The 2000s were a pretty good decade for Bears. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index is down 24% in nominal terms from December 1999 or approximately 30% when dividends and inflation are taken into account. Four of the years were Bear triumphs – 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2008. It’s the best Bear decade since the […]

It must surely have become obvious from both the catastrophes of 2008 and the bumper profits of 2009 that the investment banking/trading business, whether through independent behemoths or within even larger commercial banks, simply isn’t working. Now that “too big to fail” bailouts by taxpayers have been established, risk management in the industry is a […]

We’ve now lived through the same new disaster twice. Computer simulations, more or less universally adopted as the solution to a major problem, turned out to have been based on flawed assumptions and faulty data. As a result policy or markets became heavily skewed in an inappropriate direction. Wall Street’s risk managers and climate change […]

Gold broke through $1,200 per ounce this week, on rumors that the People’s Bank of China might increase the percentage of gold in its reserves. The dollar, the euro, sterling and the yen all have good reasons to weaken, yet in our current global fiat money system they have nothing to weaken against. Global foreign […]