by The Investor
on April 19, 2010
Overpaid bankers who are given crazy bonuses for making average returns and who ought to be using their first-class brains to design volcano-proof 747s rather than financial timebombs are a favorite topic on Monevator.
And don’t get me started on the housing bubble.
You might therefore expect the Goldman Sachs fraud charges to have me bashing away at my keyboard like Bill Clinton on an intern’s Facebook page.
But to be honest, I find myself strangely unmoved.
It’s hardly news, is it? Two years ago I wrote that Wall Street ‘innovation’ created the credit crisis, and that the elite banks should pay for it. The subsequent carnage took out Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Not a perfect result but better than I expected.
Okay, so bankers were soon collecting huge bonuses on the back of the special measures designed to protect them from going bust – but who was shocked by that? On a professional level bankers care only about money these days, and for all I know that’s all they ever cared about.
No, this SEC move seems politically timed. The sub-prime issue has been knocking about for ages. Michael Lewis even wrote a book
about it!
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by The Investor
on April 17, 2010
My Saturday comments, followed by the usual list of links to other good blog posts and articles.
Last month I found myself in the novel position of feeling a bit uncertain about the stock market rally.
For much of the past 18 months I’ve felt like the only bull in the blogosphere:
- Back in March 2009, I was selling anything that wasn’t nailed down to raise more money to buy shares.
- All last summer I wrote about how the stock market rally was rational, after such a big crash – especially in the light of the ten-year bear market.
- I wish I’d kept a list of the blogs I commented on who were urging readers not to invest. Not because we don’t all make mistakes (I certainly do!) but because some didn’t acknowledge their mistakes later. A few pessimists then now write like they thought the rally was the most natural thing in the world.
I’m not saying I had any special insights. I just saw shares as cheap, and that there was no reason why they wouldn’t rise eventually. I was prepared to wait for years if I had to, but the gains came much quicker than anyone expected.
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by The Investor
on April 16, 2010
This article on living frugally is the second part in a three-part series on radical early retirement written by Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme.
In this post, Jacob reveals key ways of living frugally that enabled him to retire early on his investments.
It’s actually really hard for me to list the ways I am frugal. I often come across such lists in the blogosphere and I’m thinking to myself: “Isn’t this stuff obvious?!”
Once one grasps the main principles of living frugally – which is mainly to look at optimizing efficiency and utility – one will become frugal, rather than just do frugal things.
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by The Investor
on April 14, 2010
There’s a long, ongoing battle between so-called Keynesian economists, who follow the writings of John Maynard Keynes, and those of the Austrian school, which was exemplified by Friedrich von Hayek.
- Keynes believed Governments and central banks can and should intervene to stave off the worst excesses of the economic cycle in capitalist societies
- Hayek wasn’t Keynes alter-ego exactly, but he was a full-on proponent of free markets and liberalism. Essentially he believed that meddling made things worse.
Over the past two years, what was a nerdy debate has taken center-stage, as Keynes and Hayek’s different theories have been put forward as the best guide to the financial crisis.
Overwhelmingly, the Keynesians have won the day – partly because his interventionist stance fits with a politician’s desire to be seen ‘doing something’.
But as this amusing Keynes Vs Hayek rap shows, there’s two sides to the story.
[continue reading…]
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