“What were you guys talking about?” asked Jackson, as we left the office. My 13yr old had swung by after practice, waiting for a ride home. Instead of answering directly, I asked him what he thought our investment team had been discussing. “You were all trying to figure something out, and it seemed like you kind of did, but it also seemed like you kind of didn’t.” He wasn’t wrong. And sensing an opportunity to explai

“Say what?” said Xi. “Shanghai fell 12.1%,” said Zhou. “Last week?” said Xi. “No Shanghai fell 12.1% this week,” said Zhou, correcting his President, “You must be thinking of 2 weeks ago, when Shanghai fell 13.3%, because last week it only fell 6.3%.” Xi pouted worse than usual, sat in silence. Zhou squirmed, filled the void with a parade of policy pronouncements, “Last Friday we cut the required reserve ratios by 50

Hope all goes well… “If the government’s intention is clear,” said the CIO, late at night from Hong Kong, “people will always run ahead of it.” Only the rare soul stands defiant before a determined tank. “Beijing wanted a gradual rise in stocks, but received a year’s gain every two weeks.” Policy-makers and regulators found themselves ill-equipped to deal with the proliferation of leverage across multiple exchanges,

“Two BMWs pull up at a traffic light,” he said. “The black person says the white man got rich because of Apartheid. The white man says the black person must be a corrupt civil servant.” He’d flown in from Johannesburg. A freedom fighter turned policy-maker. “They both might be completely wrong, but when the standard stereotype is that everyone who gets ahead does so by underhanded means, it becomes acceptable to get

The little brown giant cleaned his glasses, adjusted his dhoti, and addressed the heaving masses. “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest,” said Mahatma Gandhi, exhausting the topic of statehood, presenting mankind with a seed. And as the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, fled their homelands for America, the former withered, while the latter blosso

Hope all goes well… “Completely unexpected,” he said, from Europe Saturday night. “They were so close, their differences were meaningless.” Political analysts scurried around the CIO, searching for motives, meanings, machinations. “Did Tsipras ever really want a deal? Did Merkel? Is the die now cast? How will the ECB act Sunday, Monday? When will they drop the hammer on Greek banks? Will they activate SMP? How will t

Overall: He stood at the podium. The temperature rising, the room shrinking. A victim of game theory gone bad. And as his options narrowed in inverse proportion to his desperation, Tsipras considered the rationality of irrationality. But having played a poor hand poorly, it was unclear whether even this tactic was worth the effort so late in the game. Of course, the Greek was not alone. Policy makers across the globe

“Imagine there are two human beings in the world; my father and myself,” he said. “Dad owns a $10mm house, he’s retired with 10yrs to live and needs $1mm per year to pay the bills.” Which apparently marks the poverty line in Greenwich. “So Dad needs to sell the house to me. But there’s a problem; I only make $50k a year.” Of course there’s a way to intermediate that; a third party can lend the son $10mm at 0.1% inter

Hope all goes well… “Landing an airplane is a complicated task, but you do the same things every time,” said Eagle, swooping down from Gotham’s highest perch, to visit my new nest. “But surfing, now that is truly complex; you’re riding a wave,” he explained, narrowing focus. “The Fed thinks they’re landing, when actually they’re surfing.” We looked out across Long Island Sound, clouds reflecting off its chaotic rippl

Week-in-Review: Mon: Chinese May trade surplus $59.5bln masks weakness (imports -18%, exports -2.8%), Japan Q1 GDP revised to +3.9% (prev +2.8%), Japan C/A surplus 10th straight mth, Korea 1-day MERS cases jump 23 people, G7 agrees to phase out fossil fuels, Erdogan losses majority, Merkel “time is running out for Greece,” German IP +1.4% yoy (+0.9% exp), German Trade balance remains at elevated levels led by an incr