Its been an “interesting“ year and rather than peer into the chasm that is the prediction business, a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time and energy apart from Saxo Bank’s Outrageous Predictions, which I always find amusing and are worth looking out for, here are ten quotes from the past which are still relevant today and will be forever or until humankind gets to grips with its emotional intelligence.
1. A salutary lesson from the GOAT from Omaha.
“My perhaps jaundiced view is that it is close to impossible for outstanding investment management to come from a group of any size with all parties really participating in decisions. This made me reflect on the fact that the overwhelming majority of the literature and research around behaviour and decision making produced in recent decades has been about how individuals make choices, but in virtually every walk of life - politics, business, family and investing - decisions are frequently made by groups of people. Despite this little time appears to be spent seeking to understand how groups function. This is a severe oversight. If we thought individual choice was confusing and problematic, just wait until we start putting people together."
Warren Buffett
Hat tip to Joe Wiggins
Doesn’t it make you wonder why some folks entrust their wealth and savings to these investment behemoths that suck you in with the lie that bigger is better, more resources and more expertise, blah, blah, blah. I remember sitting in on a European fund managers investment committee meeting many moons ago. Forty people sat around the table. Yes, forty and yes it was a big table. After a very short period of time it turned into a bun fight with different factions splitting off and discussing their own opinions. The fund had been very successful, and I went to the meeting to see if I could understand why. The lesson I came away with was that they had been lucky, so we did not invest. The fund continued to be lucky for a while, but the inevitable eventually happened; their luck ran out
2. Investment or speculation?
In a speculative market, it’s not the understanding of valuation, or economics, or market history that gets you into trouble. It’s the assumption that anybody cares. John Hussman
Or put another way
The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.
We have Donald Rumsfeld to thank for the fascinating journey into known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns for which he was ridiculed at the time as is I suspect will be Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek for this acute observation
Unknown knowns: all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality.
You only have to look back a few weeks to the outcome of the US Presidential election to come up with a bucket load of those.
4. Why have we stopped thinking for ourselves?
The Slog at https://therealslog.com/ sheds some dark light of the Groupthink Tendency
This last lockstep-groupthink tendency is running more and more of our planet in the 21stcentury, and without doubt enjoys a powerful ascendency today. Dark Age thinking is everywhere – settled science, liberal correctness, stakeholder capitalism, World Health, climate change, New Normality, cancel culture, reprogramming, NWO, Silicon Valley, digital currencies, transhumanism and the allegedly inevitable geopolitical blocism that is the ‘only possible future’ in a world that is ‘irreversibly’ globalist.
It is all self-fulfilling prophecy in favour of State Control, and quite rightly evokes among the open-minded citizen demographic the traditional sarcastic irony of, “What on Earth could go wrong with that then?”
The Slog
What could go wrong? Just look around you…
5. England your England
Written nearly a century ago but still appropriate today now that we have five years of Starmerism to endure. Substitute India for Paris, the MainStream Media for Moscow and American for Russian and its spot on
“One of the dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class… In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country, they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.”
George Orwell
6. In not dissimilar vein Ludwig von Mises, the architect of Austrian economics, (Keynes didn’t have a clue compared with these guys) states the obvious on Omnipotent (Totalitarian?) government
The state is a human institution, not a superhuman being. He who says “state” means coercion and compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: The police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
Ludwig von Mises, ‘Omnipotent Government’, 1944, Chapter 3.
You think we don’t have one?
7. Bankers; what would we do without them? Ooh try me!
Another timeless quote from the Greatest Corsican of all time – That’s a GreatCOAT that you are wearing!
When a government is dependent upon the bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.
Napoleon Bonaparte
The first part of his observation is one of today’s big issues. Without central bank acquiescence – bond buying – governments are in the proverbial. The second part is always and forever true.
8. California dreaming. It was such a lovely place – well it was when I was there in the 1970s.
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
Edward Abbey
9 More cognitive dissonance from the central bonkers – deliberate spelling.
All that said, given the fundamental factors in place that should support the demand for housing, we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spill overs from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.
Ben Bernanke in May 2007.
And yet we still believe that the Fed can deliver us from evil
10. This epithet should be pinned over the doorway to the DOGE HQ
I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people under the pretence of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
Ronald Reagan understood what Jefferson meant. The most terrifying words in the English language.
I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
There are so many good quotes out there I’m going to throw in a few bonuses.
We really don’t like change, do we? Socrates spotted the way out.
The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
Socrates
The problem we still face though is encapsulated in the phrase “Follow the money.”
Wouldn’t true altruism be maaaarvellous? Oh wish.
And finally a quote on AI written way before it became a meme…
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
Terry Prachet in the Hogfather.
And finally finally it’s Deja Vu all over again
The defining characteristics of the Seventies were economic disaster, terrorist threats, corruption in high places, prophecies of ecological doom and fear of the surveillance state’s suffocating embrace. The 1970s have merely been lurking, like a mad woman in the attic, waiting for a suitable moment when they can re-emerge and scare us out of our wits all over again.
Dominic Sandbrook in the ‘State of Emergency: The Way We Were’.
Have a great Christmas. I’ll be in Sri Lanka thinking of you freezing in Blighty. Or maybe I won’t 😎
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