On the Road to Damascus: Machiavellian Anatomy and Market Romanticism
One of my favorite songwriters (Rich Mullins) – who died prematurely sixteen years ago – wrote the song “On the road to Damascus”. Let’s recall some of those lyrics: On the road to Damascus I was hung in the ropes of success When you stripped away the mask...World Island Meets World Currencies: Planting the Seeds of Turbulence
In 1904 Sir Halford Mackinder published his famous paper The Geographical Pivot of History. The paper served as the cornerstone for the study of geopolitics in the 20th century. Sir Mackinder claimed in that paper that the age of sea power (initiated by Alfred Mahan’s...Financial Repression: The Modern Equivalent of Currency Debasement
We live in an era of financial repression where savings are penalized due to low interest rates. The latter is the outcome of the financial crisis. This in turn was caused by collateralizing questionable assets, derivatives’ volume explosion, securitizing...A Temporary Lapse in Markets’ Trend: Truncation Bias and Shortsightedness
Understanding market trends is more than merely intellectual gymnastics on financial and economic themes. Every market era emphasizes different aspects of its inheritance depending on its own problems. Our challenge nowadays – where a market theme is absent – is...On Spendthrift Lords, Rays of Hope, and Market Developments: Pyrrhic Victories and the Fable of Stability
The developed world’s crisis of 2008 was the result of credit over-extension fed by international imbalances and a finance sector that was issuing instruments whose collateral base was questionable. Developing economies such as the Chinese resorted in avoiding severe...Sign Up for Our Publications
