Future of Mutual Funds Future of Mutual Funds“Mutual funds are moving away from being a mass-market product, and becoming more of a niche product aimed at elderly investors who don’t know any better and who don’t worry much about total expense ratios.” --- Felix Salmon ( 6 Nov 09)
Icahn on Tyranny"A lot of people die fighting tyranny. The least I can do is vote against it.”– Carl Icahn at Texaco annual meeting. Jan. 20, 1988
Andy Beal --- Business HeroIt's dangerous to have business heros. Many fall from grace, and, if you have really looked up to someone, the fall can be heartbreaking. Still, I admit that Andy Beal is a hero of mine.
Beal Bank has its own very interesting model, and it has worked very well. For quotes from Andy Beal, you'll have to read the Forbes piece.
Advice for Older Folks.."Deferring retirement is probably the best piece of advice I can offer," says Olivia Mitchell, executive director of the Pension Research Council at the Wharton School. (WSJ 8/23)
I agree with this advice, but it is probably easier for a professor to say than for a coal miner to hear.
Dissing the Efficient Market Myth "My guess is that the myth of the rational market — a myth that is beautiful, comforting and, above all, lucrative — isn’t going away anytime soon." --- Paul Krugman in the NYTs 8/6/09
Placing VAR"In short, VaR, we think, is very useless but it’s not very irrelevant".
Huh?
This sounds like something that Yogi Berra would get credit for saying, but from an interesting piece at FT Alphaville.
Creative Power of PovertyWhen Roberto Benigni received the Academy Award for Life is Beautiful he said:
“I would like to thank my parents in a little village in Italy. They gave me the biggest gift --- of poverty --- and I want to thank them for the rest of my life.”
His speech is guaranteed to bring tears --- and laughter.
Time Reversal and Business Models If newspapers did not already exist, and a guy proposed starting one, you'd say he was nuts. This looks to me like a pretty compelling argument that newspapers (the physical ones) are asymptotically toast.
The Elasticity of Investor Caution "Any onset of increased investor caution elevates risk premiums and, as a consequence, lowers asset values and promotes the liquidation of the debt that supported higher asset prices. This is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums." --- Alan Greenspan, August 2005.
Spending Choices "The federal investment in finding cures for cancer – $3 billion annually [as of 1999] – is less than ... zero ... point ... zero ...zero ... zero ... four ... percent of our gross domestic product, or about one-seventh of what Americans spend on beauty products." --- Michael Milkin.
Mr. Credible on His Retirement In a 2006 news conference, Walter Cronkite said,
"Probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down, at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since."
Hubert Humphrey was not a great speaker, but the soundness of certain principles kept him from being worse. His favorite rule?
"Never talk about Father on Mother's day."
According to Balzac “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
This does seem harsh, but there are enough examples to make one think --- or at least be careful with published praise. I got the quote from Bill Gross's June commentary.
"It took the Romanovs almost 300 years to produce 18 czars. Obama did it in less than 100 days." --- Katherine Mangu-Ward (5/22/09)
"The financial industry grew to a point where it represented 25 percent of the stock market capitalization in the United States and an even higher percentage in some other countries." George Soros 12/8/08
In aggregate all bets net out, so the net revenue to the financial sector comes entirely from transaction costs (including spreads).
Isn't it goofy that capital directed to frictions could ever swell 25% of the total?
A postpositive word, usually an adjective, is placed after the word to which it relates, as in the newly invented Office of the President Elect.
"To say that a company that has successfully grown over a period of 65 years—a period marked by two world wars and a major economic depression—will suddenly be unable to adapt to the changing challenge ...flies in the face of common sense." --- Anthony De Lorenzo, "In Defense of the Automobile Industry," Letters to the Editor, The New York Times, December 19, 1973, recently quoted by Emma Rothschild.
Why does not this same logic apply to the former Soviet Union, the Ottoman Empire, or --- more humbly Barings Bank --- or Lehman Brothers?
What defies common sense is to suppose that every shock is survivable or that every enterprise or industry will sensibly adapt. The examples to the contrary would fill an encyclopedia. In fact, they do.
"Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime."
Allegedly from a T-shirt worn by Salman Rushdie
"We have one-hundredth as many farmers as we had at the turn of the 20th century. We now 500 times more grain." --- Dennis Gartman, 1/24/09.
I don't think so . It's more likely that we have only about one eighth as many farmers and probably less than 10 times as much grain. What are your estimates?
"Anyone who has been to an English public school will feel comparatively at home in prison." --- Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall (1928)
Larry N. Holifield, former head of the Mexico City office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, speaking about a plane crash (12/08) that killed several high officials of the Mexican government:
"People won't believe it was an accident. They think everything down there is a conspiracy because half the time it really is."
"Value at risk (V.A.R.) as a reliable measure of risk will hopefully be taken out and shot at dawn. "--- GMO Quarterly Letter Q3 2008.
Don DeLillo's memorial characterization of Norman Mailer's chosen task as “figuring out the world, sentence by sentence.”
Try corvids, the bird group which includes crows, rooks, and magpies. Following this up, I learned that blue jays are also of the corvidae group. Ex post this makes sense, but ex ante I would have been way off base.
“I sometimes think that general and popular Treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work.”
“At bottom, my critique is a pretty simple one. Nobody pays much attention to the assumptions, and the technology tends to overwhelm common sense.”
--- David Freedman quoted by Terry Speed in the IMS Bulletin (11/2008).
Our friend David was certainly right, yet sadly he never seemed refreshed by the miracles that occasionally attend the foolishness.
Consider the twin observations that all of the assumptions of the Black-Scholes model are dead wrong and still the formula created a trillion dollar industry.
Isn't that enough to make one sit back in awe --- or at least to chuckle?
The introduction by Mark Twain called the speaker the “hero of five wars, author of six books and future prime minister of England.”
The year was 1900, and the speaker, Winston Churchill, was 26 years old.
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." --- George Bernard Shaw
Since everyone in American thinks he or she is middle class, the appeal of a middle class tax cut is irresistible --- even if a trifle hokey.
[Snippet is sourced from Adi --- Thanks!]
“It does not matter how the facts occur in life. It matters how they are told.” --- Elsa Morante, quoted in the NYTs review of Woman of Rome (9/14/08)
"It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that." --- G. H. Hardy
"Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models." --- G.E.P. Box recently quoted by Dick DeVeaux in his talk "Math is music, Statistics is literature"
Moral? It is both cheaper and safer for artists to work from photos! --- JMS
Sounds More Like Berkeley?The official motto of the University of Pennsylvania is
Leges sine moribus vanae,
which is usually translated as "Laws without morals are useless" --- though instead of "useless" you might prefer "vacuous", "empty", or even "in vain." However you translate the motto, the sentiment seems more aligned with Berkeley than Wharton.
Now here is a puzzle: Did the motto framers "forget" to give proper attribution? Google can check that Horace said:
Quid leges, sine moribus vanae, proficiunt?
In English this is sometimes translated as "What good can laws be, unless based on the principles of morality?"
Addendum and Attribution : Oops, I wrote this before I discovered that this "attribution story" is already on the web in multiple forms, some in better shape than this. Still, once written, it stays --- but consider this my attribution attribution.
In the category of Best Abstract for a Paper in Economics: The prize goes to this baby.
Next, everyone's favorite, the mesmerized economists. They provide hours of innocent fun, well worth the minute they may take to download. Don't forget to explore the picture with your mouse. The economist are cutest when watching the index go South!
David MacKay's feature-by-feature comparison of his recent book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms with J.K. Rolling's less recent Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
"There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting." --- David Letterman
"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals." --- Winston Churchill
"Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced." --- Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."--- Oscar Wilde
"Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance." --- Sam Brown
To keep this page as fresh as possible, it is often restructured --- say by morphing a group of quotes into a rant. but there is also an intermediate (purgatory?) stage:
Credit Crunch Quotes: 2008, 2009, and Beyond
Among the many rants, I warmly recommend:
- "Market Quotes" --- Quotes that Poke Financial Markets
- The theory of meta-quotes,
- On language (and languages),
- Thinking, Understanding, and Computing
- More Quotes
- Leadership and Decision Making (essay frame)
- The Full List of Rants
Let me know if you fail to find an item that you need, or if you find a link that is broken.
Nothing Goes Past a Dancing Elephant. You can quote me on that.
