NP: No gov't; best gov't..from John Lanchester LRoB

[Mark Kohut]

So, what do we think about Pynchon and all this shit? 
1) Gold Standard---good riddance to bad rubiish? GR and Inherent Vice...
 
2) In Against the  Day, the Vienna from which came the Von Mises/Milton Freidman, etc. school of
economics is ........NOT a healthy place?.....any connection,anyone think?   Or, is Pynchon's seeming
anti-statism akin--I said akin, not more--- to libertarian anti-Federal Reserve stuff, etc.?.....
 
3) IS Ayn Rand satirized in V.? Some think so...

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 4, 2011 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: NP: No gov't; best gov't..from John Lanchester LRoB

Yeah, right. Can't fool me. I know this stuff Richard.

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 4:04 PM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've read all these things. It's all inside baseball. Let's consider "A
> Random Walk Down Wall Street" where we learn of the three efficient market
> hypotheses. We've had a financial near death experience where the market has
> failed and shown that they are not efficient. All of these texts are part of
> the Chartered Financial Analyst program. Recall how many CFAs should have
> been jailed after the 2000 tech bubble blew up. I can draw a chart showing
> that a 60/40 or 70/30 or 80/20 combination of S&P and TBills beats anything
> in risk/reward. Getting into the first quadrant and staying there used to be
> the game and that is supposedly what quants did. For a number of years after
> the one day '87 crash, all of our institutional investors were looking at
> ways to outsmart such a thing and buying into mindless Strategic or Tactical
> Asset Allocation systems that promised simple machine methods of not losing.
> The trouble comes where these university endowment treasurers love to be
> told that they are smart and handsome. Once you've got that person loving to
> be told he or she is smart and pretty, you've got their money to manage.
> Fabozzi is great but not entirely useful. The WSJ always has been just a
> Republican operative. They turn up on PBS News Hour - it's joke.
> Read John Kenneth Galbraith. Find out what James K. Galbraith is doing. Send
> money to a Pacifica station.
>
> alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> The books and articles I recommned may bore you, but you'll learn how
>> things actually  work, what the problems really are, and what the real
>> solutions might be. I don't believe that the journalists and
>> ex-insiders and muck-raker types are worth reading if you want to know
>> the facts. To understand this stuff, you need to do some math and
>> master some fundamentals:
>>
>> How do banks and the Money Market and the the Federal Reserve work?
>>
>> What are derivatives?
>>
>> What is a Mortgage and what is a Mortgaged Back Security?
>>
>> How do the capital markets work?
>>
>> What is structured finance and private placement finance?
>>
>> So on and so forth in this, what many will find a stodgy and difficult
>> education.
>>
>> Next to To Big to Fail, Liar's Poker, Bonfire of the Vanities, The
>> Great Stagnation, Secrets of the Temple ...but still on Amazon's
>> shelf, you'll find Frank Fabozzi and Marcia Stigum. These are two
>> authors you simply can not avoid of you want that double major at
>> Princeton ;-)
>> The Money Market is a basic book with math in it and is a standard in
>> finance courses at the best B-school programs. Fabozzi is the experts
>> in derivities and mortgages and structured finance. You can never
>> really get a clear understanding of how things work unless you know
>> what is in these works.
>>
>> Now, sorry, but the best sources are the best and you'll need to put
>> up with the politics, WSJ and Barrons. Take the WSJ dailly and Barrons
>> on the weekend.
>>
>> That should do it.
>
>
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