I remember taking the subway home each night asking myself “What have I done today? What have I created?” And it meant that I couldn’t sleep well, I was embarrassed to tell people what I did, and I felt as though I personally owed every single person that I mucked over in the markets each day. The experience reminded me of one as a child when I unfairly sold some worthless items to neighbors at a stoop sale in front of our house in Brooklyn. When my parents found out that night, they made me go from home to home on our block returning the money.
Author: Edouard Chazal
How to Save American Finance from Itself
What about the possibility of cutting off the bubbles before they become dangerously large? It has often been proposed that the Fed should limit asset-price inflation in much the same way that it is committed to limiting goods-price inflation. In that view, the Fed should have choked off both the dot-com and house-price bubbles before they became large enough to do much damage. The usual counter-argument is that it is difficult to distinguish an asset bubble from a rise in price that is justified by “fundamentals.”
Down Is a Dangerous Direction
CEOs and financiers were desperate to answer that question, for during those years of high productivity and low wages, immense profits and “returns” kept accumulating in brokerage accounts and banks. But a bank can’t keep its money in the bank. Under the pressure of those swelling piles of capital, the answer they offered to worker-consumers like Duane was: instead of paying you enough to buy what you produce, we’ll lend you the money.
When David Einhorn Talks, Markets Listen—Usually
Einhorn’s youthful persona—his boyish looks, his habit of bringing his parents to public speaking events, his tendency to litter PowerPoint slides with cartoons and animal pictures—helps to obscure that he’s already lived through much of the textbook life cycle of the superstar hedge fund manager. Impossibly smart at a young age, he hung his own shingle at 27, then made billions for his clients by discovering the one investing strategy that he was extremely good at—producing fanatical levels of research and unapologetically embracing the short sale—and doing it over and over again.
To Succeed in Work and Life, Be Mr. T
A T-shaped man has two characteristics. First, he has a depth of knowledge and a focused expertise in one skill or discipline. This characteristic is represented by the vertical stroke of the T. Second, he has an interest in and a willingness to use a broad range of skills and disciplines outside his area of expertise. This characteristic is represented by the horizontal stroke of the T. A T-shaped man is, in short, a jack-of-all-trades, but a master of one.
Abnormal Capitalist 