Month

Hope all goes well… “Absent Trump winning, nothing changes,” said the CIO. “But if he does, everything could.” Weinergate hit the tapes late Friday. Yet another Dickileaks scandal, and this one with just 11 days to go. “As an immigrant here in America, I don’t want to see the kind of change he represents, but as a guy running a macro fund, I kind of do,” he admitted, pounding the Mexican peso like a piñata. “I reckon

Overall: “We prefer to not keep interest rates at such low levels for an excessively long time,” announced Draghi, squinting. “Unwelcome side-effects may accumulate over time,” continued the central banker, staring, straining to see, the future blurry. Never in human history has the outlook been so uncertain. Homo Sapiens hunted and gathered for 150 monotonous millennia. Then farmed for 120 mind numbing centuries, un

“We decided to close our firm,” read the email from a friend. I moved it to a folder that’s filling up fast. Been a brutal year in an unforgiving industry. Change is in the air. It usually arrives slowly, quietly, fog. But sometimes change is a hurricane. Today’s tempest is snapping saplings, uprooting oaks. A large state pension just announced a “Back to Basics” investment strategy; the commission voted unanimously

Overall: “You watch Saturday Night Live?” asked the CIO, high atop his prodigious pile. Of course I had. “How about Colbert?” he asked. Yup. “The Daily Show?” Naturally. “Did you make it through the debate or just catch the highlights?” Watched it all. “I’m not the puppet, you’re the puppet!” he shouted, repeatedly, losing his mind. We all are. And attempting to move on, I asked if he’d seen Norway’s $880bln sovereig

Hope all goes well… “You do know that in 2012, Obama won Florida by just 74k voters?” asked the political analyst. I didn’t. “There were still 725k eligible Latinos who didn’t vote,” he said. “And did you know that there were 2.5mm eligible white voters in Florida without a college education?” Didn’t know that either. That’s a lot of votes in a state where Obama received 4.237mm votes to Romney’s 4.163mm. It’s an awf

“Right back where we started,” said the CIO, spinning, dizzy. “Twelve months ago we were talking about a December rate hike.” The Fed was intent on normalizing interest rates, and if the rest of the world struggled to adjust, so be it. “It was their experiment with raising real interest rates and they were telling us to expect four more hikes in 2016.” Inflation had remained subdued ever since the 2008 crisis, but in

My email to the team… Subject: Good Company Hi All – Late last night, I was reading an analysis on the state of the world economy written by a leader in our field. Being interested in discussing it further, I sent him an email, asking to get together. And with my fingers limbered up, I fired off notes to two others of similar stature. All three replied either side of 11pm. One of their personal assistants followed up

Hope all goes well… Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize winner, artist, mirror. Ballad of a Thin Man: You walk into the room, With your pencil in your hand. You see somebody naked, And you say, “Who is that man?” You try so hard, But you don’t understand. Just what you’ll say, When you get home. Because something is happening here, But you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones? You raise up your head, And you ask, “Is

Overall: “Extreme economic events have often challenged existing views of how the economy works and exposed shortcomings in the collective knowledge of economists,” said Yellen, searching for excuses, groping, blind. “The Fed is likewise engaged in ongoing research to seek answers,” she explained, announcing a series of questions that her board of economic scientists are exploring to better understand our post-crisis

Overall: “I was inspired by the interlocking forms in Celtic art,” explained Dr. Feringa, the Nobel recipient, a nano-machine pioneer. Scientists created inert molecular rings, but a machine requires moving parts, and he discovered how to build dynamic interlocking rings around a charged copper ion. Fifteen years later, his molecular machine spun 12 million times per second. “I feel a little bit like the Wright broth