There was a great story about how Anna Delvey, a “fake it till you make it” fraudster, conned New York’s elite. I couldn’t help thinking that many of India’s crony-socialist corporate hoaxsters are Anna Delveys of India. Companies can
Mob Behaviour
In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
– James Madison
We Know Too Much
We will never again understand nature as well as Greek philosophers did. A general explanation of common phenomena in terms of a few all-embracing principles no longer satisfies us. We know too much.
Stepping Over 1-Foot Bars
In investing, there is no degree of difficulty. If something is staring you right in the face and the easiest decision in the world, the payoff can be huge. And we get paid, not for jumping over 7-foot bars, but for stepping over 1-foot bars.
The World Is Surprising
What you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.
Learning From Everyone
Intelligent individuals learn from every thing and every one; average people, from their experiences. The stupid already have all the answers.
– Socrates
Time Transforms Risk
Time is the dominant factor in gambling. Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin, for if there were no tomorrow there would be no risk. Time transforms risk, and the nature of risk is shaped by the time horizon: the future is the playing field.
The Financial Instability Hypothesis
The first theorem of the financial instability hypothesis is that the economy has financing regimes under which it is stable, and financing regimes in which it is unstable. The second theorem of the financial instability hypothesis is that over periods of prolonged prosperity, the economy transits from financial relations that make for a stable system to financial relations that make for an unstable system. In particular, over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance.
Hedge financing units are those which can fulfill all of their contractual payment obligations by their cash flows… Speculative finance units are units that can meet their payment commitments on “income account” on their liabilities, even as they cannot repay the principal out of income cash flows… For Ponzi units, the cash flows from operations are not sufficient to fulfill either the repayment of principal or the interest due on outstanding debts by their cash flows from operations.
The Impact of Technological Change on the Firm Boundary
In a landmark paper titled The Nature of the Firm published in 1937, then-26 year old economist Ronald Coase addressed the question of why firms exist. “Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is coordinated through a series of exchange transactions…