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“Who am I?” he asked. And the mirror reflected the answer; his silent eyes. “Well, how will I be remembered?” he pleaded. Silence. “Tell me the future!” cried the Greek leader. Silence. And all alone, away from the communist cacophony, unable to escape the fact that we are what we do, Alexis Tsipras swallowed the bitter hemlock. “Who am I?” asked Angela. Silence. “How will they remember me?” begged Merkel. Silence. A

Hope all goes well… “When a market breaks more than 20%, it’s brutal,” whispered the CIO, ear to the ground, listening for sounds of opportunity. Greeks groaned, Germans grunted. “Investors mentally budget for a 10% loss, some even budget for 20%, but no one prepares for 33%.” Brazilians bawled, South Africans squealed. “So when a market falls through 20%, it usually gets a lot uglier.” Amidst Turkish tantrums, as Ma

“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