Overall: “If voting made a difference, they would make it illegal,” tweeted Julian Assange, Agitator in Chief, tucked tightly into the Ecuadorian Embassy, his home of five years. Madrid had just arrested nine Catalonian democratically elected parliamentarians, charged with rebellion, sedition and embezzlement. 90% of Catalan voters who defied Spanish riot police, voted for independence. Catalonians are not alone in t

“The most common example is a ball sitting atop a hill,” she said, polished accent, hint of condescension. “Locally stable, but one nudge and it’s all over.” She drove terribly fast, discussing Minsky Moments; the idea that persistent stability breeds instability. “Naturally each cycle is different in key respects, and that’s because you’re far better at preventing past problems from recurring than new ones from aris

Hope all goes well… “There is no one left at a bottom and no one left at a top,” said Yoda, high in the Rockies, autumn fading, peaks dusted. “Value investors bought the S&P 500 down to 800 in 2009, yet it fell to 666.” That last panic leg found the final seller. “The search for the final buyer has begun,” said Yoda, the market’s biggest S&P 500 local, stepping carefully, deliberate, staff in hand. “We’ll fin

Hope all goes well… Abe wins landslide, Nikkei soars to 21yr high. Xi Jinping is named in China’s constitution, cementing his place alongside Mao, equities jump. House Republicans pass $4trln budget resolution, lifting hopes for a $1.5tlrn tax cut/reform. Despite devastating hurricanes, US Q3 GDP expands 3%, S&P 500 hits record high. VIX 9.80. Biggest Nasdaq 100 daily gain in 2yrs. Bezos becomes world’s richest m

“The trajectory will be a bit like the market,” said my friend. I’d reached out, looking for direction, a path. A recent knee operation has left me on crutches. A gimp. Which is no big deal but for the fact that my long daily walks, runs or cycles are off the table for three months. Perhaps more. “The long-term trajectory is up and very rewarding,” he continued. As a young man, I filled my life with noise. Commodity

“China’s financial system is a hermetically sealed snow globe,” he said. “They’ve built a system to resemble ours on the surface, but scratch it and you discover something altogether foreign.” China has banks. They lend money. But pierce the patina and you find a vast subsidy machine, with no cold-blooded allocation of capital. There are no defaults to speak of; just bailouts, no reckonings. “The appearance of a mode

Hope all goes well… They sat in silence. One hundred billionaires, surrounded by their 2,200 political peers, all fantastically wealthy. Some still remembered Mao’s Great Leap Forward, when 45mm peasants died of starvation, one misstep in his thousand mile march, 1958-62. Most did not. But they all reflected on their triumph over Soviet Communism. Since its collapse in 1991, Russian real GDP is nearly unchanged, its

Overall: “Imagine 3,500 elephants,” said Andrew Jones, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury. “Or consider 900 double decker buses.” And at least one bored American did. “That is the rough weight of the 1.2bln coins the UK public has handed in over the past six months.” You see the British have introduced a new twelve-sided pound coin, replacing the little round bloke they’ve had since 1983 (no longer legal tender effe

Hope all goes well… “What’s the endgame?” bellowed Biggie Too, in baritone. “What’s the final moment?” barked the Chief Global Strategist for one of Wall Street’s too big to fail affairs, letting the verse float like a bubble, warping, distorting, morphing in the autumn air. “It started with liquidity and it’s ending with technology,” hummed Too. “Big money, big tech. Big tech, big money. Uh huh. Uh huh.” The sunligh

“Every single trading decision leads to another,” said Roadrunner. “And when you get offsides in a market, it’s difficult to get back in sync,” explained the biggest market maker in equity volatility. “So I spend my quiet hours going back in time, revisiting the series of events and decisions that led me to the present.” The world rushed past us, a never-ending flow, and I recalled a point far upstream when we first