Who said? “While the crash took place only six months ago, I am convinced that we have now passed through the worst – and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There has been no significant bank or industrial failure. That danger, too, is safely behind us”. (Quoted by Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital, May 2010). No, it wasn’t Barrack Obama, or Gordon Brown. It was President Herbert Hoover in 1930. We know what happened next. A reminder that premature optimism can be dangerous.
Author: Jonathan Davis
Author, columnist and investment professional.
Take Bookmakers Over Opinion Polls
The general election has thrown up many interesting issues for investors, but none was so marked as the continuous disparity, up to and including polling day itself, between the outcome in seats implied by the opinion polls and endorsed by many pundits, and the different outcome that was forecast throughout in the odds quoted by bookmakers and on the betting exchanges.
The News From Warren Buffett
It is nineteen years since I attended my first Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting and heard Warren Buffett pronounce his views on the investment markets. It is a measure of how long ago that is that the attendance that day was around 250 people and failed to fill the local Omaha theatre. This weekend the same event, it is reported, was attended by 40,000 shareholders and filled the local convention centre to overflowing.
Beware The Marble Halls
Two years ago I wrote a column in the Financial Times about the life and career of Sir John Templeton, the professional investor and philanthropist who had died a few weeks earlier. In the course of the piece I mentioned in passing a memo that he had written to colleagues at his investment advisory firm in the early 1950s on the subject of How To Keep A Client Happy.
Where Economics Fails
A remarkably distinguished group of economists gathered last weekend for the inaugural conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, an initiative of George Soros. They were soul searching over the failures of economics in the recent crisis. Such failures are most evident in two areas: the inadequacies of the efficient market hypothesis, the bedrock of modern financial economics, and the irrelevance of recent macroeconomic theory.
Madoff And The Whistleblower
What are the lessons of the Madoff scandal? The more that comes out about this incredible story, the more complex and intriguing it becomes. Harry
Jonathan Davis 