Worst Financial Commentary Ever?

By -
When I worked at a hedge fund, the taders were constantly mocking the "explanations" for price movements being offered in the financial press. But today I saw perhaps the "best" "explanation" I have encoutered. I don't think CNN offers an embed link to this video -- and once you listen to the pearls of financial wisdom, you'll understand why. Explaining the reason gold prices are rising, Carter Evans reveals the secrets of high finance:

"[Gold is going up] because the amount of gold can actually be accounted for whereas stocks and paper currency are really just a representation."

So there you have it folks: gold is going up because there is no possible way of knowing just how much IBM stock there is out there, while for gold, we know the exact quantity to the ounce, even of the undiscovered bits still in the ground.

Comments

  1. scineram9:34 PM

    To counter the idiocy, I found this to be a sensible perspective on liberty, regulation and litigation.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more