Investment Risk | The Daily Capitalist

Countdown To The Collapse

On multiple fronts there appears to have been a resumption of hostilities in the global currency wars. A subtle indication of this is the recently released report, Gold, the Renminbi and the Multi-Currency Reserve System, which I believe is highly significant for two reasons: First, it demonstrates that major global actors [...]

Nobody Knows

“Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.”

James Buchan.

We lost another client last week. This makes a grand total of two clients who have left us over the past year, not because we lost them money, but because apparently we didn’t make them enough. [...]

Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Frying Pan

“The skill of the sports player is not the result of superior knowledge of the future, but of an ability to employ and execute good strategies for making decisions in a complex and changing world. The same qualities are characteristic of the successful executive. Managers who know the future are more [...]

Goons Versus Gold

When, more than 100 years ago, George Gilbert Williams, president of the famously conservative Chemical Bank, was asked for the secret of his success, he replied: “The fear of God.” You can have the fear of God or the socialisation of risk, but you cannot have both at once.

Nassim Taleb on Fragility and Antifragility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is, as my readers know, my favorite contemporary philosopher. He has come out with a new book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Taleb wrote the book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which was a revolutionary look at risk in the investment world. I [...]

The Terminator

“Our Russian psychosis has two curious features. Firstly, that an 80 per cent Christian Orthodox society for some reason reacts to a Mayan calendar which no one has ever seen. And secondly, that the end of the world is perceived as an economic crisis that can be survived on the banal [...]

Chaos

“Can an economy that has become dependent on lies, misrepresentation, ‘fudging’ of numbers, fraud, embezzlement and a multitude of skimming and scamming operations escape the moral and financial black hole it has created ? The self-evident answer is ‘no’.”

— Charles Hugh Smith, 28 August 2012, as quoted in [...]

The Greatest Trick

“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

- US Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney.

Never try to teach a pig to sing, advised Robert Heinlein. It wastes your time and it [...]

S.W.A.G.

Silver, wine, art, and gold have been touted as the investment alternatives for wealthy investors, many of whom have been pounded in the financial markets. We have certainly seen this in the art market where the recent sale of Munch’s iconic The Scream went for $120 million at auction. That reportedly went to, of course, financial giant [...]

Great Expectations

Brazil bank strike

Central bank staff are striking for a 23% pay deal to keep pace with inflation, even though one of the institution’s key roles is to curb inflation.

- FT News Briefing.

The Chinese apparently have a saying: a man [...]

An Olympian Hurdle

Very little has definitively changed during the course of the financial crisis and where there has been evidence of change, very little of it seems to have been positive. Governments appear to believe that a problem of overmuch indebtedness can be resolved by the creation of more debt. Which is why [...]