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In the wake of the US defeat in Afghanistan, I’ve reinforced my previous belief that outside powers (particularly Western democracies) are almost always going to lose in counter-insurgency wars of this kind. I covered this theme is a post from 2004. But what was the source of the confidence that wars of this kind could be won? One of the most important was the Malayan Emergency, in which Britain defeated a communist insurgency, supported mainly by impoverished Chinese workers on...

In a post last week, I raised the possibility that the vaccines might not get the virus under control this winter. Since the markets still seem to be pricing in vaccine success, this could have implications for investors. How might we think this through in more depth? One way to do this is by looking at the Google Mobility Index and seeing if it is any good at explaining EPS growth in the S&P. Here I take an aggregate construction from the index that encompasses all of the...

from Lars Syll Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Sapere aude! “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part...

from Blair Fix The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket. — Richard Feynman Like Richard Feynman’s game of science, evolution is stuck in a straitjacket. It is driven by chance. But evolution is not free to explore every path. Take, as an example, the evolution of organism size. While it seems like there are many routes to bigness, I propose that there is fundamentally only one: sociality. In the march towards ever-larger organisms, there have...

Two weeks ago I wrote a piece for Newsweek outlining potential troubles in the junk bond market. I pointed out that there is a strong possibility that enormous junk bond issuance is floating companies that otherwise would have gone bankrupt due to the lockdown measures. Here is that piece: The Next Financial Crisis is Coming But that is not the only bubble on the horizon. The lockdowns and work-from-home appears to have driven investors pretty kooky because we also have what...

I’ve written another denunciation of Labor’s capitulation on high-income tax cuts at Independent Australia. Read there, comment here. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

For the last year and a half the biggest sentiment driver in markets has undoutedly been COVID-19. This is perfectly reasonable as the virus is probably the biggest single driver of variables that matter in financial markets – from inflation expectations to earnings. Yet it has been striking that most financial analysts have been outsourcing their analysis of the trajectory of the virus to those in public health. In theory this is reasonable. Many are assuming that the public...

from Lars Syll What is to take the place of neoclassical economics and its neoliberal policy offshoot? There is no shortage of candidates, grouped under the broad banner of economic heterodoxy. Some of these successor doctrines – behavioral economics and complexity economics are examples of note – take the neoclassical orthodoxies as a point of departure. They therefore continue to define themselves in relation to those orthodoxies. Others avoided the gravitational pull altogether – or,...