Standard & Poor’s (S&P) has downgraded U.S. Treasuries to AA+ from AAA. While this has been discussed for several months, the announcement yesterday evening came as a bit of a surprise. The question is, what does this mean for you? The truth is that I am not really sure, and neither is anyone else, regardless…
I often wonder, what is the person on the other end of this transaction thinking? One of the best investment books of the last decade isFooled by Randomness, by Nassim N. Taleb. Taleb, an options trader by profession, does an excellent job of explaining how humans are hard-coded to find patterns, even when patterns don’t…
As the debt ceiling debate drags on we are faced with some tough decisions from an investment standpoint. The medical profession has a standard often expressed in the Latin phrase “primum non nocere,” which translates to, “first, do no harm.” According to the omniscient Wikipedia, it is a fundamental principle for emergency medical services around the…
I have put off discussing the debt ceiling for two reasons. First, because these economic issues are inherently political, and I promised not to discuss anything political this year, since I don’t like doing it and was tired of having to do so for the last few years of the economic crisis. Second, the market…
Has our society gone bipolar? As I understand it, people who suffer from manic depression, now called bipolar disorder, experience episodes of extreme mood swings from clinical depression to extreme elation. In the most serious cases it is all extremes, there is nothing in the middle. I think this describes our societal situation pretty well….
