More than twenty years ago, the late Samuel Huntington coined the phrase “Democracy’s Third Wave”. By that Huntington described the three phases/waves of democratic revolution that the world has experienced, starting with the Jacksonian democracy in the US in the 19th...

One of my favorite authors is Isaiah Berlin. I consider his anthology of essays by the title “The Proper Study of Mankind” as one of the finest books published in the 20th century. Isaiah Berlin had a notorious ideological conflict with Isaac Deutscher. Their public...

By Thursday last week we felt that given the markets drop by 5% this year, it was time to put some money to work by investing into companies with strong fundamentals and which seemed to be at a good entry point. We still believe that this will turn out to be a decent...

I did not expect the last commentary to start becoming a reality so soon. In that last commentary I explained that the emerging markets look like prime territory for a crisis. In the last few days we have witnessed significant emerging market turmoil. It started with...

As noted from these commentary pages before, I believe that we have entered into a watershed period that will determine if in about two-three years the global economic system collapses, or experiences a rebirth. We live in historical times, and for such a time as this...

Richard Koo has been known as the father of the “balance sheet recession” theory. The essence of his theory states that monetary policy becomes ineffective when interest rates drop to almost zero, and thus government spending (fiscal policy) can only rebalance the...

In this third and final commentary regarding market trends and prospects in 2014, I would like us to concentrate on what we assess to be key-elements for equity markets as the New Year unfolds. But first, a word on bonds: Like last year, we anticipate that the...

I boarded the flight from Chicago to London. From the plane’s speakers I could clearly hear Tom Petty’s voice singing his song about “dancing in the zombie zoo”. “How appropriate”, I thought. “It seems that we have a zombie economy which dances around equities’ gains,...

Numbers reveal conceptual relationships. Price movements become powerful sources of inferential knowledge regarding changing historical conditions. The rhythms of price movements signify an historical inevitability as has been shown over the course of the millennia....