In the Canadian province of Quebec there was once a relatively average pharmaceutical company. But then some financial wizards of the McKinsey school of magic joined its top management, and they wanted to be big and powerful. Incidentally, at the…
In recent years a new category of investment products has emerged. Companies offering these products claim that they are able to systemically outperform a market index in the long run – a promise that has rarely been fulfilled within the…
Bill Ackman explains the basics of investing in under an hour. Amazing!
It is common knowledge that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has outperformed the equity markets by a wide margin. The degree of outperformance appears especially impressive if it is adjusted for inflation. Since 1964, the value of Berkshire Hathaway increased in…
There have been frequent calls for a new approach to economics in the press. For this purpose, George Soros founded the “Institute for New Economic Thinking” (INET). I personally do not see this as a solution. Nobody knows what “new…
Economics as a cock fight In August last year, Raghuram Rajan, the current Head of the Indian Central Bank and previous Professor of Finance in Chicago, wrote an article that had attracted considerable attention about the “paranoid style” of economic…
Is the economy complex or merely complicated? The methodological approach of mainstream economists largely involves seeing an economy as either in a state of equilibrium or in a state of striving to reach an equilibrium. Economists analyse factors and chains…
These days economists have a bad reputation. And not only because almost all of their forecasts are wrong. They failed to predict both the financial crisis and the Euro crisis; indeed, most of them did not even have a vague…
Due to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima 2011 and the US shale revolution prices for natural gas have developed in different directions in the past. However, this trend seems to have reversed recently.
A great video with Tim Harford from the FT, putting financial meltdowns into the broader context of complexity.
With a Steady Hand 