Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets PDF Author: William Bonner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118039157
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
An insightful look at how to succeed by going against the crowd Collectively, people think and act in ways that are different from how they think and act as individuals. Understanding these differences, says William (Bill) Bonner-a longtime maverick observer of the financial world and the vagaries of the investing public-is vital to preserving your wealth and personal dignity. From the witch-hunts of the early modern world to the war on terror, from dot-com mania to the real estate bubble, people have always been caught up in frauds, conceits, and wild guesses-often with devastating results. In Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets, Bonner and coauthor Lila Rajiva show groupthink at work in an improbable array of instances throughout history and reveal why swimming against the current pays. Shares the deeper secrets of investing and pushes you to question what this means for your financial well-being Explains why people so often abandon good sense and good behavior to "follow the crowd" Offers concrete advice on how you can avoid the "public spectacle" of modern finance The authors' cautionary tale of bubble economies reveals how the gush of credit let loose by Alan Greenspan has wreaked havoc on our lives-but their thoughtful and always entertaining approach also offers some sound investing principles for avoiding the pitfalls of the public spectacle, thinking for yourself, and protecting your money, your sanity, and your soul.

Markets, Mobs & Mayhem

Markets, Mobs & Mayhem PDF Author: Robert Menschel
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471267716
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
In this fascinating tour through cultural, global, economic, and business history, icon of the financial world Robert Menschel explores the phenomenon of crowd psychology and its effects on business and culture. Explaining how crowd psychology creates market bubbles and irrational exuberance, Menschel mines world history—from the rise of the Nazis in Germany, to the fanatical love of brands, to the Dutch tulip craze of the seventeenth century, to America’s 1990s Internet bubble—to reveal how the behavior of crowds negatively affects the business world. Championing the causes of individuality and common sense, Markets, Mobs & Mayhem offers real wisdom for investors who want to keep their wits when everyone else is losing theirs.

Financial Market Bubbles and Crashes

Financial Market Bubbles and Crashes PDF Author: Harold L. Vogel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316101576
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 471

Book Description
Despite the thousands of articles and the millions of times that the word 'bubble' has been used in the business press, there still does not appear to be a cohesive theory or persuasive empirical approach with which to study 'bubble' and 'crash' conditions. This book presents a plausible and accessible descriptive theory and empirical approach to the analysis of such financial market conditions. It advances such a framework through application of standard econometric methods to its central idea, which is that financial bubbles reflect urgent short side rationed demand. From this basic idea, an elasticity of variance concept is developed. It is further shown that a behavioral risk premium can probably be measured and related to the standard equity risk premium models in a way that is consistent with conventional theory.

The Art of Learning

The Art of Learning PDF Author: Josh Waitzkin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743277465
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
An eight-time national chess champion and world champion martial artist shares the lessons he has learned from two very different competitive arenas, identifying key principles about learning and performance that readers can apply to their life goals. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Dice Have No Memory

Dice Have No Memory PDF Author: William Bonner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118058135
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
Right now, Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury are all gambling with your future and your money. And it's contagious. Economies around the globe are suffering from the biggest multitrillion-dollar bets ever wagered on big governments and miraculous financial interventions in pretend "free markets." One man saw it all coming and told his readers well in advance of today's crisis. Bill Bonner reports on the true health and well-being of the world's largest economy to over half a million readers each day in The Daily Reckoning. His newsletter is to the mainstream financial press what the Gnostic Gospels are to the King James Bible. Back in 2000, Bill Bonner sounded like a prophet crying in the wilderness. While everyone scrambled to purchase shares of the latest and hottest dot-com, Bill announced his Trade of the Decade: Sell dollars, buy gold. Back in 2000, you could get an ounce for around $264. Today, you could pay as much as $1,400 for that same ounce. Finally, some of Bonner's best pronouncements, predictions, and profitable analysis are collected in one place. Dice Have No Memory gather's Bonner's richest insights from August 1999 through November 2010 to form a chronological narrative of economics in America. Here's a fraction of what you'll find inside: *Gold says "I Told You So" *Three out of Four Economists Are Wrong *Imperial Overstretch Marks *Why Debt Does Matter *Economic Zombies Shuffle Towards Bankruptcy Bonner's Dice Have No Memory offers elegies for economists, tips for investors, tirades against wasteful warfare past and present, and practical guides to modern finance with graceful prose, well-earned intelligence, and riotous irreverence. Bill Bonner's common sense genius rips the window dressing off modern finance - a world normally populated by misguided do-gooders, corrupt politicians, and big bankers empowered by dubious "mathematical" truths. The investing game is rigged, just like Monte Carlo. Instead of giving you magic formulas, this archcontrarian teaches you how to think clearly. And Dice Have No Memory gives today's investor the next moves he should make...before it's too late.

Structural Changes and their Econometric Modeling

Structural Changes and their Econometric Modeling PDF Author: Vladik Kreinovich
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030042634
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 776

Book Description
This book focuses on structural changes and economic modeling. It presents papers describing how to model structural changes, as well as those introducing improvements to the existing before-structural-changes models, making it easier to later on combine these models with techniques describing structural changes. The book also includes related theoretical developments and practical applications of the resulting techniques to economic problems. Most traditional mathematical models of economic processes describe how the corresponding quantities change with time. However, in addition to such relatively smooth numerical changes, economical phenomena often undergo more drastic structural change. Describing such structural changes is not easy, but it is vital if we want to have a more adequate description of economic phenomena – and thus, more accurate and more reliable predictions and a better understanding on how best to influence the economic situation.

On The Wrong Track

On The Wrong Track PDF Author: Ivan Pavell
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 1491878444
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 487

Book Description
Various opinion polls, both in the USA and Great Britain have revealed that a large proportion of citizens believe that their countries are heading in the wrong direction. The book generally describes the trends in the governance of the West that have been gradually changing Individualistic free societies to Collectivist societies of subservient people. This progression has been carried out by the so called Political elite. In practical terms we can see that there has been a growth of governments and their bureaucracies, as well as an encroachment of government's influence on what used to be citizen's individual decision. This occurrence has driven the attempt to "manage" entire societies. Examples can be noted in relation to: management of the economy, social engineering, the use of media and education to impose collectivist ideologies, extensive surveillance of citizens, and the general aggrandizement of governments and their rulers. These have all lead to the transformation of free individuals into subjects of the State (that is ruling elite) Alongside this transformation, the governments in the West are currently living beyond their means and are accruing enormous debts. The book compares the present Statism of the West with the Soviet Socialism, and how they are gradually drawing closer.

The Rise and Fall of Wessex Asset Management and the 2008 Crash

The Rise and Fall of Wessex Asset Management and the 2008 Crash PDF Author: Tim Weir
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443896780
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
What caused the Global Financial Crisis of 2008? What lessons should be learnt from it? Could it happen again? Taking his own career in the City of London as a starting point, the author tackles these important questions. His position as a fund manager in a variety of financial institutions during the 1980s and 1990s, and then as a hedge fund manager from 1999 to 2011, gives him the ideal vantage point. He is an insider: he knows the trade, the pitfalls, the hubris and the mistakes. This highly readable book highlights the fundamental weaknesses of the financial system: the problems surrounding liquidity and risk, the vulnerability of the market to errors and overshoots, and the devastating effects of amplifying those errors with unsustainable amounts of debt. The book also examines issues such as women in hedge funds, pay in the finance sector, and the future of the Eurozone. The distinction between the banking system and the hedge fund industry is also brought into sharp focus. With an entertaining and lively style, the book leads the reader effortlessly through complex arguments and analysis, leading to a comprehensive overview of the financial crisis as well as a clear-eyed grasp of the finer details. Whatever your level of financial expertise, this is essential reading.

Demonic

Demonic PDF Author: Ann Coulter
Publisher: Crown Forum
ISBN: 0307353494
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob. Sweeping in its scope and relentless in its argument, Demonic explains the peculiarities of liberals as standard groupthink behavior. To understand mobs is to understand liberals. In her most provocative book to date, Ann Coulter argues that liberals exhibit all the psychological characteristics of a mob, for instance: Liberal Groupthink: “The same mob mentality that leads otherwise law-abiding people to hurl rocks at cops also leads otherwise intelligent people to refuse to believe anything they haven’t heard on NPR.” Liberal Schemes: “No matter how mad the plan is—Fraternité, the ‘New Soviet Man,’ the Master Race, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Building a New Society, ObamaCare—a mob will believe it.” Liberal Enemies: “Instead of ‘counterrevolutionaries,’ liberals’ opponents are called ‘haters,’ ‘those who seek to divide us,’ ‘tea baggers,’ and ‘right-wing hate groups.’ Meanwhile, conservatives call liberals ‘liberals’—and that makes them testy.” Liberal Justice: “In the world of the liberal, as in the world of Robespierre, there are no crimes, only criminals.” Liberal Violence: “If Charles Manson’s followers hadn’t killed Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, Clinton would have pardoned him, too, and he’d probably be teaching at Northwestern University.” Citing the father of mob psychology, Gustave Le Bon, Coulter catalogs the Left’s mob behaviors: the creation of messiahs, the fear of scientific innovation, the mythmaking, the preference for images over words, the lack of morals, and the casual embrace of contradictory ideas. Coulter traces the history of the liberal mob to the French Revolution and Robespierre’s revolutionaries (delineating a clear distinction from America’s founding fathers), who simply proclaimed that they were exercising the “general will” before slaughtering their fellow citizens “for the good of mankind.” Similarly, as Coulter demonstrates, liberal mobs, from student radicals to white-trash racists to anti-war and pro-ObamaCare fanatics today, have consistently used violence to implement their idea of the “general will.” This is not the American tradition; it is the tradition of Stalin, of Hitler, of the guillotine—and the tradition of the American Left. As the heirs of the French Revolution, Democrats have a history that consists of pandering to mobs, time and again, while Republicans, heirs to the American Revolution, have regularly stood for peaceable order. Hoping to muddy this horrifying truth, liberals slanderously accuse conservatives of their own crimes—assassination plots, conspiracy theorizing, political violence, embrace of the Ku Klux Klan. Coulter shows that the truth is the opposite: Political violence—mob violence—is always a Democratic affair. Surveying two centuries of mob movements, Coulter demonstrates that the mob is always destructive. And yet, she argues, beginning with the civil rights movement in the sixties, Americans have lost their natural, inherited aversion to mobs. Indeed, most Americans have no idea what they are even dealing with. Only by recognizing the mobs and their demonic nature can America begin to defend itself.

Identifying Speculative Bubbles

Identifying Speculative Bubbles PDF Author: Bradley Jones
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484398270
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 49

Book Description
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the issue of how best to identify speculative asset bubbles (in real-time) remains in flux. This owes to the difficulty of disentangling irrational investor exuberance from the rational response to lower risk based on price behavior alone. In response, I introduce a two-pillar (price and quantity) approach for financial market surveillance. The intuition is straightforward: while asset pricing models comprise a valuable component of the surveillance toolkit, risk taking behavior, and financial vulnerabilities more generally, can also be reflected in subtler, non-price terms. The framework appears to capture stylized facts of asset booms and busts—some of the largest in history have been associated with below average risk premia (captured by the ‘pricing pillar’) and unusually elevated patterns of issuance, trading volumes, fund flows, and survey-based return projections (reflected in the ‘quantities pillar’). Based on a comparison to past boom-bust episodes, the approach is signaling mounting vulnerabilities in risky U.S. credit markets. Policy makers and regulators should be attune to any further deterioration in issuance quality, and where possible, take steps to ensure the post-crisis financial infrastructure is braced to accommodate a re-pricing in credit risk.
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