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

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/5/2011 10:07 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> Since other reads are faltering, maybe we all ought to read some good
> n-fic along the financial lines so many have been talking about...
> I did a bit of 'refutational' reading a while back with Von 
> Mises'--grandaddy
> of all of them there Viennese witchdoctors--Human Action......it was 
> easier
> than I thought to show-up his supposed premisses and first principles, 
> if I say
> so myself, and I have to, since i had no one to challenge me and don't 
> know how delusional
> I was....

Well, the very fact you're considering the possibility means you're not 
delusional.

But, practically no one is totally wrong about everything.

No matter how problematic it is, the market system at least has  a 
mechanism for setting prices and allocating resources, while the 
socialist system must rely on central planning, which is even more 
problematic.

Too bad everything's not as free as cyberspace, although THAT unlimited 
resource does produce a lot of clutter.

P




>
> *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 
> <mailto: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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