I’ve got an extended dance version of my column (three pages!) in the magazine this week. It’s basically an extreeeemely condensed version of my book, which coincidentally is also called The Myth of the Rational Market. The print version of the article is really wonderfully laid out, and while the online version can’t offer such beauty …
My colleague Stephen Gandel did the hard work of watching the Ken Lewis hearing today on TV, and e-mails this report:
The most important thing we learned from the Ken Lewis hearing today is that the Bank of America CEO has no idea what the definition of the word “threaten” is.
Lewis testified that he was considering backing out of his …
Slate’s The Big Money is running a two-part excerpt from my book. Not just any excerpt, but an excerpt from the especially wonky Chapter 8, “Fischer Black Chooses to Focus on the Probable.” It’s Fischer Black day here at the Curious Capitalist! Anyway, Part 1 ran Monday. Part 2 is online now. Enjoy! (And enjoy the big ads for Barry …
Just remembered this, in reference to the previous post. It’s from Keynes’ Tract on Monetary Reform, right after the famous line about us all being dead in the long run:
Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.
Black’s …
Ezra Klein quotes from a new paper by Tyler Cowen on the financial crisis:
In a strict rational expectations model, we might expect some people to overtrust others and one view of rational expectations is that investors’ errors will cancel one another out in each market period. Another view of rational expectations is that investors’
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Well, this and the fact that I have an extra-long column due.
Update: Okay now (Wednesday morning at 11:11) it’s up to #53, thanks to Burton Malkiel. But it has dropped to #2 in investing books—because Peter Schiff was on the Daily Show last night. My dead-tree work for the day is almost done, so pretty soon I’ll be blogging again …
I had this thank you letter in mind that I was going to write to Peter Bernstein. It wasn’t going to be electronic, and it wasn’t going to be just a brief note. The proximate cause was the blurb he wrote for the back cover of my new book, but I meant to thank him more generally for making the book possible. He had given me the idea for …
Zvi Bodie e-mails with an interesting question, related both to my article about long-run investing in the current TIME (in which he plays a starring role) and my book:
If you doubt the rationality of the stock market, then isn’t investing in stocks a crap shoot? How can you be sure that there is a positive risk premium? The historical
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I’ve been staying away from book-related self-promotion here lately, but it’s a big weekend for The Myth of the Rational Market. The book goes on sale Tuesday, and in between checking my Amazon rankings every 20 minutes (currently at #279!) , I’ve been obsessing over the weekend coverage. There’s the Roger Lowenstein review in the WaPo, …
I have a big story in the new TIME (with Steven Johnson’s Tweet Heard Round the World on the cover) about what ever happened to stocks for the long run. A sample:
The notion goes back to 1922, when a bond brokerage in New York City hired Edgar Lawrence Smith to put together a pamphlet explaining why bonds–and certainly not stocks–were
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The employment numbers released today were pretty encouraging. Payroll employment dropped by significantly less in May than most people expected, and while the unemployment rate is now at a scary 9.4% (and is headed higher), that’s a lagging indicator of the state of the economy. The index of weekly leading indicators compiled by the …
Evan Newmark has a column in the WSJ making the case that we should start honoring Hank Paulson as a “national hero.” Newmark lists the various improvements in credit markets since Paulson got Congress to approve his Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall, then writes:
All of this is not to suggest that TARP alone made all these good
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