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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

Hope all goes well… “My wife is a four-time veteran, she told me to suck it up, an epidural is the least of my problems,” I said to Wesley. “Yeah, she’s got a point sweetheart, you’re not going to be doing a lot of pushing,” said my nurse. “You see all I’m going to do is inject this little bit of something into your drip and all you’re going to do for me is count backwards from thirty to twenty.” In it went. “But I’m

Overall: “I went to buy me another goddamn bump stock,” shrieked the mentally retarded, Prozac-popping American on the Federal no-fly list, terrified it might be his last chance. “But the price jumped on me faster than you can say NRA.” You see, bump stocks were quickly out of stock. That’s what happens when you threaten to regulate something, anything. And when the NRA is open to restricting our 2nd amendment right

Overall: “The United States does not recognize the unilateral referendum,” announced Secretary of State Tillerson. What does it take these days Rex? 93% of voters in the Kurdistan region voted to establish an autonomous state in northern Iraq. And the only surprising thing was that 7% voted against independence. In 1776 an estimated 15-20% of the population in our Thirteen Colonies were British Loyalists. But votes d

Hope all goes well… “My colleagues and I may have misjudged the strength of the labor market, the degree to which longer-run inflation expectations are consistent with our inflation objective, or even the fundamental forces driving inflation,” admitted our Fed Chairwoman. “Our understanding of the forces driving inflation is imperfect, and we recognize that something more persistent may be responsible for the current

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” said the Englishman, stepping outside of himself. “That’s Goodhart’s Law.” Charles Goodhart observed that central banks measured money supply, and found certain M1 growth rates to be optimal. But once they targeted that optimal range, M1 lost its value as a measure. Market and economic actors adjusted their behavior to game the M1 system. So central b