I have written a few articles that might help you, see below. https://morganisteconomics.blogspot.com/2019/11/make-sure-you-invest-in-right-country.html https://morganisteconomics.blogspot.com/2019/11/get-strong-long-term-secondary-return.html https://morganisteconomics.blogspot.com/2019/11/get-strong-long-term-secondary-return.html I have also written a couple of books that explain secure investments and international investment analysis. My book Euro Crisis contains an National Investment Analysis, you can see the statistics for free at the link below and an article that explains it in the link below that. Scroll down to the Scribd document for the statistics, the technique was proven effective in application. https://morganisteconomics.blogspot.com/2019/11/get-strong-long-term-secondary-return.html https://morganisteconomics.blogspot.com/2011/11/tip-on-national-investment-analysis.html?q=tip
The thing about these good natured jabs is that they make you feel superior while the jabee is so supremely confident in his superior knowledge that he doesn't feel a thing. However when the tables are turned and the jabee jabs back, the prick is painful indeed and may invoke silly defensiveness in the jaber. A wonderful example of this, though I would guess you may be far too young to know who these chaps were, was the evening debates of William F. Buckley vs Gore Vidal at the Democrat's National Convention in 1968. Both men went in supremely confident of their superiority over the other -- Buckley, a Yale man, and a patrician the likes of which might have only been rivaled by the Sitwells of England, vs Vidal, who skipped college, and was therefore forced to squeak by with his Phillips Exeter education. This, however, proved more than enough to drive Buckley nuts. So far as I know, such an inglorious defeat happened to Buckley in public only one other time. And that time it was on Buckley's own, regular PBS program, Firing Line, designed to deliver up hapless left-wingers for Buckley to neatly skewer and spit roast. It occurred when he invited a young Noam Chomsky to be his guest on Firing Line. Chomsky had such ready command of facts and figures that every Buckley thrust was more than parried by Chomsky's superior intellect. The result was similar to that in Buckley's encounters with Vidal. In both instances there was never the slightest question over which was the superior intellect. Now, years later with the test of subsequent events, it is clear that both Vidal and Chomsky not only triumphed over Buckley's moralizing conservatism, but were spectacularly correct on a number of then contentious issues. These were occasions when the tide of reality and facts left conventional wisdom swimming in deep water gasping for breath. a sampling: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vgT7Wr7Nkc www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy68qXMcGn8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvmLMUfGss www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XGpc8gnc-Q Hitchens take on Buckley and Vidal Dame Edith Sitwell
Academic traders versus Real world traders...the real world traders win. George Soros vs LTCM, Long Term Capital Management and their magical formula. The Midas Formula - Trillion Dollar Bet The Ascent of Money Episode 6: Chimerica
pointing when a conservative got "skewered" twice .... in your opinion. Purely coincidental that your example was not of a liberal. Yup.
ha ha. Good for you to notice that. But it is after all the same pompous conservative that is the victim in both instances. This is not an accident. I assure you. It is the unavoidable statistics! Conservative are, by their nature, wrong about almost everything.
IYO I won't bother playing the useless tit for tat game posting Lib skewers. "What difference does it make".
I have a little time on my hands now as we wait for the Eastern fringe of IDA to pass by and dump torrential rain on us. Most everything except our communication channels has shut down or is in process of doing so. So I should like to use this "waiting time" to comment on Wang's very nice book on Central Banking. This is the book sorely needed by those who have a penchant for blaming the Fed for things they don't like. Whereas much of the time these "things" the Fed has no control over. The Fed is a both a pro-active and reactive body, always trying to guess what's coming and when. As that's extremely difficult, they often end up as a reactive force trying to counter undesirable ups and downs in our economy. This is ,of course, not to say the Fed's judgement is perfect, it's just much better on average than any other one person's judgement. The worst messes, it can be soundly argued, have been due to Fed inaction rather than action; at heart, it's a very conservative outfit... Now back to our story. Wang was a Trader on the Fed's "Bond Desk" so he has first hand knowledge of Fed bond operations, and indeed this is a main strength of his book. He goes as well into other aspects of Fed operations and does a very credible job of most of that as well. There is only one aspect of central banking where his coverage , while not outright incorrect, is unfortunately misleading and incomplete. This is unsurprising. Even Chairman Powell's knowledge is incomplete in the same regard. Neither of these men realize that long before the Treasury has sold bonds to make it look to all the world as though the Treasury is borrowing money to cover our Nation's deficit spending, the Fed has "printed" the money needed to cover deficits. They do this by crediting the Treasury's reserve account with the money needed to cover Treasury checks; checks that would otherwise have bounced. This is the money "printing step"! Indeed, it was the discovery and exposure of this by the Modern Money Theory Economists in the latter part of the last Century that stands as their seminal achievement. The MMT economists will say, "The U.S. Government Always Money Funds its Purchases," or some equivalent variation. [By no means does this apply to all nations.] What this means is that the Treasury pays no attention to its reserve account balance when it writes a check (It does pay close attention to it for other reasons however!). It writes a check knowing that it cannot bounce. The Fed makes sure it doesn't bounce by crediting any necessary amount to the Treasuries account. (The Treasury maintains Commercial Bank Accounts as well and can transfer funds among its accounts as required.) At the end of the Fiscal Year the Treasury will normally have spent well beyond its receipts and the Fed will have covered these excess expenditures. That is the origin of what we call newly printed money. Some time later, and not in synchronization with deficit spending, the Treasury will auction off securities in amounts totaling the deficit spending. In other words, whereas typical borrowing by the Treasury would simply cause a transfer of money from Bank reserve accounts to the Treasury's reserve, decreasing the amount of Bank reserves and increasing the amount of Treasury securities held by the private sector, the ersatz "borrowing the U.S. Treasury does transfers newly printed money, residing in private sector reserve accounts as the result of Treasury deficit spending, right back to the Treasury's reserve account in exchange for Treasury Securities; thus leaving reserve balances unchanged from where they were when the deficit spending began [ceteris paribus, of course] -- a profoundly different final State than that that would accompany real Treasury borrowing. In both instances of either real or ersatz borrowing, the amount of Treasury's held by the private sector increases. In other words the U.S. Treasury's bond sales amount to exchanging one form of money for another, and not in real borrowing. This is something Wang the Bond trader did not understand, not at the time he wrote his book anyway, as he writes of these Treasury bond sales as though they were real borrowing -- the same way the Fed would describe them. And, too, the same way Chairman Powell (not to be confused with Chairman Mao) would undoubtedly describe them. Chairman Powell has described MMT as "Just Wrong." And why would Bond Trader Wang necessarily understand the difference between real borrowing and Treasury ersatz "borrowing?" To do a fine job as a Federal Reserve Bond Trader he would not need to know that the U.S. Treasury doesn't really borrow in the traditional sense of that word. This money creation process, involving Fed Printing followed by Ersatz Borrowing, Trader Wang has omitted from his book. He does, however, treat the main contributor to our money supply fairly well. And that is demand controlled credit. We are a credit economy! Years ago now our Central bank stopped trying to control the money supply directly, Milton Friedman's failed pet idea, and begin instead to attempt to indirectly influence credit demand via control of the short term interest rate. Although this has a relatively impotent affect on credit demand, it has nevertheless been more effective than trying to control the money supply. This is perhaps why we see less Fed emphasis on the "M" measures in recent years. Currently, I believe, the Fed is not using a mandatory reserve level, but creating an interest rate "corridor" between a low base rate which it pays on reserves and its loan rate (the discount rate). Traditionally the Fed did not pay any interest on commercial bank reserves. Under that regime excess reserves would rapidly drive the overnight rate to zero. Despite a few little things that are omitted or not entirely correct, I can still highly recommend Wang's book, "Central Banking 101." There just isn't much else out there that is so approachable. It's difficult to be critical of this book, when we consider that all of the standard text's in economics, except one, are hopelessly out of date in their Banking and Money chapters (my polite way of saying "wrong").** ______________________ **A good friend of mine at the University here has been bugging me to come to the University and give a talk to a mixed audience of mainly hard and soft scientists and engineers on a subject I am not particularly interested in. But I would like to give a talk instead on "Three Things We Are Certain of That Are Just Not True." There is a large body of material here, so it would be difficult to choose. I think I might choose three examples, one from Economics, one from Medicine, and one from the Sciences. The Titles might be: 1) The U.S. Borrows the Money it Deficit Spends; 2) Testosterone Accelerates the Growth of Prostate Cancer, and 3) The 3rd Period Elements Expand their Valence Using d-Orbitals. What I like about this subject matter is that it allows ample opportunity for us to poke fun at ourselves. [Didn't Twain say something like, "It's not the things we don't know that get us into trouble, it's the things we know for certain that just ain't so."? ]
Stay safe But as for what you posted - TL : DR Though I might pick up the book itself to read the author's own words, but I have read (mentioned before to no avail) Fed Up by Danielle DiMartino Booth; who worked in the Dallas Fed and who sat in many FOMC meetings (right there with Chairmen (Bennie) and all the Fed Presidents etc over the years. She has a ummm much different opinion of the capabilities of the FOMC, especially their vaunted Ivy League Economists, and how wrong they often get policy. And no not just because she says so. The events leading up and following their decisions plainly show they get it wrong more times than not.