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It’s All About the Jobs… and Gold

This week we briefly look at yesterday morning’s dismal unemployment report, then drop back and survey some other very eye-opening data on employment. Some groups are (surprise) doing better than others. What would it take to get us back to “normal,” whatever that is? I give you a link...

Back to the Basics

This week we are going to revisit some themes concerning the problems of the debt and the deficit. I am getting a number of questions, so while long-time readers may have read most of this in one letter or another, it is clearly time for a review, especially given the...

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

The Efficient Market Hypothesis, according to Shiller, is one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economic thought. EMH should be consigned to the dustbin of history. We need to stop teaching it, and brainwashing the innocent. Rob Arnott tells a lovely story of a speech he was giving to...

The Problem With Indexes

This week we look at index funds, and specifically at the problems that the certain types of capitalization weighted index funds have. It is intuitively obvious that capitalization weighted indexes have a larger proportion of their assets in the larger stocks. But is this what a rational...

After Iraq: the Real World of Earnings

I wrote about a study last year that suggested corporate earnings in the US could not grow by more than the growth of GDP.

"Our median estimate of the growth rate of operating performance corresponds closely to the growth rate of gross domestic product over the sample period ....the growth in...