Tag Archives: Markets

Bitcoin Is A Lot Scarier Than China | Crypto 1

I’ve been bothered by Cryptocurrency for quite some time. I started following it seriously again after the 2017 peak and crash. I’ve always been leery of talking about it because I so fundamentally did not get why it continued to be a thing. After researching it at great length in recent months, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the world that’s crazy, not me. If cryptocurrency continues on its current trajectory, it’s got a lot of terrifying implications. I begin to unpack those in this video, which is intended to be the first of three.

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Saudi Arabia Is The Stock Market

That old, way over-quoted saying, attributed to Keynes, keeps reverberating in my head lately. “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”.

Almost three years ago, I put out a video mocking Saudi Arabia’s investing strategy, calling it plainly irrational and irresponsible, and destined to end in tears. Well, so far it looks like my prediction is a failure. In fact, this investing strategy may be the most successful thing that MBS has done, staving off financial disaster for his country, and in the process making himself just as valuable to US politicians as Saudi Arabia was back in the 20th century when we needed their oil.

This one was interesting. The fact that I need to produce longer videos kind of ambushed me here. I intended to focus on how the MBS-Khashoggi issue is a side-show to what our true priorities should be, but the need to correct my older video on Saudi investing kind of swallowed my scripting process, drawing in Gamestop and some media critique.

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WTF Happened To Oil Prices This Week!?! | Markets Are Dumb 13

Futures Markets are a lot more interesting than you’d think. They are a key piece of financial infrastructure, that helped us build the modern world. If you’re interested, William Cronon’s book, “Nature’s Metropolis” is fascinating on the way that futures markets freed farmers and other economic actors from the tyranny of uncertainty and time. On Monday we got a rare, frightening look at what can happen when a futures market breaks. In this video we lay out why US oil prices fell into the -30s on Monday April 20th.

Despite what much of the business press has told you, this price fall wasn’t just a financial oddity. If certain things don’t happen, these prices risk becoming a monthly occurrence. As the Coronavirus depression proceeds, we are likely to see further examples of financial machinery breaking down. Get a preview by watching today’s video.

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Donald Trump: The Man Who Killed The World | Coronavirus 4

What a week! Today’s video deals with a troubling aspect of all this that hasn’t really begun to be reckoned with yet. Because of CDC and FDA screw-ups, and Trump’s campaign against acknowledging the disease, we are only now waking up to the fact that the United States probably harbors more cases of Coronavirus than any other country in the world, including China. This has probably been true for weeks, or maybe even a month. What this means is that our country has acted as a super spreader, sending this disease everywhere. We have the medical capacity to (hopefully!) keep this from being too much of a mass death event. Many of the countries we gave this disease to do not have that capacity. While Donald Trump has done the United States incredible damage with his mismanagement of this pandemic, he may have done even more to harm the rest of the world.

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The Stock Market’s “Trump Bump” Is Over | Markets Are Dumb 2

With today’s video we go all in on discussing the US stock market. There’s this idea that stock markets are somehow rational, or serious. People who talk about it are always wearing suits, and we put a lot of effort into making all the details of interest rates, portfolio management, and valuations seem boring. The stock market is none of these things. In fact it’s nuts. By going through the history of the “Trump Bump”, I attempt to draw the curtain back a bit.

Unfortunately, watching the video, I think I screwed something up. It’s not that the story I put forward is wrong, it’s just that I left too much out. The video falls into the “Presidents impact everything” school of commentary. I hate that school. The differing views market makers took of Trump and Obama are tremendously important to this particular economic story, but that doesn’t mean that presidents are actually all that powerful. I really don’t want to create that impression, and I apologize if I did so with this video.

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What’s an Economy? | Markets Are Dumb 1


I feel like markets and economics have been an underpinning of what I’ve been talking about for quite some time now. It’s been a troubling thing for me. There’s always a lot of certainty when these issues come up in political discussions, but usually almost nothing backing up that certainty. The conditions we’re looking at are always changing, and the theories that people gravitate to are some of the least proven imaginable. Economics has pretensions to being a science. But the variables are immense, and there’s really only one result.

We have one world economy, and its performance at any given time is the only thing that we have to point to, to see whether our theories are working. There is no control group. Most of the figures we rely on to measure what’s going on are little better than rough estimates, and the political consensus rarely lasts a decade. I have high hopes for the profession of economics. People are doing amazing work in the field, and the move onto the internet that our species is currently undergoing provides the possibility of real measurement (and Orwellian nightmares). I’m confident that the future is bright, but I think we all need a lot more humility in talking about the economy. Which is why I made today’s video, and why I’ll be adding to the series in the coming weeks…

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