Monday 19 December 2016

Wednesday 9 November 2016

The disappearing middle class, and a nation, on the brink

and



Written in advance
5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win
This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president.
 http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

{http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/3-bits-bad-news-tories-9219925}

Friday 14 October 2016


After Brexit, our tabloid newspapers are taking political intolerance to a chilling new extreme

These newspapers and their commentators are now implying that those who disagree with them should be silenced, or even locked up. This is dark and dangerous territory

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/daily-mail-brexit-daily-express-the-sun-tabloids-language-political-intolerance-traitors-a7357591.html









Blockchain settlement
http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=10201


Five Books to Change Liberals' Mindshttps://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-11/five-books-to-change-liberals-minds

Friday 7 October 2016

ON £ MOVE
But some foolish folk will have done a Bloomberg News search for GBP and decided that it is due to the news that fracking had been allowed in North West England. Which is of course rubbish, because we all know that it happened because Diane Abbott was made the shadow Home Secretary.
http://polemics-pains.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/gbp-goes-eurchf-whats-going-on.html

Thursday 6 October 2016


Your name will also go on the list

http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2016/10/british-economic-policy
But this was not the only bad idea to come out of the current Conservative conference. First, there was the idea of training more British doctors so that foreign doctors could “go home” after 2025, a policy hardly designed to engender confidence in the many immigrants (like my GP and dentist) who keep the health service going. Then there was the idea oflimiting the number of foreign students who can come to British universities (another brainwave from Ms Rudd).

Friday 9 September 2016

Thursday 11 August 2016

Are market efficient?

Do market prices generally reflect all available information? Or are they prone to bubbles? On this episode of The Big Question, two members of the Chicago Booth faculty—Nobel laureate Eugene F. Fama and Richard H. Thaler, the father of behavioral economics—discuss how markets behave (and misbehave). Along the way they discuss value stocks versus growth stocks, the existence of economic bubbles, and the curious case of the CUBA Fund

29:30 : They are all lineal combinations of various multistate combinations


Thursday 14 July 2016


Gaiety is a quality of ordinary people. Genius presupposes some disorder in the machine
Denis Diderot

Friday 8 July 2016


Just Say No to High-Speed Rail
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-07/just-say-no-to-high-speed-rail



Why Traders Have Lost Their Touch
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-08/why-today-s-traders-have-lost-their-touch

Wednesday 6 July 2016



https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/more-on-how-it-happened.html

Tuesday 5 July 2016

Didn’t the Sex Pistols sing about “…now I got a reason to be waiting”?
When will the United Kingdom invoke Article 50?
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/07/when-will-the-united-kingdom-invoke-article-50.html

Monday 4 July 2016

social terrorism through wine

'Everything with wine is subjective. There are no rights or wrongs in wine appreciation, and, as one would expect with anything that involves the palate and sensitivity to various different compounds and like and dislikes, we do vary. I’ve never tried to give the impression that my opinion is the one and only one. I just say what I think, and my whole career has been dedicated to trying to give consumers enough confidence to make up their own minds'
http://fivebooks.com/interview/jancis-robinson-wine/

Wednesday 11 May 2016



http://boingboing.net/2016/05/10/clever-non-lethal-mousetrap-ma.html



Everything is fine


Tuesday 10 May 2016

Wednesday 4 May 2016

Professor Fama: How Markets Really Work
{http://ritholtz.com/2016/05/professor-fama-how-markets-really-work/}

Bill Sharpe, The Arithmetic of Active Management

'In aggregate active investors hold the market portfolio, so if some skilled active investors overweight an undervalued stock, other active investors must underweight it. This means that, before fees and expenses, trading is a zero sum game. Ignoring costs, the gains of the skilled investors are, dollar for dollar, at the expense of other investors.'
{https://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/essays/why-active-investing-is-a-negative-sum-game.aspx}

Wednesday 20 April 2016



Offshore in central London: the curious case of 29 Harley Street
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/19/offshore-central-london-curious-case-29-harley-street

Top ten trends in Fintech
http://www.futuresmag.com/2016/04/15/top-10-trends-fintech

What the great degree rip-off means for graduates: low pay and high debt
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/19/degree-graduates-low-pay-high-debt-students

good points against a 'Brexit'
https://medium.com/@DuncanWeldon/brexit-the-trade-deficit-is-not-a-source-of-strength-345f88026723#.6gjmupa5s

The whole point of the debate at the moment is that we know — at least in the short term — what Remain looks like, we don’t know what Leave looks like. That creates the kind of uncertainty which delays investment decisions and which would get worse after a Leave vote as we entered into months or years of talks.

And it’s this uncertainty which takes me to my biggest problem with the “the trade deficit is a strength” argument. It ignores the elephant in the room which the large UK’s current account deficit 

That to me, is the best economic argument against a Leave vote — why trigger an event that could lead to a reassessment of UK risks by global investors when you are “dependent to the kindness of strangers” for funding? 

Tuesday 19 April 2016


FT on Bullshit
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2e43b3e8-01c7-11e6-ac98-3c15a1aa2e62.html?siteedition=uk 
Such careful statistical spin-doctoring might seem a world away from Trump’s reckless retweeting of racially charged lies. But in one sense they were very similar: a political use of statistics conducted with little interest in understanding or describing reality

Tuesday 12 April 2016

Tuesday 23 February 2016



What will P2P lending look like 5 years from now?
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/19/2119569/what-will-p2p-lending-look-like-5-years-from-now/
'The really interesting thing about the potential for P2P to displace traditional banks and their clones is that it shows how easy it is to separate the business of taking deposits and running the payments system from the fundamentally unrelated business of allocating credit. Banks like combining these business lines to extract rents from the rest of society but there isn’t really any good reason why we let them do it. (Also, it’s not even clear they do a particularly good job at allocating credit to productive investments.)'

The worrying signal from US online lending
{http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/02/22/2153904/the-worrying-signal-from-us-online-lending/}

Monday 15 February 2016

Thursday 11 February 2016

Friday 5 February 2016

Unobtainium
The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age
{https://literaryreview.co.uk/unobtainium}

Thursday 4 February 2016

Broader questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism...

Photographer: Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg
Goldman Sachs Says It May Be Forced to Fundamentally Question How Capitalism Is Working
{http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-03/goldman-sachs-says-it-may-be-forced-to-fundamentally-question-how-capitalism-is-working}



The NIM force awakens ft
So what the hell is going on? Is capitalism broken? Or is the simpler answer that global capital availability isn’t what we thought it was?
Is the capital stock we think we have actually illusion? And does negative NIM represent not a capital glut …. but perhaps weirdly enough the exact opposite: a large liquid layer atop a very slim capital share?
Perhaps what’s really been happening is that the digitisation of the market since the 1980s has led to the creation of a Gosplan 2.0 mechanism for the world? Which is to say, market signals have been entirely contaminated by the digital sector’s obsession with “eco-systems” and conglomerisation — a Silicon Valley euphemism for cross-subsidisation.
If that’s true, it’s entirely possible the cost of essential goods (internet, telecoms, base foods, base clothes, base transport) has been massively underpriced for years versus their true cost of production at the same that the price of quality goods has been entirely overpriced versus their cost of production as well?

Wednesday 6 January 2016