Superb

The Ponzi pub crawl (via FT Alphaville and Dan Hon's blog)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How does it feel to be part of Europe?

I had this piece drafted before the murder of Jo Cox last week. But I don’t think it changes anything I was going to say. It simply makes it more urgent to say it. May I introduce you to my two lovely young nieces? Natasha is four months old and Rosalind four years. They live in rural Devon, and they’re just starting to discover the world and decide how to feel about it. I want to think a little about what it might feel like to be in their world. The campaign for Britain to remain in the EU has been full of facts and utilitarian arguments. Economic projections, dispelling of myths about regulations, estimates of the economic and tax contributions made by European workers in Britain. All the kinds of things that may convince you if your inclination is to weigh up the numbers and evaluate the facts. But there are plenty of people who don’t want to make a decision based on numbers, and I understand that. Numbers can be manipulated. We don’t all have the time or desire to r
Read more

Rebuilding macroeconomics

Spending today and tomorrow attending the Rebuilding Macroeconomics conference at the Treasury. The programme looks very interesting - highlights include: Ekaterina Svetlova's opening talk on "Imagining the Future", which I think will be quite relevant to System 3 and an idea I have been working on, prospective expectations: the concept that actors based their decisions not on a Nash equilibrium (rational expectations) or on a simple extrapolation of the past (adaptive expectations), but on the future they are best able to imagine. Sam Johnson on "The cognitive and affective processes that give rise to emergent economic order", which sounds right up my street. David Laibson on "Using model free data to predict future outcomes" - more in this case for the speaker than the topic. "Markets as a function of language: microfoundations of narrative economics" by Douglas Holmes - a topic that has been studied both by Robert Shiller and
Read more

Rigour? In a blog?

Brad DeLong has an impressively clear (although, or perhaps because, a bit technical) piece on risk appetite and fundamental values of assets . I feel I should respond to it, but it's such a tour de force of clear and explicit assumptions, rigorous logic and thunderous conclusions that I feel I barely can. I particularly loved this statement for pure bloody-minded literalism (that's a good thing, by the way): The fundamental values of asset prices are the money-metric values that the costate variables associated with the commodities would have in some reasonable utilitarian central-planning social-welfare-maximization exercise under reasonable utilitarian preferences. However, here is what comes to mind: Given that asset prices rarely approach the values Brad ascribes to them, could this be because there is competition for the limited amount of savings capital available in the world? If I, as a productively investing business, want to get access to some of it, I probably need t
Read more