One upon a time, in the early 2000s, a small company had a little HR issue: one of their employees was a bit of a weirdo. He was, more to the point, really weirding out one of his coworkers, and she said she felt uncomfortable coming in to work. HR
A common theme I’ve mentioned — in pieces on mortgages, industry demographics, energy, and bubbles generally — is the idea that the perception of lower risk creates the reality of higher risk. This theme is hardly original to me; Hyman Minsky wrote about it, and anybody can intuit it from thinking
A few weeks ago, the CEO of a Chinese company got in some legal trouble. They had her dead to rights: a camera had seen her crossing a street against the light, facial recognition software had matched her image to a database, and so she was promptly issued a ticket.
One of the best business parables goes like this: A man walks into a bar, and he tells the bartender “I bet you $10 I can bite my eye.” The bartender says “You’re on.” He pops out his glass eye, puts it in his mouth, and bites down. The
Classical value investors were my first investing subculture, back in the early 2000s. Like all subcultures, they have their sacred texts (The Intelligent Investor, Warren Buffett’s various epistles), their status games (Usually value investors are really impressed by obscure stocks — “My biggest position is a Hungarian haberdashery company trading
The idealized model of the way the media operate is this: a reporter makes a bunch of observations, slowly comes to a conclusion, and then writes up what they learned in order to let the reader draw their own conclusion. The cynic says this is 100% backwards: a reporter starts
There are really only two things that get the financial sector in trouble: excess leverage, and maturity transformation. Excess leverage is easy to understand. If you have $100 of assets, and you borrow $50 against it, you’re safe as long as the value of your assets never declines by
When people talk about the financial services industry and subsidies, they’re usually thinking of implicit subsidies the industry receives — you can cast the bankruptcy code, the tax treatment of interest, and even the existence of central banks as an implicit finance industry subsidy. But it’s a tricky topic:
American liberals and conservatives don’t differ in explicit beliefs all that much. In a non-parliamentary system, the two parties coalesce at just-visibly-left- and just-visibly-right-of center. There’s no need to go any further, and per Hotelling’s Law it’s a bad idea anyway. And yet on countless individual
The copywriter Eugene Schwartz was a master growth hacker. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure if a product was worth manufacturing — so he’d run ads for it and sell it anyway, and just cancel the orders if demand wasn’t there. Sometimes, it’s the marketing campaign that creates the
Campaign finance laws exist to provide transparency and prevent undue influence. It would be bad for a very rich person to write a giant check to a politician who, in return, passed laws that made that rich person richer. That’s especially risky because it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. If
Is there a speed limit for wealth creation? Two recent Twitter threads asked this question in two different ways, which is the sign of an interesting problem. In both cases, the question is: subject to an extreme constraint — time or headcount— how rich can you get? This is a salient