“The first recorded credit bubble popped in 594 B.C. Athens. Threatened with a civil war of creditor versus debtor, the Athenian ruler Solon pulled down the mortgage stones to free the debtors and devalued the drachma by 27% to relieve the bankers. Every credit collapse since – from the Panic of A.D. 33 to John Law’s Mississippi Bubble to the Great Depression and many others besides – has followed Solon’s template of debt default and currency devaluation….”
~ Myrmikan Capital LLC
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
~ Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching (circa 400 BC)
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
~ Oscar Wilde
Without order nothing can exist — without chaos nothing can evolve.
~ Oscar Wilde
Our continued addiction to fossil fuels is bolstering Vladimir Putin’s petrodictatorship and creating a situation where we in the West are — yes, say it with me now — funding both sides of the war. We fund our military aid to Ukraine with our tax dollars and some of America’s allies fund Putin’s military with purchases of his oil and gas exports.
~ Thomas L Friedman, NY Times, May 17, 2022
Men, it has been well said, think in herds;
it will be seen that they go mad in herds,
while they only recover their senses slowly,
and one by one.
~ Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)
Bob Farrell wrote these 10 rules after spending more than 50 years on Wall Street. He is dead today but his rules still apply, even in the current bull market euphoria.
Hat tip to Lance Roberts at Real Investment Advice.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.~ Abraham Lincoln: Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
“These crises are really a form of domestic default that governments employ in countries where financial repression is a major form of taxation. Under financial repression, banks are vehicles that allow governments to squeeze more indirect tax revenue from citizens by monopolizing the entire savings and payments system, not simply currency. Governments force local residents to save in banks by giving them few, if any, other options. They then stuff debt into the banks via reserve requirements and other devices. This allows the government to finance a part of its debt at a very low interest rate; financial repression thus constitutes a form of taxation. Citizens put money into banks because there are few other safe places for their savings. Governments, in turn, pass regulations and restrictions to force the banks to relend the money to fund public debt….”
~ Carmen M. Reinhart, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
“An investor’s task is not to predict the future but to properly analyze the present.”
