moral hazard issues surrounding banking bailouts and the like, a South African fund manager friend made the following pertinent observation: in a shooting war, don’t waste time scrupling over moral hazard – the objective is survival.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

MAY DAY

“Japan was the dress rehearsal; the rest of the world will be the main event.”

  • Investor in Japanese stocks, known to this correspondent, circa 2001.

“Twitter has taught me a couple of things. 1: there are some incredibly brilliant people in the world. 2: they are vastly outnumbered.”

  • Tweet by @jrsalzman.

There are weeks when decades happen, and this past week feels like one of them. While US inflation expectations touched a four-year high and 10-year US Treasury yields reached seven-year highs, the voters of Italy – or rather its anti-establishment Five Star Movement and its far-right League – delivered a resounding raspberry to the EU and any lingering hopes for faster and smoother European integration. Two years ago, in this commentary, we were conveying our relief that the UK had finally elected to sever its political ties with a failing totalitarian socialist economic bloc. Now, displaying – if possible – even more political incoherence, the Italians are having a go. You can see below, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, why they might have a point:

What follows is what we wrote in the giddy days of June 2016:

The euro zone is a latter-day gold standard. Because its member countries have no control over their own monetary policy, they must accept a one-size-fits-all model. But what is appropriate today for an economy like Germany’s is unlikely to be appropriate for an economy like that of Greece. (Which should never have been allowed to join in the first place – but then institutionalised corruption is another of the euro zone’s fatal flaws. Are the EU’s accounts and payments “free from material error” ? On this basis they haven’t been signed off by the EU’s own Court of Auditors for over 20 years.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

On Rational Optimism

“We got stick for questions like, ‘Who came second in the last war?’” he recalled. “But the contestants weren’t always the brightest tickets — some of their IQs didn’t reach room temperature. Once I accidentally read out the question and the answer: ‘Where was President Kennedy assassinated, in Dallas?’ And the contestant still answered ‘Chicago’.”

  • Jim Bowen, the host of the British TV show Bullseye, who died on March 14, 2018.

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party is perhaps his most celebrated play. In a shabby seaside boarding-house, Stanley Webber, a retired pianist, is visited by two disquieting strangers, Goldberg and McCann. The Birthday Party introduced a generation of theatre-goers to the Pinteresque pause, to Pinteresque word play, to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘the theatre of the absurd’. There is an anecdote about the play that Pinter himself frequently retold. Having seen a recent production, a woman wrote to the playwright and asked,

Dear Sir, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men ? 2. Where did Stanley come from ? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal ? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play.

Pinter’s response:

Dear Madam, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand. 1. Who are you ? 2. Where do you come from ? 3. Are you supposed to be normal ? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your letter.

Touché.

In his best-selling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari asks what it is about the human species Homo Sapiens that caused it to win out against all its competitor species during man’s prehistory. One of his answers (spoiler alert) is that the ability of Homo Sapiens to cooperate in large numbers arose from our unique ability to believe in things that exist solely in the imagination, such as gods, countries, and money. Human beings, he argues, have a distinctive cognitive capacity for fiction.

Our aptitude for the largely imaginary also leaves us with a perverse requirement for certainty where certainty cannot exist. (Nobody, other than economists, ever said that human beings were either consistent, or rational.) A good example is financial market commentary provided by traditional media. Why did the market perform the way it did yesterday ? Traditional media will tell us. Whether there is any fundamental ‘reality’ or substance to their account is debatable.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Close to the Edge

“Look at it this way. In 100 years, who’s gonna care ?”

  • Nancy, waitress, in ‘The Terminator’ (screenplay by James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd).

Imagine that a cyborg from 10 years into the future paid you a visit back in 2007. Here is what is going to happen, he says, in a thick Austrian accent, his body looking like a condom stuffed with walnuts. After deregulation and a gaudy credit boom, Wall Street will face an extinction level event. So will the City of London. As a result, interest rates will be driven down to zero and kept there for a decade as a “temporary” emergency measure. The UK will vote to leave the European Union. Donald Trump will be elected US President. On the basis of these facts alone, what do you think would happen to global stock markets ? Would they be higher, or lower – and perhaps much lower ?

Since we know the answer, it’s hardly a fair question, and there can in any case be no counter-factual. But this thought experiment does reveal the vulnerability of ‘global macro’ investing in a world in which central banks are almost exclusively calling the shots. Which might explain why an increasing number of ‘global macro’ managers are quietly folding up their tents.

The first requirement to harvest superior long-term returns from the markets is to have some kind of edge. If you do not know what your edge is, you do not have one. It is difficult to see how many (or any) ‘global macro’ managers can possess any form of edge when the financial markets are largely at the mercy of the arbitrary behaviour of monetary central planners, either adding or withdrawing liquidity as they see fit. Which is just one of the reasons why we don’t invest in ‘global macro’ funds.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

For God’s Sake, Stop!

“Most economists, it seems, believe strongly in their own superior intelligence and take themselves far too seriously. In his open letter of 22 July 2001 to Joseph Stiglitz, Kenneth Rogoff identified this problem. ‘One of my favourite stories from that era is a lunch with you and our former colleague, Carl Shapiro, at which the two of you started discussing whether Paul Volcker merited your vote for a tenured appointment at Princeton. At one point, you turned to me and said, “Ken, you used to work for Volcker at the Fed. Tell me, is he really smart ?” I responded something to the effect of, “Well, he was arguably the greatest Federal Reserve chairman of the twentieth century.” To which you replied, “But is he smart like us ?”

  • Satyajit Das.

“..Every time a report lands on their desks, central bankers must stop to think about the economic, social and political havoc their policies have caused over the past 10 years.

“The desperate attempt to avoid deflation via quantitative easing and record-low interest rates has had horrible side effects, and this observation is hardly controversial. The rich have become much richer; corporate wealth has become more concentrated; soaring house prices have created intergenerational strife; low yields have made all but the super-rich paranoid that they will be entirely unable to finance their futures. Most markets have ended up overvalued (this will really matter one day), while pension fund deficits and a constant sense of crisis have discouraged capital investment — and have possibly held down wages in the UK.

“Set a target, get a distortion. This is standard stuff. But the fact that extreme monetary policy has been going on for so long means that central bankers do not just have macro problems to feel bad about.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

On Borrowed Time

On Borrowed Time

time.PNG

There are a number of things you don’t want to hear a central banker say. One of those things just popped out of Janet Yellen’s mouth – “I don’t believe we will see another financial crisis in our lifetime.” That has to be up there with Irving Fisher’s deathless observation from 17 October 1929 that “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” or John Maynard Keynes’ comparably adept forecast from 1927 that “We will not have any more crashes in our time.”

So far, so anecdotal. How about some data to back up the thesis that, as Thorstein Polleit puts it, the super bubble is in trouble ?

First, define your Super Bubble. We can do this in two ways. One relates to longevity (how long has the bull run lasted ?), the other to valuation (how expensive is the market now ?). The global bond bull began back in 1981, when 30 year US Treasury yields peaked at 15.2%. Now, over 35 years later, long bond yields are below 3%.

Polleit expresses it a little differently, citing the p/e ratio of bonds so that they might more fairly be compared to stocks. To calculate the p/e ratio of a government bond, he divides 1 by the 10 year government bond yield. His results are shown below.

Source: Thomson Financial / Thorstein Polleit

img_595e115946e40_1.png

¹For bonds, calculated as 1 divided by the 10 year government bond yield

In his words,

You do not need to be a financial market wizard to see that especially bond markets have reached bubble territory: bond prices have become artificially inflated by central banks’ unprecedented monetary policies. For instance, the price-earnings-ratio for the US 10-year Treasury yield stands around 44, while the equivalent for the euro zone trades at 85. In other words, the investor has to wait 44 years (and 85 years, respectively) to recover the bonds’ purchasing price through coupon payments.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Much Longer Will Investors Trust the Central Banks?

How Much Longer Will Investors Trust the Central Banks? 

There is no simple, painless solution. The world has to reduce debt, shrink the financial part of the economy, and change the destructive incentive structures in finance. Individuals in developed countries have to save more and spend less. Companies have to go back to real engineering. Governments have to balance their books better. Banking must become a mechanism for matching savers and borrowers, financing real things. Banks cannot be larger than nations, countries in themselves. Countries cannot rely on debt and speculation for prosperity. The world must live within its means.

~ Satyajit Das, Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

There is now almost $16 trillion worth of sovereign debt trading with a negative yield. Last week the credit bubble entered new territory with two euro zone issuers of corporate debt, Germany’s Henkel and France’s Sanofi, becoming the first private firms to sell negative-yielding non-financial corporate bonds in euros. This may, just may, happen to mark the top of the great bond bull run that started as far back as the early 1980s. By Friday of last week, the implications of an ugly slide across bond and stock markets may have led some fund managers and traders to soil themselves, or suffer heart problems, or both. By a happy coincidence, however, Henkel makes Persil laundry detergent, and Sanofi makes treatments for cardiovascular disease. So any affected “investors” dumb enough to have bought those guaranteed loss-makers and then suffered immediate regret don’t have to look too far for a remedy.

Doubts Emerge in Global Markets

Taper Tantrum II” would appear to have arrived. The sell-off in bond markets last week was universal. US Treasuries, UK Gilts, German Bunds, Japanese JGBs, all declined. Japanese bonds are suffering more than most. Kevin Buckland, Wes Goodman and Shigeki Nozawa for Bloomberg report:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When the Game Changes

“In a free market, the price and quantity of an item are determined by the supply and demand for that item.”

In their efforts to jam the square peg of financial theory into the round hole of human nature, economists have perpetrated some pretty stupid things. But few of them are dumber than the efficient market hypothesis. EMH states that it is impossible to beat the market because the efficiency of the market means that prices always incorporate and reflect all relevant information. Why was the Dow Jones Industrial Average worth 22.6% less on Tuesday October 20th 1987 than it had been the previous day ? Why is Warren Buffett worth $67 billion ? Must be all that efficiency.

George Soros (estimated net worth: $25 billion) is also a pretty good refutation of the efficient market hypothesis. As a student at the LSE, Soros chose the Viennese-born philosopher Karl Popper as his tutor. Popper argued that empirical truth can never be known with absolute certainty; scientific laws can never be conclusively proved, they can only be given provisional authority, until some better theory intercedes. No amount of confirmation is sufficient. One failed test is enough to falsify.

“While I was reading Popper I was also studying economic theory and I was struck by the contradiction between Popper’s emphasis on imperfect understanding and the theory of perfect competition in economics which postulated perfect knowledge. This led me to start questioning the assumptions of economic theory.”

Buffett’s refutation is less elegant, but equally effective:

“I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.”

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Your Do-It-Yourself Page Financial Armageddon Story

“The media select, they interpret, they emotionalize and they create facts.. The media not only reduce reality by lowering information density. They focus reality by accumulating information where “actually” none exists.. A typical stock market report looks like this: Stock X increased because.. Index Y crashed due to.. Prices Z continue to rise after.. Most of these explanations are post-hoc rationalizations.. An artificial logic is created, based on a simplistic understanding of the markets, which implies that there are simple explanations for most price movements; that price movements follow rules which then lead to systematic patterns; and of course that the news disseminated by the media decisively contribute to the emergence of price movements.”

– Thomas Schuster, ‘Meta-Communication and Market Dynamics; Reflexive Interactions of Financial Markets and the Mass Media’.

Monday 15th February 2016. Our silver-haired trader, in front of a panel of random prices, clutching his head and grimacing, probably because he’s hungover, brings you the latest from a dealing room in the same stock photo that the Telegraph have used at least three times in the last five years:

Yes, it’s [Monday / all over / a bowel-clenching orgy of blood-soaked insanity] as [negative interest rates / China devaluation fears / lower oil prices / higher oil prices / sideways oil prices] strike [like junior doctors / pant-wetting horror / sharpened blades of doom-laden Götterdämmerung] into [the soft, pulpy hearts of innocent pensioners staring wide-eyed in stunned horror at the untimely end of their sheer financial existence / the markets].

• [Fed chair Yellen / BoE governor Carney / CoCo the Clown] seeks to reassure [investors / someone / anyone / turn those machines back on !]

• Gold makes biggest one-day gain since [yesterday]

Global financial markets endured a day of [you think I could stand this butcher’s yard more than once / mind-shattering turmoil beyond the edge of imagination / light winds and scattered showers] as investors’ fears rose over [China / global currency wars / negative interest rates everywhere / more QE / widespread banking failures / Take That reforming].

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Life Finds a Way

“The snag for them is that it happened on Monday. And all the official pronouncements in the State media were: “Well, it’s a blip. It’s a very rare event.” Well, it’s happened three days later so you then have to ask yourself, “How much of a blip is it ?” And some analysts question whether the authorities have got a grip on this, if they’re saying on Monday, “Look, don’t worry about it, it’s just a blip,” and then it happens again. The whole question arises of whether the authorities are trying to control the uncontrollable.”

– Correspondent Stephen Evans on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, 7 January 2016, discussing the second closure of the Chinese stock market that week.

“For [our investment process] to work we have consistently needed the following criteria to be met:

• Access to transparent and truthfully compiled data at both a macro and a company specific level..

• Logical decision making by macro-economic policy makers..

..China also presents further problems.. than just a weakening growth profile. This is the problem of the predictability (or rather lack of) of policy making. As its growth rate has slowed and as China – due to its sheer size – has become more important to the functioning of the rest of the global economy, so external scrutiny has increased. Unfortunately, instead of responding with greater transparency, which would reduce the level of enquiry, the Chinese government has responded by drawing in on itself and hiding behind a welter of official statistics that quite frankly no longer add up..”

– Nevsky Capital in a letter to investors explaining why it is closing the $1.5 billion Nevsky Fund.

Chaos theory studies the behaviour of dynamic systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. In a chaotic system, tiny changes in initial conditions lead to wildly divergent outcomes further down the line. Under chaos, short term prediction may yield certain benefits, but long term prediction is impossible.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What’s the last dollar they can print before financial crisis?

What’s the last dollar they can print before financial crisis?

In the field of mathematics, chaos theory studies the behavior of systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.

The idea in chaos is that, like life itself, where you start today has tremendous influence on what happens next.

In chaos, even very tiny changes to initial conditions can lead to wildly divergent outcomes further down the line.

Again, think about life: how different would your outcome be if you’d been born in the next town over? Or to different parents?

The film ‘Jurassic Park’, adapted from Michael Crighton’s novel, brought chaos theory into the popular realm.

A wealthy scientist, John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough), uses DNA derived from fossilized mosquitoes to recreate dinosaurs on a remote island.

But once brought back to life, won’t they breed?

No, says Hammond. Because all the dinosaurs on the island are engineered to be female, by way of chromosome control.

Dr. Ian Malcolm, a chaos expert played by Jeff Goldblum, has been brought along to assess the project. His assessment is skeptical to the point of hostility:

“[T]he kind of control you’re attempting is not possible. If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories. It crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even… dangerously…

“I’m simply saying that life… finds a way.”

Life -nature- does indeed find a way, and Malcolm barely survives into the inevitable sequel.

Jurassic Park is, of course, a work of fiction.

That central banks that exist today, on the other hand, are fact.

And it is fact that for several years they have been attempting to artificially manipulate the market.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Honey, I Broke the Markets

Honey, I Broke the Markets

“Donald Trump looks like the villain in a movie where the hero is a dog.”

– The internet.

Which four letter word still has an amazing capacity to cause offence, anxiety and aggravation ? In the world of investment, that word would have to be
R-I-S-K.

Do we even have a workable definition of what it means ?

Author Guy Fraser-Sampson, in ‘The Pillars of Finance’, points out that before the Second World War, financial thinkers had a somewhat humbler perspective on the subject:

“..while before the War there was eager discussion as to what risk might be, and whether it was the same thing as uncertainty, there was total agreement that whatever it was it was probably too complex an animal ever to be fully understood and, in particular, that it was incapable of mathematical calculation.” [Emphasis ours.]

The American academic Frank Knight published ‘Risk, Uncertainty and Profit’ in 1921. As he wrote, some forms of uncertainty are measurable. There is, for example, empirical observation with regard to the occurrence of a number of discrete outcomes, such as the rolling of dice.

Then there is ‘true uncertainty’, such as the chances of a house in a particular area catching fire in any given year. The probability of dice throws is capable of mathematical calculation – albeit the outcome is still not guaranteed – whereas the chance of a house burning down is not. In relation to fire insurance, we can only use statistical inferences drawn from prior observation.

“The import of this distinction.. is that the first.. type of probability is practically never met with in business, while the second is extremely common. It is difficult to think of a business ‘hazard’ with regard to which it is any degree possible to calculate in advance the proportion of distribution among the different possible outcomes. This must be dealt with, if at all, by tabulating the results of experience. The ‘if at all’ is an important reservation.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dammit, Janet

Dammit, Janet

According to Einstein, time is affected by gravity. Clocks far from strong gravitational fields run more quickly; those close by run more slowly. We can only assume, then, that Janet Yellen has the density of a neutron star. Under her leadership of the US Federal Reserve, time seems to have stopped altogether.

It is now seven years since the Fed pegged short term interest rates at zero percent. That was in response to the credit crunch that engulfed the world after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. A lot can happen in seven years. The typical newborn, by the age of seven, can talk fluently, has well-developed physical coordination, and can read and write. Evidence of intellectual or kinetic progress at the Fed has been somewhat more limited.

Unlike many central banks, the Federal Reserve is empowered to pursue two specific mandates: stable prices, and maximum employment. The data on jobs looks clear enough: the US unemployment rate stands at just 5.1 percent, or half its level during the height of the financial crisis. (Just ignore the fact that those out of work who are politely called ‘discouraged’ tend to fall out of the statistics after a while, so the true count is some way off.) But the progress on prices – or rather, the lack of it – is even more startling. Despite quadrupling the size of its balance sheet to $4.5 trillion (which incidentally means the Fed is sitting on $4.5 trillion worth of existing bonds), signs of ‘proper’ inflation – in the prices of goods and services, say – are almost invisible.

Given that the experimental policy of Quantitative Easing was always predicated on triggering inflation, the almost complete lack of inflation so far might be regarded as something of a failure.

The neo-Keynesians will no doubt argue that QE has worked, and that Janet and our own Mark Carney simply haven’t done enough of it yet. I have a subtler fear: what if expectations of our central bank policymakers are simply too high ?

– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/10/dammit-janet/#sthash.MdXcwTLh.dpuf

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress