The chief goal of society should be to maximize wealth, according to Tyler Cowen. Pursuing that goal has delivered everything from nutritious and abundant food, to air conditioning and smartphones in the developed world, and those benefits are spreading rapidly to the developing world. The challenge is how societies can embrace and implement that goal. If those challenges are overcome, the benefits to globally diversified equity investors will be substantial.
I can guarantee a few things about Howard Marks’ new book, Mastering the Market Cycle. You will enjoy the thoughtful writing in clear language, and you will learn one great, and I believe correct, idea about the operation of markets.
Michael Lewis’ account of governance in the age of Donald Trump is frightening, inspiring, and surprisingly lively.
For the first time in at least 40 years, there’s a fundamental economic reason that a yield curve near-inversion might notherald a recession.
Byron Wien discusses what people don’t recognize about Donald Trump, the future of Italy and the E.U. and whether federal deficits will be inflationary.
Among the populist ideas that have gained currency are hostility to free trade, a sharp reduction in immigration, the redistribution of income, and nationalism bordering on jingoism. Dambisa Moyo doesn’t like it, and neither does Ian Bremmer.
The rise of populism has been fueled by rhetoric bemoaning the downward plight of the middle class, and that chorus has been joined by many from the left. But are we really worse off than we were a generation or a century ago? Not according to Steven Pinker, whose new book documents the dramatic improvement in lives across the globe.
Why do experts, CEOs, politicians, and other apparently highly capable people make such terrible decisions so often? Is because they’re ill-intentioned? Or because, despite appearances, they’re actually stupid? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, philosopher, businessman, perpetual troublemaker, and author of, among other works, the groundbreaking Fooled by Randomness, says it’s neither.
In this far-reaching interview, Jack Bogle comments on the future of index funds, argues that the value premium has been arbitraged away and attacks publicly-held mutual fund companies.
Technology is the driving force of our economy, and investors and their advisors would be wise to learn as much about it and its history as they can. Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s A Mind at Play opens a window into a crucial period in the creation of the Information Age in which we now live.
What do living organisms, cities and businesses have in common? They all have organic characteristics: they’re born, grow, sometimes shrink and usually die. They all require energy to maintain and grow, and they all must deal with the sometimes undesirable byproducts of their existence.
Has productivity growth slowed in the U.S. and around the world, as is the conventional wisdom? Or is that just an illusion, caused by the difficulty of measuring the quality improvements that constitute the bulk of productivity growth? In a provocative interview, Woody Brock puts his unique spin on questions like these.
According to Richard Bookstaber, a financial risk manager is like a fire marshal. The problem, in a nightclub fire, is that people can’t get out fast enough because the exits aren’t big enough; they don’t have the time to get out because the fire is spreading too quickly; and there are too many of them.
Is the market efficient? Of course not – not exactly, or not even close, depending on your point of view. However, the efficient market hypothesis has remained surprisingly resistant. The reason is that, as MIT professor Andrew W. Lo says repeatedly in his new book, Adaptive Markets, “it takes a theory to beat a theory.” And, up to this point, there has been no alternative theory.
Who is better at value investing: robots or people? How have robots – the quantitatively-driven passive funds that hold, for example, low price-to-book stocks – fared against actively managed value mutual funds?
Have we all gone lazy? Are Americans no longer the restless go-getters they once were? Has our culture changed in ways that impede economic progress instead of naturally promoting it? In his new book, The Complacent Class, Tyler Cowen, one of the most eclectic and inventive authors on economic issues, says yes to all of these questions.
A common lament during the presidential campaign was over middle-class income stagnation and the wealth of the top 1%. But are most people getting poorer while the rich get richer? In a sparkling – and delightfully short – new contribution to the econo-optimist genre, Johan Norberg, author of Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, emphatically answers “no.”
Who would guess that the modern sciences of behavioral economics and the psychology of decision-making owe their origin to a love affair (no, not sexual) between two men born early in the last century and so different that one could barely imagine them speaking to each other? Yet that is the story chronicled by the extraordinary nonfiction writer Michael Lewis in The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed our Minds, which, despite some quirks, is a compelling and worthwhile read.
What effect will the index fund revolution and the Department of Labor’s (DOL) fiduciary rule have on active managers? The data shows that active management is still a healthy business model. But industry consolidation is coming and advisors will need to change the way they construct portfolios.
Should history regard Greenspan as a “maestro” who managed the economy to new heights of prosperity or as a blunderer who let the housing crisis, and other simultaneous crises, unfold?
