Robert Shiller

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pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

More modern theories emphasize imperfectly informed and often irrational consumers and firms operating in markets with imperfect and asymmetric information, where profits can typically be enhanced more by exploiting these market imperfections than in any other way. Nobel Prize–winning economists George Akerlof and Rob Shiller document this widespread behavior in their brilliant book Phishing for Phools—using the term for Internet scammers who systematically “fish for fools.”16 With financial products moving ever more easily throughout Europe, the opportunity to take advantage of a whole continent of people who might be duped into buying financial products that were not suitable for them proved irresistible.

See Nikolaos Antonakakis and Alan Collins, “The Impact of Fiscal Austerity on Suicide: On the Empirics of a Modern Greek Tragedy” 112 (2014): 39–50. 24 The current account is the balance of trade, net primary income or factor income (earnings on foreign investments minus payments made to foreign investors), and net cash transfers, that have taken place over a given period of time. 25 As Keynes once wrote, “In the long run we are all dead.” A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1923), p. 80. 26 For instance, they do not build in, or build in in a fully adequate way, essential market imperfections—for example, the irrationality of financial markets, as emphasized by the research of Nobel Prize–winning economist Rob Shiller (see, for instance, his book Irrational Exuberance [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000]) or the pervasive imperfections of information (as emphasized by Nobel Prize–winning economists Michael Spence, George Akerlof, and myself). For a more extensive discussion of the failures of the standard macroeconomic models, see, for instance, Stiglitz, “Rethinking Macroeconomics: What Failed and How to Repair It,” Journal of the European Economic Association 9, no. 4 (2011): 591–645; and Stiglitz, “Stable Growth in an Era of Crises: Learning from Economic Theory and History,” Ekonomi-tek 2, no. 1 (2013): 1–38 (originally delivered as keynote lecture to the Turkish Economic Association, Izmir, November, 2012).

As this book goes to press, traders convicted in the scandal were appealing their verdicts. Meanwhile, some banks were still under investigation. In another case of massive market manipulation, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS agreed to plead guilty to a felony of market manipulation. 16 George A. Akerlof and Robert A. Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 17 In the United States almost unbounded campaign contributions are made to the individual and the party that comes the closest to leaving the sector unregulated, with significant amounts given to the opposition for good measure.


pages: 367 words: 97,136

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation by Sebastien Page

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Cal Newport, capital asset pricing model, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, iterative process, loss aversion, low interest rates, market friction, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, oil shock, passive investing, prediction markets, publication bias, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs, TSMC, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

., 186–187, 197–198 Sapra, Steve, 132 Satchell, Stephen, 212 Scenario analysis: in asset allocation, 134 and asset class changes over time, 158–162 defensive use of, 157–167 defining scenarios in, 158 factor-based, 162–165 forward-looking scenarios in, 165–168 offensive use of, 167–168 Scherer, Bernd, 2, 117 Schoar, Antoinette, 221, 222 Seasholes, Mark, 31 Sentiment, 69, 131–132 Sharpe, Bill, 6, 7, 9, 13, 151 Sharpe ratios, 150 Sharps, Rob, 228 Shiller, Robert, 13, 14, 25–26 “The Shiller CAPE Ratio” (Siegel), 26 Shive, Sophie, 235 Shkreli, Martin, 238 Shorter-term investments, macro factors for, 63–66 Shorter-term valuation signals, 45–59 for relative valuation between stocks and bonds and across bond markets, 56–59 for tactical asset allocation, 45–59 Shriver, Charles, 57, 62, 94 Siegel, Jeremy, 12–14, 25, 26 Simonato, Jean-Guy, 143 Single-period portfolio optimization, 194–195, 197–215, 268 issues with concentrated and unstable solutions, 207–210 mean-variance optimization, 198, 203–207 and risk parity, 212–215 and usefulness of optimizers, 211–212 Size of measurement errors, 148 Skewness, 118 of call options, 118 mean reversion of, 118–119 persistence of, 117–119 positive vs. negative, 207 and risk forecasting, 144–145 (See also Negative skewness) “Skulls, Financial Turbulence, and Risk Management” (Kritzman and Li), 205 Smart betas, 179, 235 S.M.O.O.T.H. fund, 224–225 Smoothing bias, 128–130 Sovereign wealth funds, 37, 128–130, 194 S&P 500: in March 2018, 12 P/E ratio of, 30–31 realized one-month volatility on, 103–104 recent earnings on, 27 sector weights in, 159 and tech bubble, 163 Spread duration, 40–42 Stock market: used as market portfolio, 17–18 valuation changes in, 31–34 Stock picking, 233–243 “The Stock-Bond Correlation” (Johnson et al.), 132–133 Stocks: beta and relative returns of bonds and, 10–11 CAPM and returns on, 5–14, 20 correlation of bonds and, 132–134 of emerging markets, 159–160 and human capital, 189–190 international equity diversion, 125–126 in market portfolio, 17–19 P/E ratio and real return for, 12–13 P/E ratio vs.

For inflation, we can use a market-implied or “breakeven” estimate, as measured by the difference between the yield of a nominal bond and an inflation-linked bond. In March 2018, 10-year inflation breakevens were around 2%. If we add inflation to the real return estimate, we get an expected nominal equity return of 7% (5% + 2%). Not bad. On the other hand, Robert Shiller, Yale professor and Nobel laureate, uses a P/E ratio that normalizes earnings over the last 10 years and adjusts for inflation (the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio, or CAPE). The 10-year period is meant to represent a full business cycle. His approach yields a meager 1% expected real return for US stocks, or 3% nominal if we assume 2% inflation.6 The CAPE is higher than the current P/E in part because earnings have increased significantly over the last 10 years.

But on the other hand, valuations are more attractive than they were back in 2018, in a way that may offset lower rates. 4. For the nine years ending March 23, 2018. 5. Robert Huebscher, “Jeremy Siegel’s Predictions for 2018,” Advisor Perspectives, February 5, 2018. 6. Robert Huebscher, “Jeremy Siegel Versus Robert Shiller on Equity Valuations,” Advisor Perspectives, February 23, 2017. As of Q1 2018, the CAPE ratio was still relatively close to where it was when this article was published, hovering around 30. With the CAPE at 30, a simple earnings yield calculation would imply a 3.3% real return. It’s not clear how Shiller arrives at 1%, but I suspect he’s using a regression between the CAPE and subsequent returns to account for the fact that the relationship is not one-to-one. 7. http://shiller.barclays.com/SM/12/en/indices/welcome.app.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

See “Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan” (our emphasis), Federal Reserve, December 5, 1996, http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm. 35. From Robert J. Shiller, “Definition of Irrational Exuberance,” http://www.irrationalexuberance.com/definition.htm. 36. Leonhardt (2005). 37. Leonhardt (2005). 38. Greenspan (2007, 176). 39. Greenspan (2007, 177). 40. See “Robert Shiller: Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate are Overvalued,” GuruFocus, May 30, 2015, https://www.gurufocus.com/news/338699/robert-shiller-stocks-bonds-and-real-estate-are-overvalued. 41. Grove (2008). 42. Kindleberger (2000). 43. Kindleberger (2000, 16). 44. See “Robert Shiller: Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate are Overvalued,” GuruFocus, May 30, 2015, https://www.gurufocus.com/news/338699/robert-shiller-stocks-bonds-and-real-estate-are-overvalued. 45.

See “Robert Shiller: Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate are Overvalued,” GuruFocus, May 30, 2015, https://www.gurufocus.com/news/338699/robert-shiller-stocks-bonds-and-real-estate-are-overvalued. 45. Rotblut and Shiller (2015). 46. For a discussion of narrative economics, see Shiller (2017). 47. Rotblut and Shiller (2015). 48. See “Robert Shiller: Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate are Overvalued,” GuruFocus, May 30, 2015, https://www.gurufocus.com/news/338699/robert-shiller-stocks-bonds-and-real-estate-are-overvalued. 49. Shiller (2014). 50. Milner (2015). 51. Interview with authors. 52. Interview with authors. 53. Interview with authors. 54.

Others actually sold their equities only because they found themselves in massive liquidity squeezes, some of which were predictable. So, as investors, you should have a plan for liquidity needs in the face of deep trouble. And you should have some plan, in advance, for how you’re going to rebalance and move forward.”74 To create a Perfect Portfolio, you need to start with a plan. 9 Robert Shiller and Irrational Exuberance ROBERT (BOB) SHILLER’S most famous work was a challenge to the conventional wisdom that financial markets are efficient. Although the Nobel Prize committee would later call it the centerpiece of his work, many in the academic profession originally greeted it with harsh criticism. It wasn’t easy for him to endure the attacks on his work.


Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Leibniz’s admonition—“but only for the most part”—and Lo’s interjection of “but not necessarily”—explains why there is such a thing as risk in the first place. Without that qualification, everything would be predictable, and change would be impossible in a world where every event is identical to some previous event.2 bern_c06.qxd 3/23/07 9:03 AM Page 65 6 Robert Shiller The People’s Risk Manager rofessor Robert Shiller of the Cowles Foundation at Yale looks much too young to have earned his Ph.D. at MIT over thirty years ago, while working with Paul Samuelson and Franco Modigliani. During those thirty years, he has managed to publish over 200 papers and five books, including the worldwide best seller, Irrational Exuberance.

The Strange Paradox of Behavioral Finance: “Neoclassical Theory Is a Theory of Sharks” 3 19 PART II: THE THEORETICIANS 3. Paul A. Samuelson: The Worldly Philosopher 37 The Institutionalists 4. Robert C. Merton: “Risk Is Not an Add-On” 5. Andrew Lo: “The Only Part of Economics That Really Works” 6. Robert Shiller: The People’s Risk Manager 47 58 65 The Engineers 7. Bill Sharpe: “It’s Dangerous to Think of Risk as a Number” vii 91 bern_a02ftoc.qxd 3/23/07 8:42 AM Page viii viii CONTENTS 8. Harry Markowitz: “You Have a Little World” 9. Myron Scholes: “Omega Has a Nice Ring to It” 100 110 PART III: THE PRACTITIONERS 10.

Samuelson 39 Ever the economist, Samuelson has mixed feelings about Behavioral Finance, which he wryly def ined to me as “the study of people not doing the most rational thing as judged by assistant professors of f inance.” Nevertheless, Samuelson’s connection with Behavioral Finance is far from casual. As Robert Shiller of Yale has pointed out in a recent paper, “This is a good occasion to recall that [Samuelson] was in an important sense one of the originators of the canonical intertemporal model that underlies much of the theory of neoclassical f inance, but also, at the same time, anticipated a good deal of the progress of behavioral f inance.


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Craig MacKinlay (1997), The Econometrics of Financial Markets, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Campbell, John Y.; and Robert J. Shiller (1988), “Stock prices, earnings and expected dividends,” Journal of Finance 43(3), 661–676. Campbell, John Y.; and Robert J. Shiller (1991), “Yield spreads and interest rate movements: A bird’s eye view,” Review of Economic Studies 58, 495–514. Campbell, John Y.; and Robert J. Shiller (1998), “Valuation ratios and the long-run stock market outlook,” Journal of Portfolio Management 24(2), 11–26. Campbell, John Y.; Robert J. Shiller; and Luis M. Viceira (2009), “Understanding inflation-indexed bond markets,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring), 79–120.

The best known series is the composite real house price series since 1890 that Robert Shiller and Karl Case created from various data sources (see Figure 11.3). Shiller’s result has been summarized as saying that house prices barely kept up with inflation, except for the bubble runup. This finding is surprising but consistent with other evidence that Manhattan (Amsterdam) land in a great location barely maintained its real value over 100 (400) years. Figure 11.3. Real house prices estimated by Robert Shiller, 1890–2010. Source: Robert Shiller’s website. Net real house price appreciation (HPA) was minimal over the 120-year window (0.3% per annum) but there were two big rallies—the late 1940s (due to the postwar return of soldiers) and the early 2000s—and two big falls—a real fall during the 1910s inflation and the recent crunch.

There are of course many other ways to predict asset returns—to be discussed in Sections 8.6, 9.6, and 24.4—but the contrarian approach shows promise and at least seems to do better than extrapolating long-run past returns. For an example popularized by Robert Shiller and John Campbell, Figure 2.8 shows how well smoothed earningsFigure 2.8. Valuation ratios have been good predictors of subsequent multi-year equity market return. Sources: Robert Shiller’s website, Kenneth French’s website. yields (the inverse of the P/E ratio, with 10-year average trailing earnings used instead of current year earnings, adjusted for inflation) have been able to predict subsequent multi-year equity market returns [5]. 2.4 NOTES [1] The venture capital (VC) asset class shows the highest average returns, perhaps partly reflecting various biases.


pages: 319 words: 106,772

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

Irrational Exuberance This page intentionally left blank Irrational Exuberance Robert J. Shiller Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey Copyright © 2000 Robert J. Shiller Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shiller, Robert J. Irrational exuberance / Robert J. Shiller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-05062-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Stocks—United States. 2.

Michael Brennan, “Stripping the S&P 500,” Financial Analysts’ Journal, 54(1) (1998): 14. 29. Robert Shiller, Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society’s Largest Economic Risks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). I have been working with my colleague Allan Weiss and others at my firm, Case Shiller Weiss, Inc., to develop certain of these new markets. See Karl E. Case, Robert J. Shiller, and Allan N. Weiss, “Index-Based Futures and Options Trading in Real Estate,” Journal of Portfolio Management, 19(2) (1993): 83–92; Robert J. Shiller and Allan N. N O TE S TO PAG E S 230–232 267 Weiss, “Home Equity Insurance,” Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 19 (1999): 21–47; and Robert J.

.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Campbell, John Y., and Robert J. Shiller. “The Dividend-Price Ratio and Expectations of Future Dividends and Discount Factors.” Review of Financial Studies, 1 (1988): 195–228. ———. “Valuation Ratios and the Long-Run Stock Market Outlook.” Journal of Portfolio Management, 24 (1998): 11–26. 272 R EFER ENC ES Case, Karl E., Jr., and Robert J. Shiller. “The Behavior of Home Buyers in Boom and Post-Boom Markets.” New England Economic Review, November-December 1988, pp. 29–46. Case, Karl E., Robert J. Shiller, and Allan N. Weiss. “Index-Based Futures and Options Trading in Real Estate.”


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

Pablo Galarza, “It’s Still Stocks for the Long Run,” Money, Dec. 2004. 14. Robert J. Shiller, “Price-Earnings Ratios as Forecasters of Returns: The Stock Market Outlook in 1996,” paper posted on Shiller’s Web site, July 21, 1996, www.econ.yale.edu/%7Eshiller/data/peratio.html. The original paper was John Y. Campbell and Robert J. Shiller, “Stock Prices, Earnings, and Expected Dividends,” Journal of Finance (July 1988): 661–76. 15. Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence (New York: Penguin, 2007), 176–79. 16. J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin, “Contrary to Robert Shiller’s Predictions, Stock Market Investors Made Much Money in the Past Decade: What Does This Tell Us?”

.: Rowman & Allanheld Publishers, 1984), 223. 14. This work is described in chapter 13, “Bond Market Volatility: An Introductory Survey,” of Robert J. Shiller, Market Volatility (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 219–36. The best known of his papers on the subject was “The Volatility of Long-Term Interest Rates and Expectations Models of the Term Structure,” Journal of Political Economy (Dec. 1979): 1190–219. Reprinted in Shiller, Market Volatility, 256–87. 15. Robert J. Shiller, “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?” American Economic Review (June 1981): 421–35.

None of these men devoted any of their serious scholarly work to fleshing out these ideas about financial market error. THAT WOULD BE THEIR STUDENTS’ job. While Joe Stiglitz led the way in looking for theoretical flaws in the perfect market worldview, another product of Samuelson and Modigliani’s MIT was to take on the efficient market hypothesis where it counted—in the data. Robert Shiller, who got his doctorate from MIT in 1972, was a sophisticated statistician and a crack computer programmer. He combined those skills with a seemingly naive eagerness to apply them to questions so simple that they could seem childlike, brazen, or even downright lunkheaded. In his dissertation and his early work as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Shiller focused on whether real-world interest rates behaved in accordance with the theory of rational expectations.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

The earnings yield may differ from the commonly cited ROE, or return on equity, which usually measures the ratio of profits to the book value of equity rather than its market value. 7. In 2013 Robert Shiller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in part because of his work on stock market volatility and behavioral finance. 8. J. Y. Campbell and R. J. Shiller, “Valuation Ratios and the Long-Run Stock Market Outlook,” Journal of Portfolio Management, Winter 1998, pp. 11-26. Their earlier paper was Campbell and Shiller, “Stock Prices, Earnings and Expected Dividends,” Journal of Finance, vol. 43, no. 3 (July 1988), pp. 661-676. Robert Shiller posted a paper, “Price Earnings Ratios as Forecasters of Returns: The Stock Market Outlook in 1996,” on his website on July 21, 1996, which served as the basis for his presentation to the Federal Reserve. 9.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, First Harbinger Edition, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965, p. 157. (This book was originally published in 1936 by Macmillan & Co.) 16. Robert Shiller, Market Volatility, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. The seminal article that spawned the excess volatility literature was “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?,” American Economic Review, vol. 71 (1981), pp. 421-435 17. Robert Shiller was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics in part for this research on market volatility. 18. Memorandum from Dean Witter, May 6, 1932. 19. Keynes, The General Theory, p. 149.

Williams, If You Must Speculate, Learn the Rules, Burlington, VT: Freiser Press, 1930. 3. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” Econometrica, vol. 47, no. 2 (March 1979). 4. Robert Shiller, “Stock Prices and Social Dynamics,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1984. 5. Robert Shiller, “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Movements in Dividends?” American Economic Review, vol. 71, no. 3 (1981), pp. 421-436. See Chapter 19 for further discussion. 6. Solomon Asch, Social Psychology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1952. 7.


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Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Two best-selling books were especially effective in broadcasting this line: John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail and Justin Fox’s Myth of the Rational Market. Some economists who had been strong advocates of behavioral approaches prior to the crash, such as Robert Shiller and Robert Frank, leaped in with op-eds essentially blaming the entire crisis on native cognitive weaknesses of market participants.37 This line became entrenched with the appearance of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits: displaying an utter contempt for the history of economic thought, they “reduced” the message of Keynes’s General Theory to the proposition that people get a little irrational from time to time, and thus push the system away from full neoclassical general equilibrium.38 They wrote: The idea that economic crises, like the current financial and housing crisis, are mainly caused by changing thought patterns goes against standard economic thinking.

Akerlof, George, and Rachel Kranton. Identity Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Akerlof, George, and Paul Romer. “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity no. 2 (1993): 1–73. Akerlof, George, and Robert Shiller. Animal Spirits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Akerlof, George, and Robert Shiller. “Disputations: Our New Theory of Macroeconomics,” New Republic (2009), www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/disputations-our-new-theory-macroeconomics. Akerlof, George, and Joseph Stiglitz. “Let a Hundred Theories Bloom” (2009), www.project-synciate.org.

Treasury on part of its debt—then it was a snap to get 162 economists, including two Nobel winners, to sign a statement denying that proposition.74 Or take that larger and more contentious issue, the question of whether there was a bubble in housing prices by 2006, and why so few economists were willing to sound the alarm. There is retrospective evidence that a few prominent economists had warned the New York Fed of a housing bubble as early as 2004; in response to one such presentation, Timothy Geithner removed Robert Shiller from the Fed advisory board.75 But the orthodox profession seems loathe to ever admit knowledge is actively policed and purged according to a preset script. After the fact, some economists at the Boston Fed decided that, because one would encounter a range of opinions on that issue before the crisis, there is no justification in blaming the profession for missing the disaster.


Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy J. Siegel

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fixed income, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Money creation, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, vertical integration

It appears suddenly as a new name for our hopes and for economic progress due to recent technological advances, notably the Internet, and for our reasons to think that the future growth prospects are ever so brilliant. ROBERT SHILLER, 20011 What are the most important macrotrends in the economy that influence future stock market returns? Economic growth immediately comes to mind. But economic growth has nowhere near as big an impact on stock returns as most investors believe. However, other important trends do have a positive impact on stock valuation: the stability of the overall economy, the reduction in transactions costs, and the change in taxes on stock market income. 1 Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, New York: First Broadway Books, 2001, Afterword to the paperback edition, p. 249. 123 Copyright © 2008, 2002, 1998, 1994 by Jeremy J.

The right answer was obvious, but when confederates of Dr. Asch presented conflicting views, the subjects often gave the incorrect answer.6 3 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica, vol. 47, no. 2 (March 1979). 4 Robert Shiller, “Stock Prices and Social Dynamics,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1984. 5 Robert Shiller, “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Movements in Dividends?” American Economic Review, vol. 71, no. 3 (1981), pp. 421–436. See Chapter 16 for further discussion. 6 Solomon Asch, Social Psychology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1952. 324 PART 4 Stock Fluctuations in the Short Run Follow-up experiments confirmed that it was not social pressure that led the subjects to act against their own best judgment but their disbelief that a large group of people could be wrong.7 Dave: Exactly, so many were hyping these stocks that I felt there had to be something there.

The stock price data during this period are taken from Schwert (1990), and I have added my own dividend series. G. William Schwert, “Indexes of United States Stock Prices from 1802 to 1987,” Journal of Business, vol. 63 (July 1990), pp. 399–426. 6 The stock series used in this period are taken from the Cowles indexes as reprinted in Robert Shiller, Market Volatility, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. The Cowles indexes are capitalizationweighted indexes of all New York Stock Exchange stocks, and they include dividends. 7 The data from the third period are taken from the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) capitalization-weighted indexes of all New York stocks, and starting in 1962, they include American and Nasdaq stocks. 6 PART 1 The Verdict of History FIGURE 1–1 Total Nominal Return Indexes, 1802 through December 2006 It can be easily seen that the total return on equities dominates all other assets.


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Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

., September 7, 2006, transcript. 2 elaborated on his pessimistic vision: Nouriel Roubini, “The Rising Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: The Twelve Steps to Financial Disaster,” February 5, 2008, online at http://www.roubini.com/analysis/44763.php; Stephen Mihm, “Dr. Doom,” New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2008. 3 Robert Shiller: Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Karl E. Case and Robert J. Shiller, “Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (2003), 299-362. 3 Raghuram Rajan: Raghuram G. Rajan, “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” speech delivered at Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium, “The Greenspan Era: Lessons for the Future,” Jackson Hole, Wyo., August 27, 2005. 3 “the greatest of all credit bubbles”: Justin Lahart, “NASDAQ: Five Years after the Peak,” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2005. 3 William White: Beat Balzli and Michaela Schiessl, “The Man Nobody Wanted to Hear,” Der Spiegel, July 8, 2009. 3 Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff: Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff, “The Unsustainable US Current Account Position Revisited,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 10869, November 2004. 3 Stephen Roach: Brett Arends, “Economic ‘Armageddon’ Predicted,” Boston Herald, November 23, 2004. 5 “animal spirits”: John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1936), 161. 5 “the ideas of economists . . .”: Ibid., 383. 11 “The decadent international . . .”: John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” Yale Review 22 (1933): 760-61.

Norton, 1973). 41 “Don’t bother . . .”: Andrew W. Lo and A. Craig MacKinlay, A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 6. 41 Yale economist Robert Shiller: Robert J. Shiller, “Consumption, Asset Markets and Macroeconomic Fluctuations,” Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 17 (1982): 203-38. 42 “While markets are not totally crazy . . .”: Robert J. Shiller, “From Efficient Markets Theory to Behavioral Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (2003): 90. 42 “models of human psychology . . .”: Ibid. 42 recent research in behavioral finance: Ibid.; Fox, Myth of the Rational Market, 175-210, 247-64. 42 “fundamental parameters . . .”: Shiller, “From Efficient Markets Theory,” 94. 42 “biased self-attribution”: Kent Daniel, David Hirshleifer, and Avanidhar Subramanyam, “Investor Psychology and Security Market Under- and Overreactions,” Journal of Finance 53 (1998): 1839-85. 43 “some accident . . . sets speculation . . .”: John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: Longmans Green, 1909): 527-29. 45 William Stanley Jevons: Sandra J.

“The Panic of 1857: Origins, Transmission, and Containment.” Journal of Economic History 51 (1991): 807-34. Capie, Forrest, and Geoffrey E. Wood, eds. Financial Crises and the World Banking System. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Case, Karl E., John M. Quigley, and Robert J. Shiller. “Comparing Wealth Effects: The Stock Market versus the Housing Market.” Advances in Macroeconomics 5 (2005): 1-34. Case, Karl E., and Robert J. Shiller. “Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (2003): 299-362. Cassidy, John. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Cihák, Martin, and Erlend W.


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Market Sense and Nonsense by Jack D. Schwager

3Com Palm IPO, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brownian motion, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, diversified portfolio, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Jim Simons, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, negative equity, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, tail risk, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, yield curve

For over a century since the starting year of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the inflation-adjusted index level fluctuated in a range of approximately 70 to 130. At the peak of the 2003–2006 housing bubble, the index more than doubled its long-term median level (see Figure 2.5). Figure 2.5 Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, Inflation-Adjusted Source: www.multpl.com/case-shiller-home-price-index-inflation-adjusted/; underlying data: Robert Shiller and Standard & Poor’s. The extremes of the housing bubble were fueled by excesses in subprime mortgage lending in which loans were made to borrowers with poor credit, requiring little or no money down and in its later phases no verification of income or assets. The competition among mortgage lenders to find new borrowers seemed like a race to issue the poorest-quality mortgages possible, and in terms of both market share and excesses, Countrywide seemed to be the clear winner in this dubious contest.

The consistent superior performance of years following low-quartile return periods versus years following high-quartile return periods is clearly evident. Figure 3.2 S&P Returns, Including Dividends: Comparison of Years Following Highest- and Lowest-Quartile Performance, 1872–2011 Data source: Moneychimp.com, which is based on Robert Shiller’s data and Yahoo!. Prior to 1926 (first year of S&P index), data is based on Cowles stock index data. There is always a trade-off between more data and more relevant data. It can reasonably be argued that by going back as far as the 1870s, we included a period of history that is not representative of the current market.

Once again, years following low-quartile return periods significantly outperformed years following high-quartile periods, with the difference being 6 percent for the one-year period and nearly 4 percent for the three-year period. Figure 3.3 S&P Returns, Including Dividends: Comparison of Years Following Highest- and Lowest-Quartile Performance, 1950–2011 Data source: Moneychimp.com, which is based on Robert Shiller’s data and Yahoo!. The lesson is that the best prospective years for realizing above-average equity returns are those that follow low-return periods. Years following high-return periods, which are the times most people are inclined to invest, tend to do slightly worse than average on balance.


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House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

See Charley Stone, Carl Van Horn, and Cliff Zukin, “Chasing the American Dream: Recent College Graduates and the Great Recession,” in Work Trends: Americans’ Attitudes about Work, Employers, and Government (Rutgers University, May 2012), http://media.philly.com/documents/20120510_Chasing_American_Dream.pdf; and Meta Brown and Sydnee Caldwell, “Young Student Loan Borrowers Retreat from Housing and Auto Markets,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics Blog, April 17, 2013, http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2013/04/young-student-loan-borrowers-retreat-from-housing-and-auto-markets.html. 6. Martin and Lehren, “A Generation Hobbled.” 7. Bernard, “In Grim Job Market.” 8. We have been influenced heavily by the work of Robert Shiller for many of the ideas in this chapter. He has been a strong advocate for financial contracts that more equally share risk in the context of household and sovereign debt. See, for example, Stefano Athanasoulis, Robert Shiller, and Eric van Wincoop, “Macro Markets and Financial Security,” FRBNY Economic Policy Review, April 2009. Kenneth Rogoff has also advocated more equity-like instruments in the context of sovereign debt.

Stock prices in Smith’s experiment fluctuated wildly, with prices at times deviating two to three times away from their fundamental value. Of the twenty-two experiments conducted, fourteen saw a stock market “characterized by a price bubble measured relative to dividend value.” The results bore an uncanny resemblance to the “excess volatility” phenomena first documented by Robert Shiller in 1981 for the U.S. stock market.4 In his seminal paper that led to the creation of the field of behavioral finance, Shiller showed that stock prices moved too much to be justified by the subsequent movement in their dividends. This phenomenon was later succinctly summarized by Jeffrey Pontiff in 1997 when he demonstrated that closed-end mutual funds were significantly more volatile than the market value of the underlying securities.5 Closed-end mutual funds hold stocks and bonds like regular “open-ended” mutual funds.

One proposal is for countries to leave the euro and revert to their own currency. However, given that leaving the euro would lead to default on all euro-denominated debt, an exit could destroy an economy. In a world of more flexible sovereign financing, such a dramatic course of action would be unnecessary. Mark Kamstra and Robert Shiller have proposed sovereign bonds where the coupon payment—the regular payment that countries make to investors—is linked to the nominal GDP of the country.22 Such a bond is more equity-like because the investor experiences profits that vary with the fortune of the country, much like an equity holder receives higher or lower dividends depending on earnings of a corporation.


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A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

This theory might less charitably be called the “greater fool” theory. It’s perfectly all right to pay three times what something is worth as long as later on you can find some innocent to pay five times what it’s worth. The castle-in-the-air theory has many advocates, in both the financial and the academic communities. Robert Shiller, in his best-selling book Irrational Exuberance, argues that the mania in Internet and high-tech stocks during the late 1990s can be explained only in terms of mass psychology. At universities, so-called behavioral theories of the stock market, stressing crowd psychology, gained favor during the early 2000s at leading economics departments and business schools across the developed world.

The Internet was associated with both: it represented a new technology, and it offered new business opportunities that promised to revolutionize the way we obtain information and purchase goods and services. The promise of the Internet spawned the largest creation and largest destruction of stock market wealth of all time. Robert Shiller, in his book Irrational Exuberance, describes bubbles in terms of “positive feedback loops.” A bubble starts when any group of stocks, in this case those associated with the excitement of the Internet, begin to rise. The updraft encourages more people to buy the stocks, which causes more TV and print coverage, which causes even more people to buy, which creates big profits for early Internet stockholders.

Investors then began to purchase common stocks for no other reason than that prices were rising and other people were making money, even if the price increases could not be justifiable by fundamental reasons such as the growth of earnings and dividends. As the economic historian Charles Kindleberger has stated, “There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.” And as Robert Shiller, author of the best-selling Irrational Exuberance, has noted, the process feeds on itself in a “positive feedback loop.” The initial price rise encourages more people to buy, which in turn produces greater profits and induces a larger and larger group of participants. The phenomenon is another example of the Ponzi scheme that I described in chapter 4, in connection with the Internet bubble.


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Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant and influential scientists in all of history, lost a fortune by investing in the South Sea Bubble. When questioned about his losses, he is reputed to have said ‘that he could not calculate the madness of the people’.29 This madness-of-crowds hypothesis has been refined and expanded by the likes of Kindleberger, John Kenneth Galbraith and, most recently, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller.30 Shiller and other economists argue that bubbles can largely be explained by behavioural economics, with cognitive failings and psychological biases on the part of investors causing prices to rise beyond their objective value.31 A subset of investors, for example, may suffer from an overconfidence bias, whereby they overestimate the future performance of a company stock, or they may have a representativeness bias, whereby they incorrectly extrapolate from a series of good news announcements and overreact.32 Other investors may simply follow or emulate this subset of investors simply because of herd behaviour and naivety on their part.33 The view that bubbles are largely a product of irrationality has been contradicted by economists who, like Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama, believe investors to be rational and markets to be efficient.34 Much recent research on the subject has thus focused on establishing whether a particular bubble was ‘rational’ or not.35 This is unfortunate, because the rational/irrational framework is almost useless for understanding bubbles.

The S&P 500 index, covering the largest US-based companies, rose by 115 per cent between January 1990 and 156 THE DOT-COM BUBBLE December 1996, prompting concern that the equity market was overheating. These gains appeared to be somewhat out of proportion with the money being made by its constituent firms. Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio (CAPE) stood at 28, meaning that S&P 500 companies were, after adjusting for the business cycle, valued at an average of 28 times their annual earnings. This was well above the longterm average of 15, leading Shiller to advise the Federal Reserve that a correction was due.19 Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve’s Chairman, gave what would become an iconic speech 3 days later, in which he questioned the point at which rising asset prices could be said to result from ‘irrational exuberance’ rather than changes in their intrinsic value.

The Tiger Group of hedge funds began to bet against technology firms in 1998, underperforming its rivals for the next 2 years as a result. In the first quarter of 2000, its investors lost patience and withdrew their funds, forcing its closure only weeks before its strategy would have paid off.78 Perhaps the most influential explanation to emerge from the DotCom Bubble was that of Robert Shiller, whose bestseller Irrational Exuberance was published just as the bubble began to burst. While this book is most famous for emphasising the role of psychological factors in 168 THE DOT-COM BUBBLE driving share prices, this was only one part of a hypothesis that also referenced the aforementioned incentive problems, steady inflation, tax cuts and cultural factors.79 The long list of precipitating factors made it difficult to ascertain the relative importance of each one, but in part this reflected the difficulty of explaining a bubble which could not be neatly attributed to a single cause.


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Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Moody’s Economy.com estimated that the total for 2007 would reach 1.7 million, up from 1.26 million in 2006, through a “self-reinforcing downward cycle” of falling home prices, loan defaults, and credit tightenings.9 The public-relations-minded National Association of Realtors was slow to accept the inevitability of an outright decline—it finally did so in late summer—because year-over-year slippage would mark the NAR index’s first anual downturn of home prices since its launch in 1950. But outside measurement-takers had less compunction. The relatively new S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, monitoring home prices in twenty major metropolitan areas, reported a 3.4 percent decline between June 2006 and June 2007.10 More scarily, Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who made his name predicting the fate of the technology stock bubble, pictured housing’s downfall in comparable terms. He told a late-August conference that home prices in some cities might fall by as much as half if the gathering bust could not be contained.11 If so, losses by U.S. homeowners could reach $10 trillion, more than the $7 trillion lost in the 2000-2002 stock market bust led by the decline of the technology-heavy NASDAQ index.

Finally, the thirty-first day of a painful month concluded with a much-publicized conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the majestic onetime fur trappers’ rendezvous, the twenty-ninth in an annual series underwritten by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. This assemblage neatly book-ended the month’s surprises as participants came away from speeches—by Harvard’s Martin Feldstein, Robert Shiller the home-price Cassandra, German central bank chief Axel Weber, and others—convinced that a rougher endgame than they had hoped for was likely. “I came to Jackson Hole thinking there would be no recession,” said Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate at Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, “but I’m leaving thinking we could well have one.”29 When those events pass into the history books, the more detailed accounts will surely confect some of those unexpected German state bank casualties, fearful New York Stock Exchange openings, extraordinary final-hour Dow surges (possibly Washington-orchestrated), mortgage-lender death spirals, $700 billion of central bank liquidity injections, Venezuelan and Iranian rants, eerie “Hindenburg Omen” fulfillments, a hedge fund disgraces, and trillion-dollar meltdowns into the sort of breathless You Are There chronicles that have offered insider-type postmortems on previous notable financial crises.

Several market watchers, however, took a deeper breath and reminded their audiences that 1987 had led into the 1990-91 downturns, and that interest-rate cuts hastily provided in 1998 had wound up feeding the speculative bubble and eventual market debacle of 2000-2002. Treasury Secretary Paulson told a financial audience that he thought the 2007 crisis would last longer than individual shocks like those of 1987 and the 1990s. And some representatives of the most pessimistic school—Robert Shiller and other housing-crash worriers—outlined the case for a much more powerful downturn. This book does not predict, or select among, any of these outcomes. This is too early a stage. It does, however, take note of the variety of scenarios laid out, most relevant to the circumstances and problems described in these pages.


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Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

“What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs.” New York Times Magazine, December 17. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html. Case, Karl E., and Robert J. Shiller. 2003. “Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 2: 299–362. Case, Karl E., Robert J. Shiller, and Anne Thompson. 2012. “What Have They been Thinking? Home Buyer Behavior in Hot and Cold Markets.” Working Paper 18400, National Bureau of Economic Research. Chang, Tom Y., Samuel M. Hartzmark, David H. Solomon, and Eugene F.

At the end we arrive in London, at Number 10 Downing Street, where a new set of exciting challenges and opportunities is emerging. My only advice for reading the book is stop reading when it is no longer fun. To do otherwise, well, that would be just misbehaving. ________________ * One economist who did warn us about the alarming rate of increase in housing prices was my fellow behavioral economist Robert Shiller. 2 The Endowment Effect I began to have deviant thoughts about economic theory while I was a graduate student in the economics department at the University of Rochester, located in upstate New York. Although I had misgivings about some of the material presented in my classes, I was never quite sure whether the problem was in the theory or in my flawed understanding of the subject matter.

Miller’s talk came in the afternoon session of the last day, chaired by Eugene Fama, another Chicago faculty member and a strong defender of the rational point of view. The other speaker during that session was Allan Kleidon, who like Miller was not so much presenting new research of his own, but rather attacking a paper by Robert Shiller that we will discuss in detail in chapter 24. Shiller was given the role of discussant, along with two efficient market defenders, Richard Roll and Steve Ross. Shefrin and Statman could only heckle from the audience. Clearly, during this part of the program the deck was stacked. Chalk it up to home field advantage.


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13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

Terry Pristin, “Risky Real Estate Deals Helped Doom Lehman,” The New York Times, September 16, 2008, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/realestate/commercial/17real.html. 22. See Robert J. Shiller, The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 30–34. Data for Figure 5-1 are from Robert Shiller, available at http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm and used with his permission. Shiller’s historical housing data series was first used in Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and later in Shiller, The Subprime Solution, supra. 23.

Increased Wall Street demand for mortgages (to feed the securitization pipeline) funneled cheap money to mortgage lenders, who sent their sales forces out onto the streets in search of more borrowers; by the early 2000s, many prime borrowers had already refinanced to take advantage of low rates, and so subprime lending became a larger and larger share of the market. And the cycle continued. Figure 5-1: Real U.S. Housing Prices, 1890–2009 Source: Robert Shiller, Historical Housing Market Series. Used by permission of Mr. Shiller. Data were originally used in Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Ordinarily, the instinct for financial self-preservation should prevent lenders from making too many risky loans. The magic of securitization relieved lenders of this risk, however, leaving them free to originate as many new mortgages as they could.

This belief reflects a general economic principle; given perfectly rational actors with perfect information and no externalities, all transactions should be beneficial for both parties. But few economists ever believed that these assumptions actually held in the real world. And over the next few decades, dozens of leading economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Shiller, and Larry Summers set about knocking holes in the Efficient Market Hypothesis.44 Brad DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Summers, and Robert Waldmann created a model showing that “noise trading can lead to a large divergence between market prices and fundamental values.”45 Even Fischer Black (of Black-Scholes fame) agreed.


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A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

This theory might less charitably be called the “greater fool” theory. It’s perfectly all right to pay three times what something is worth as long as later on you can find some innocent to pay five times what it’s worth. The castle-in-the-air theory has many advocates, in both the financial and the academic communities. The Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, in his book Irrational Exuberance, argues that the mania in Internet and high-tech stocks during the late 1990s can be explained only in terms of mass psychology. At universities, so-called behavioral theories of the stock market, stressing crowd psychology, gained favor during the early 2000s at leading economics departments and business schools across the developed world.

The Internet was associated with both: it represented a new technology, and it offered new business opportunities that promised to revolutionize the way we obtain information and purchase goods and services. The promise of the Internet spawned the largest creation and largest destruction of stock market wealth of all time. Robert Shiller, in his book Irrational Exuberance, describes bubbles in terms of “positive feedback loops.” A bubble starts when any group of stocks, in this case those associated with the excitement of the Internet, begin to rise. The updraft encourages more people to buy the stocks, which causes more TV and print coverage, which causes even more people to buy, which creates big profits for early Internet stockholders.

Investors then began to purchase common stocks for no other reason than that prices were rising and other people were making money, even if the price increases could not be justifiable by fundamental reasons such as the growth of earnings and dividends. As the economic historian Charles Kindleberger has stated, “There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.” And as Robert Shiller, author of the best-selling Irrational Exuberance, has noted, the process feeds on itself in a “positive feedback loop.” The initial price rise encourages more people to buy, which in turn produces greater profits and induces a larger and larger group of participants. The phenomenon is another example of the Ponzi scheme that I described in chapter 4, in connection with the Internet bubble.


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Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Finance and the Good Society Finance and the Good Society _______________ Robert J. Shiller With a new preface by the author Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford Robert J. Shiller is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics and professor of nance at the International Center for Finance, Yale University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also the co-creator of the Standard & Poor’s / CaseShiller Home Price Indices, and he serves on the index committee for these indices at Standard & Poor’s, New York.

“Limited Liability and the Corporation.” University of Chicago Law Review 52(1):89–117. Fabozzi, Frank J., and Franco Modigliani. 1992. Mortgage and Mortgage-Backed Securities Markets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Fabozzi, Frank J., Robert J. Shiller, and Radu Tunaru. 2010. “Hedging Real-Estate Risk.” Journal of Portfolio Management, Special Real Estate Issue 35(5):92–103. Fair, Ray C., and Robert J. Shiller. 1990. “Comparing Information in Forecasts from Econometric Models.” American Economic Review 80(3):375–89. Falke, Armin. 2004. “Charitable Giving as a Gift Exchange: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” IZA Discussion Paper 1148.

., Xun Liu, Yang Jiang, Donald Lynam, and Thomas H. Kelly. 2008. “Neural Correlates of Emotional Reactivity in Sensation Seeking.” Psychological Science 20(2):215–23. Jung, Jeeman, and Robert J. Shiller. 2005. “A Simple Test of Samuelson’s Dictum for the Stock Market.” Economic Inquiry 43(2):263–92. Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. 1979. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47(2):263–92. Kamstra, Mark, and Robert J. Shiller. 2010. “Trills Instead of T-Bills: It’s Time to Replace Part of Government Debt with Shares in GDP.” The Economists’ Voice 7(3), Article 5, http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol7/iss3/art5.


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Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, stocks for the long run, the market place, transaction costs

Since no news development can be identified that could so decisively have changed investor expectations over so short a time span, it seemed intuitively obvious that the overall market must have been badly mispriced, either before or after the crash. This is the essence of the case made by critics of the efficient market hypothesis. It is based on the same reasoning employed by the economist Robert Shiller, who, as discussed in chapter 13, found that stock prices have been far more volatile over time than can be justified by changes in underlying fundamentals. After the 1987 crash, Robert Shiller wrote scathingly that “[the] efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory. This is just another nail in its coffin.”17 Harvard professor Lawrence Summers, later to be treasury secretary, agreed, noting, “If anyone did seriously believe that price movements are determined by changes in information about economic fundamentals, they got to be disabused of that notion by Monday’s 500-point movement.”18 The reasoning of Shiller and Summers has been expanded on by other scholars, who seek to replace the efficient market theory with what can best be called “behavioral” explanations of market movements.

Studies were published that isolated a “day of the week” effect, showing that stock prices tended to act differently on different days of the week. A 1977 analysis of low P/E stocks found that those stocks tended to perform better than did other stocks, implying that they were not efficiently priced.11 But the most crucial blow to the notion that markets were perfectly efficient was struck by Yale professor Robert Shiller. Shiller studied the aggregate dividends and earnings of the S&P 500 between 1871 and 1979 and concluded that the value of the market as measured by the index fluctuated far more than could be explained by changes in subsequent cash flows (dividends) to investors.12 According to the efficient market theory, the market should adjust instantaneously to new pieces of information pertinent to particular companies or to the overall market.

As Lynch put it, the heavily quantitative, theoretical analysis he was exposed to at Wharton “taught me that the things I saw happening at Fidelity couldn’t really be happening.”3 He went on to say, “It’s hard to support the popular academic theory that the market is [efficient] when you know somebody who just made a twentyfold profit in Kentucky Fried Chicken, and furthermore, who explained in advance why the stock was going to rise.”4 Lynch was also troubled by the seeming inconsistency between the idea of market efficiency and the fact that stock prices appeared to move around more than they should. (In this sense, he intuitively grasped the more rigorous argument made by economist Robert Shiller, cited in chapter 13, that stock prices are far more volatile than they should be if the market were truly efficient.) As his graduation from Wharton neared, Lynch made one additional, and very important, observation. He noticed that Wharton professors were not paid nearly as much as Fidelity managers and analysts.


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I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

Except that the asshole was right: Enron’s accounting was so corrupt that when the nature of the frauds came out, the share price crashed from $90 to nothing, Skilling went to jail for twenty-four years, the auditor Arthur Andersen (one of the world’s five biggest accountancy firms) was put out of business, many employees lost their life savings, and many investors’ sentiments turned sharply against the stock market, since if a much-admired, much-analyzed blue-chip investment such as Enron could turn out to be worth nothing, whose accounts could you trust?* The economist Robert Shiller regularly sends out a questionnaire to investors, and the response in 2001, after the Enron crash, was that “Investors told us in no uncertain terms that the accounting scandals were a major factor in their withdrawal from the stock market.” As a result of the dot-com crash and the Enron implosion, the early years of the new millennium were a time when the money which chases the new idea, the go-go idea, had turned its attention away from the stock market.

Just to repeat the basic point: a 20 percent drop in U.S. home prices, not on the face of it an extraordinarily unlikely thing, was enough to cause a global banking crisis that nearly destroyed the entire system, followed by a global recession verging on depression. So why didn’t more economists seem aware of that possibility? Has the profession really drifted that far away from the real world? The short answer is that with some stellar exceptions—Robert Shiller, Nouriel Roubini, Paul Krugman, and John Kay conspicuous among them—yes, it has. The profession’s preference for textbook-perfect academic models of phenomena led to it being AWOL during the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s. A profession whose job it is to make sense of economic phenomena collectively failed.

I would like to thank The Atlantic for permission to quote Simon Johnson’s article “The Quiet Coup,” and the Nobel Foundation for permission to quote Daniel Kahneman’s Biography. SOURCES This is a list both of sources and of suggestions for further reading. These are all books from which I have learnt a great deal. Ahamed, Liaquat. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. Penguin Press, New York, 2009. Akerlof, George, and Robert Shiller. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Princeton, Princeton, 2009. Bernstein, Peter. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Wiley, New York, 1998. Bitner, Richard. Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance.


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Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist-cum-polemicist, has written that it is hard to think of any major recent financial breakthroughs that aided society.3 A conference held by the Economist in New York in late 2013 debated whether talented graduates should head to Google or Goldman Sachs. Vivek Wadhwa, a serial entrepreneur, spoke up for Google; Robert Shiller, another Nobel Prize–winning economist, argued for Goldman. Wadhwa had the easier task. “Would you rather have your children engineering the financial system creating more problems for us or having a chance of saving the world?” he asked. Even an audience of Economist readers in New York was pretty clear about its choice, plumping heavily for Mountain View over Wall Street.

When the figures come out on the proportion of graduates going into the financial services industry, the usual reaction is to assume that other industries simply must be more productive outlets for our brightest young people. But are other sectors really more useful? In his book Finance and the Good Society, Robert Shiller cites a statistic showing that 19.7 percent of America’s labor force in 2002 was engaged in some form of guarding activity.1 That doesn’t scream social utility. Financial innovation has made enormous contributions to society in the past, and it is primed to do so again. Indeed, the crisis of 2007–2008 has made it more likely that finance will be both creative and constructive.

Andrew Odlyzko, “Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s,” SSRN Electronic Journal (2010). 18. Peter Tufano, “Business Failure, Judicial Intervention and Financial Innovation: Restructuring US Railroads in the Nineteenth Century,” Business History Review (1997). 19. Robert Shiller, “The Invention of Inflation-Indexed Bonds in America” (NBER Working Paper 10183, December 2003). For a more comprehensive history, see Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale, Financial Innovation and Risk Sharing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 20. Sometimes, they are more important. As policy makers try to find a way to avoid bailing out banks in a future financial crisis, one answer is a new security issued by banks called “contingent convertible” bonds, or CoCos for short.


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Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

The only thing needed to own a piece of the “future of money” was a willingness to part with the current version of it. The more people invested, the more prices rose, resulting in even more FOMO that drew in yet more people—a self-reinforcing dynamic common to economic bubbles and Ponzi schemes. Quite simply, crypto had gone viral. In his 2019 book Narrative Economics, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller examined how economic narratives spread by drawing on decades of research from fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, marketing, literary criticism, and perhaps most fittingly for our purposes, epidemiology. He defined an economic narrative as “a contagious story that has the potential to change how people make economic decisions, such as the decision to . . . invest in a volatile speculative asset.”

Times were good, and on paper it seemed as if almost everyone was richer, or at least a little more secure during some precarious times. But it was already clear that many of the economic gains during the pandemic were going to the ultrarich. And as an armchair economist, I saw far worse storm clouds forming on the horizon. Surveying the markets in the spring of 2021, I saw all the signs of what Robert Shiller describes as “naturally occurring Ponzi schemes.” The premise of a traditional Ponzi scheme is quite simple: A fraudster promises investors he can produce incredible returns if they give him money to invest on their behalf. Instead of legitimately investing that money, the con man pretends to have generated profits and uses that story to lure in more investors.

I’m an actor with a barely used undergraduate degree in economics. I earned some money in showbiz but I’ve never worked on Wall Street or in finance. Who was I to call out a multi-trillion-dollar industry that very fancy people on TV assured us was the future of everything? Then again, I knew about money and lying. And Robert Shiller said something else: “We can think of history as a succession of rare big events in which a story goes viral, often (but not always) with the help of an attractive celebrity (even a minor celebrity or fictional stock figure) whose attachment to the narrative adds human interest.” A dim light clicked inside this middle-aged dad’s feeble brain.


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How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

In the four-year period between December 1998 and December 2002 alone, house prices jumped by almost 70 percent in San Francisco and Boston, and by about 50 percent in Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, D.C. (These figures and those that follow are not adjusted for inflation. They come from the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, which the same Robert Shiller helped to develop.) FIGURE 18.1: HOUSE PRICES 1890–2008, along with Building Costs, Population, and Long-Term Government Bond Interest Rates, annual 1890–2008 (Source: Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, Second Edition, © 2005 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.) Overall, between the fourth quarter of 1996 and the fourth quarter of 2006, average house prices nationwide rose by 129 percent.

HOW MARKETS FAIL THE LOGIC OF ECONOMIC CALAMITIES JOHN CASSIDY FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX • NEW YORK Farrar, Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011 Copyright © 2009 by John Cassidy All rights reserved First edition, 2009 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint material from Irrational Exuberance, Second Edition, by Robert J. Shiller, copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cassidy, John, 1963– How markets fail : the logic of economic calamities / John Cassidy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

In June 2005, The Economist said, “The worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history. Prepare for the economic pain when it pops.” In the United States, the ratio of home prices to rents was at a historic high, the newsweekly noted, with prices rising at an annual rate of more than 20 percent in some parts of the country. The same month, Robert Shiller, a well-known Yale economist who wrote the 2000 bestseller Irrational Exuberance, told Barron’s, “The home-price bubble feels like the stock-market mania in the fall of 1999.” One reason these warnings went unheeded was denial. When the price of an asset is going up by 20 or 30 percent a year, nobody who owns it, or trades it, likes to be told their newfound wealth is illusory.


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Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Siegel, Stocks For The Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-Term Investment Strategies (McGraw-Hill, 3rd Ed., 2002) Mark Singer, Funny Money (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985) Robert Shaplen, Kreuger, Genius and Swindler (Alfred A Knopf, 1960) Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2000) Robert J. Shiller, Market Volatility (MIT Press, 2001) Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B. Resor, www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm Andrew Smithers and Stephen Wright, Valuing Wall Street: Protecting Wealth in Turbulent Markets (McGraw-Hill, 2000) Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A History of America’s Financial Disaster’s (Macmillan, 1968) Robert Sobel, The Great Bull Market - Wall Street in the 1920s (W.

In Valuing Wall Street, they subject the most common valuation measures to various tests, importantly the reliability of those measures relative to subsequent returns as indicated by “hindsight value”. What we find is there were measures of value available to investors at the time that showed equities to be very cheap in 1921, 1932, 1949 and 1982. While accepting the usefulness of the cyclically adjusted PE - the chosen measure of value of Yale’s Robert Shiller - Smithers and Wright found that the q ratio has been a particularly accurate indicator of superior future returns. Given its usefulness, at least over the long term, we will use the q ratio to assess how equity valuations have altered over different periods. The q ratio is effectively a measure of the stock-market valuation of a company relative to the replacement value of its assets.

Cowles’ 1938 study shows earnings per share for the whole market declined 34% in the 40 years from 1881 until 1921, though earnings that year were very depressed. Figure 18 provides some of the low and high points for earnings per share. FIGURE 18. S&P COMPOSITE INDEX (1871=100) – PEAKS AND TROUGHS FROM INCEPTION Source: Robert Shiller, Market Volatility So what constitutes the normal level of earnings to be utilised in computing earnings growth over the period? If we use 1916 earnings, then the markets’ earnings growth over the 40 years was 250%. If we use 1921 earnings, then there was a contraction in earnings of 34%. Taking 1921 earnings as normal, the PE in January 1921 was 24.5x, but if 1916 earnings were considered normal, then the PE was 4.6x.


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Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Animal Spirits Animal Spirits HOW HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY DRIVES THE ECONOMY, AND WHY IT MATTERS FOR GLOBAL CAPITALISM With a new preface by the authors GEORGE A. AKERLOF AND ROBERT J. SHILLER Princeton University Press • PRINCETON AND OXFORD George Akerlof is the Daniel E. Koshland Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley; co-director of the Program on Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; and a member of the board of directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Robert Shiller is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics and Professor of Finance at the International Center for Finance, Yale University; research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and co-founder and principal of two U.S. firms that are in the business of issuing securities: MacroMarkets LLC and Macro Financial LLC.

We are very grateful for the invaluable help we have received from our research assistants Santosh Anagol, Paul Chen, Stephanie Finnel, Diego Garaycochea, Joshua Hausman, Jessica Jeffers, Mark Schneider, Hasan Seyhan, Ronit Walny, and Andy Di Wu, as well as from Carol Copeland, a most loyal administrative assistant. We are grateful for many comments offered by students in Robert Shiller’s Economics 527/Law 20083/Management 565 course, part of the macroeconomics sequence at Yale University, in which, over the course of five consecutive years, succeeding drafts of this book were used as a textbook. Robert’s wife, Virginia Shiller, a clinical psychologist, has been influential in impressing upon her husband the significance for economics of various principles of human psychology and has helped temper his technical impulses to make sure there is always a connection to economic reality.

Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Ninth printing, and first paperback printing, with a new preface by the authors, 2010 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-14592-1 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Akerlof, George A., 1940– Animal spirits : how human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism / George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-691-14233-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Economics—Psychological aspects. 2. Finance—Psychological aspects. 3. Capitalism. 4. Globalization. I. Shiller, Robert J. II. Title. HB74.P8A494 2009 330.12′2019—dc22 2008052649 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Galliard and Formata by Princeton Editorial Associates, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 Contents * * * Preface to the Paperback Edition Preface Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION Part One: Animal Spirits ONE Confidence and Its Multipliers TWO Fairness THREE Corruption and Bad Faith FOUR Money Illusion FIVE Stories Part Two: Eight Questions and Their Answers SIX Why Do Economies Fall into Depression?


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A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan by Ben Carlson

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, loss aversion, market bubble, medical residency, Occam's razor, paper trading, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto

Rick Ferri, “Expect Years of Pain Before Market Gains,” RickFerri.com, November 28, 2011, www.rickferri.com/blog/markets/expect-years-of-pain-before-market-gain/. 12. Ben Carlson, “Are Commodities for Trading or Investing?” A Wealth of Common Sense (blog), August 12, 2014, http://awealthofcommonsense.com/commodities-trading-investing/. 13. Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14. Robert Shiller online data, available at www.econ.yale.edu/∼shiller/data.htm. 15. Robert Shiller, “Why Home Prices Change (or Don't),” New York Times, April 13, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/business/why-home-prices-change-or-dont.html. CHAPTER 5 Defining Your Investment Philosophy Investment philosophy is really about temperament, not raw intellect.

Table 4.6 Every Cycle Is Unique Average Nominal Average Dividend Earnings GDP Inflation 10-Year Stock Bond Yield Growth Growth Rate Yield Returns Returns 1930s 5.5% –5.7% –1.4% –2.1% 2.9% –0.9% 4.0% 1940s 5.7% 9.9% 11.2% 5.6% 2.3% 8.5% 2.5% 1950s 4.9% 3.9% 6.3% 2.0% 3.0% 19.5% 0.8% 1960s 3.2% 5.5% 6.6% 2.3% 4.7% 7.7% 2.4% 1970s 4.0% 9.9% 9.7% 7.1% 7.5% 5.9% 5.4% 1980s 4.2% 4.4% 8.3% 5.5% 10.6% 17.3% 12.0% 1990s 2.4% 7.7% 5.6% 3.0% 6.7% 18.1% 7.4% 2000s 1.8% 0.6% 3.9% 2.6% 4.5% –1.0% 6.3% 2010s 2.0% 17.2% 2.1% 2.1% 2.5% 15.7% 4.2% Source: Robert Shiller. Try to find a pattern among those numbers. You will find no rhyme or reason from one decade to the next. There's no single indicator or variable that's going to give investors an edge. The only constant in the markets is the fact that they're cyclical. Nothing goes in one direction forever.

Real estate investment trusts (REITs), commercial real estate securities that can be diversified by geography and different types of real estate—apartments, office complexes, shopping centers, and so on—were up more than 10 percent a year in that time frame. You would think that because housing prices tend to go up most of the time that housing would be a worthwhile investment. Here's Robert Shiller, who the Case-Shiller Index is named after, on why this isn't the case: Here is a harsh truth about homeownership: Over the long haul, it's hard for homes to compete with the stock market in real appreciation. That's because companies whose shares are traded on a stock exchange retain a good share of their earnings to plow back into the business.


Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

This is hard to accomplish, however, and it’s never enough. Unless people—at least most people—are willing to do what is right because it is right, our laws will be objects of mockery and abuse. First we need a change of heart. Perhaps we’ll then get the laws right too. 31 3 Viewpoint “Boom Thinking” Caused the Crisis Robert J. Shiller Robert J. Shiller is a professor of economics at Yale University and an economics columnist for the New York Times. In the following viewpoint, Shiller says that the boom in mortgage lending was fueled by a belief that housing prices would rise indefinitely. Shiller calls this belief a “social contagion”—an epidemic of a certain kind of thinking.

The Greed of Financial Institutions Caused the Crisis Oskari Juurikkala 27 Financial institutions wanted large profits, therefore they hid the risks they were taking from regulators. Better regulations are important, but businesspeople need to be more responsible and less greedy. 3. “Boom Thinking” Caused the Crisis Robert J. Shiller 32 Boom thinking is a kind of social contagion; once a commodity starts rising in price, people convince themselves and then each other that the price will keep going up. This happened in the United States with home prices, which rose to unsustainable levels. 4. The Weakness of Banking Regulations Caused the Crisis Vince Cable Some British banks have grown too big to fail, and perhaps too big for regulators to handle.

Regulators and experts also tend to be caught up in the enthusiasm, creating a speculative bubble that can have complicated and disastrous effects. As you read, consider the following questions: 1. Between 1997 and 2005, how much did homeownership rates in the United States increase, according to the U.S. Census? 2. According to Robert J. Shiller, with whom did Alan Greenspan have an overly strong ideological alignment? 3. What was the federal funds rate between mid-2003 and mid-2004? This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions. 32 Causes of the Global Financial Crisis This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions. 33 The Global Financial Crisis This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions. 34 Causes of the Global Financial Crisis This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions. 35 The Global Financial Crisis This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions. 36 Causes of the Global Financial Crisis U.S.


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The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

White, “Why Banks Love Debit Cards Again,” Time, March 28, 2013. http://business.time.com/2013/03/28/why-banks-love-debit-cards-again/ Despite these two huge suits: Pew Charitable Trusts, “Checks and Balances,” p. 3. 34 “have lost an essential tool”: Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff, “Arbitration Everywhere: Stacking the Deck of Justice,” New York Times, DealBook blog, October 31, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitration-everywhere-stacking-the-deck-of-justice.html “they tend to do them”: Ibid. George Akerlof and Robert Shiller: George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Prince­ton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. xi. 36 made it a common catchphrase: Renee Haltom, “Failure of Continental Illinois,” Federal Reserve History, November 22, 2013. http://www.federalreservehistory.org/Events/DetailView/47 37 “other people’s money”: Other People’s Money is the title of Louis Brandeis’s 1914 treatise.

When banks make mistakes or do bad things,” Hackett says, “they tend to do them many times and to many people.” Banks are not the only type of business to engage in practices that aren’t in the best interest of consumers. In their book Phishing for Phools, the Nobel Prize–winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller argue that the free market is set up to reward tricksters. Business people, they say, are under pressure to compete and to make the most profit possible. This environment leads them to engage in manipulation and deception. “The economic system,” Akerloff and Shiller write, “is filled with trickery.”

to manage regulatory risk: Ibid. Paul Krugman argued: Paul Krugman, “Making Banking Boring,” New York Times, April 9, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=0 Bibliography Akasha, Nan. “Money Archetypes and Guilt and Shame.” Nan Akasha blog, May 29, 2012. Akerlof, George A., and Robert Shiller. Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Ardener, Shirley. “Microcredit, Money Transfers, Women, and the Cameroon Diaspora.” Afrika Focus, vol. 23, no. 2 (2010): 11–24. Arnett, Jeffrey J., and Joseph Schwab. “The Clark University Poll of Parents of Emerging Adults.”


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Portfolio Design: A Modern Approach to Asset Allocation by R. Marston

asset allocation, Bob Litterman, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carried interest, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, German hyperinflation, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, inventory management, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, passive investing, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Stocks Long-Term Treasury Return Jul 53–May 54 Aug 57–Apr 58 Apr 60–Feb 61 Dec 69–Nov 70 Nov 73–Mar 75 Jul 81–Nov 82 Jul 90–Mar 91 Mar 01–Nov 01 Dec 07–Jun 09 Jan 53–Sept 53 Jul 56–Dec 57 Jul 59–Oct 60 Dec 68–Jun 70 Jan 73–Dec 74 Nov 80–Jul 82 Jun 90–Oct 90 Aug 00–Feb 03 Oct 07–Mar 09 −8.0% −14.3% −8.0% −26.3% −36.2% −16.6% −14.1% −42.5% −46.6% 1.2% 2.9% 8.9% −4.6% 6.6% 17.8% 0.1% 32.3% 23.4% The market peak and trough are determined by the monthly average of daily prices for the S&P 500 index. The S&P data is from Robert Shiller’s web site, http://www.econ.yale.edu/∼shiller/data.htm. The returns for large-cap U.S. stocks and Treasury bonds are from the 2010 SBBI Classic Yearbook (© Morningstar). The large-cap stock returns include dividends. by Standard & Poor’s (via the Zephyr StyleADVISOR database) is used instead.

In every recession, equities will be traced from their trough during the recession over the 12 months succeeding the trough. Table 1.5 lists dates for the nine recessions since 1951 including the second half of the double-dip recession(s) of 1980–82. The market trough is determined by the lowest monthly average of daily prices for the S&P 500 price index from Robert Shiller’s web site, http://www.econ.yale.edu/∼shiller/data.htm. The S&P 500 gain is based on P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABC c01 JWBT412-Marston December 20, 2010 16:58 Printer: Courier Westford 14 PORTFOLIO DESIGN TABLE 1.5 S&P 500 Rallies After Recessions, 1951–2010 Recession months (NBER dating) Jul 53–May 54 Aug 57–Apr 58 Apr 60–Feb 61 Dec 69–Nov 70 Nov 73–Mar 75 Jul 81–Nov 82 Jul 90–Mar 91 Mar 01–Nov 01 Dec 07–Jun 09 Market Bottom Gain in first 12 months Sept 53 Dec 57 Oct 60 Jun 70 Dec 74 Jul 82 Oct 90 Feb 03 Mar 09 46.0% 43.4% 32.6% 41.9% 37.3% 59.3% 33.5% 38.5% 49.8% the total return on the S&P (including dividends) from the 2010 SBBI Classic Yearbook (©Morningstar).

Figure 2.5 shows the variation in P-E ratios for the S&P 500 index since 1951 as measured using the same methodology as P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABC c02 JWBT412-Marston December 20, 2010 16:59 Printer: Courier Westford 32 PORTFOLIO DESIGN 50 40 30 20 10 0 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 FIGURE 2.5 Price-Earnings Ratios for S&P 500, 1951–2009 (Current Real Price Relative to 10-Year Average Real Earnings) Data Source: www.econ.yale.edu/∼Shiller described in Shiller (2000). Robert Shiller in his book, Irrational Exuberance (2000).12 Shiller compares the S&P 500 index for a given year with the average reported earnings of the S&P companies over the previous 10 years. Both series are expressed in real terms using the CPI. The rise in P-Es during the 1990s, in particular, introduced an upward trend into the average real return on equity.


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The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

People are still looking for information, but they believe that the ones who have it are the mavens, connectors, and salesmen (each of whom has a different kind of information). Do cascades exist? Without a doubt. They are less ubiquitous than the restaurant-going model suggests, since, as Yale economist Robert Shiller has suggested, people don’t usually make decisions in sequence. “In most cases,” Shiller writes, “many people independently choose their action based on their own signals, without observing the actions of others.” But there are plenty of occasions when people do closely observe the actions of others before making their own decisions.

That’s especially true when you consider that most investors are trying to evaluate only a small number of stocks, while the market has to come up with prices for more than five thousand of them. The fact that the market is, even under those conditions, smarter than almost all investors is telling. Even so, financial markets are decidedly imperfect at tapping into the collective wisdom, especially relative to other methods of doing so. The economist Robert Shiller, for instance, has shown convincingly that stock prices jump around a lot more than is justified by changes in the true values of companies. That’s very different from the NFL betting market or the IEM or even racetrack betting, where the swings in opinion are significantly milder and the crowd only rarely pulls a U-turn.

abstract_id=267770; and Suzanne Lohmann, “The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989–91,” World Politics 47 (1994): 42–101. A rigorous model of cascades and the way networks function is in Duncan Watts, Six Degrees (New York: Norton, 2002). A remarkably rich and human picture of how cascades work in the real world can be found in Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (New York: Little, Brown, 2000). Robert Shiller, “Conversation, Information, and Herd Behavior,” American Economic Review 85 (1995): 181–85. While Shiller is skeptical of the ubiquity of cascades, in this paper he nonetheless emphasizes the importance of social influence, as a way of explaining herding behavior. A longer account of William Sellers’s campaign to standardize the screw can be found in James Surowiecki, “Turn of the Century,” Wired 10.01 (January 2002), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.01/standards_pr.html.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

The point is underlined by the brilliant quote from Daniel Defoe with which Charles Mackay begins his book: Some in clandestine companies combine; Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line; With air and empty names beguile the town, And raise new credits first, then cry ’em down; Divide the empty nothing into shares, And set the crowd together by the ears.80 Missing from the work of efficient market theorists are the insights of behavioural finance, which brings the disciplines of psychology and sociology to the analysis of behaviour in financial markets. In discussing bubbles, economists such as Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler posit a feedback theory. When prices rise fast, the profits made by investors attract public attention, promoting word-of-mouth enthusiasm and encouraging expectations of further price rises. Commentators fuel the boom with rationalisations such as the idea that the economy has reached a new era of permanently higher returns.

Having made an initial 100 per cent profit of £7,000 on his shares in the South Sea Company, he was unlucky enough to go back into the market close to the top and lost £20,000, equivalent to £2.5 million in today’s money. A rueful Newton clearly grasped the logic of behavioural finance when he famously remarked: ‘I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’ Part of the psychology, as Robert Shiller points out, is that news of the profits of others leads people to a sense of futility in doing their relatively unrewarding day-to-day work and to a growing sense of envy. For many, including Pope, the stock market also appeared to hold the answer to their immediate financial problems. Dickens understood all this well.

When they turn out to be right, we anoint them. When they turn out to be wrong, we ignore them. They are typically right and wrong about half the time. Meantime, Queen Elizabeth II famously asked at the London School of Economics why no one had predicted the crisis. But many had. Among leading economists Robert Shiller and Raghuram Rajan, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who subsequently became governor of the Indian central bank, had given due warning, as had Nouriel Roubini of New York University’s Stern School of Business. And numerous fund managers have a consistently good record in identifying bubbles.


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Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

And that’s a shame, because a 2015 survey of hundreds of high-level financial professionals found that more than a third had witnessed instances of malfeasance at their own firms and 38 percent disagreed that the industry puts a client’s best interests first.69 THE THEATER OF FINANCIALIZATION Of course, there are other theories about why financialization occurs. Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller has described the “irrational exuberance” that he believes is a natural human tendency. The fact that we go repeatedly from boom to bust throughout history, moving like lemmings toward the New New Thing—be it tulips or collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)—points to the idea that there are strong psychological forces at work.

As Friedman famously said back in 1970, “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”33 This went hand in hand with another idea, which was that the share price of a firm always perfectly reflected all known information, and thus stock prices were the best overall measure of corporate value. This idea, known as the “efficient-market hypothesis,” eventually won its creator, another Friedman disciple and Chicago academic, Eugene Fama, the Nobel Prize. Ironically, Fama won it jointly in 2013 with Robert Shiller, a Yale economist whose work basically said the opposite—that markets, and asset values, were influenced by a variety of things (emotions, biases, bad habits, and pure chance) that had little to do with efficiency, and that they didn’t always work well, or predictably.34 The joint prize to the two men, one representing the past and the other the future, expresses as well as anything the existential crisis that has beset the economics profession.

It’s a stark statement about who has profited, and who hasn’t, from the housing recovery.8 The federal government is still underwriting most new mortgages in one way or another, via a multitude of state-sponsored programs and federally backed bonds. If a healthy housing market is one that is stable, affordable, inclusive, and not primarily dependent on government life support, then “we’re a long way from there,” says Yale professor and housing expert Robert Shiller. How to create a truly healthy housing market is a question that matters to everyone, not just those of us who can’t afford homes. American consumers spend $2 trillion a year on housing, which triggers billions of dollars of additional spending in related industries like consumer goods, telecommunications and technology, automotives, construction, retail banking, etc.


pages: 198 words: 53,264

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

In other words, to go back to the example of the gambler who was tossing a mental coin between two teams, had the gambler been asked if they would like to change their mind, it's highly unlikely they would say yes. Confidence grows exponentially once you've decided on something you were previously unsure about. Overconfidence is so ingrained in our DNA that even if we're aware of it, shielding ourselves from it becomes supremely difficult. Robert Shiller has written, “Our satisfaction with our views of the world is part of our self‐esteem.”2 This applies to everyone, but especially to people in the financial business. David Dreman shows how overconfident financial analysts are in his book, Contrarian Investment Strategies: Analysts were asked for their high and low estimates of the price of a stock.

Making decisions ahead of time, especially decisions that involve admitting defeat, can help conquer one of the biggest hurdles investors face; looking in the mirror and seeing an ability that we just do not possess. Notes 1. Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler, “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 193–206. 2. Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 60. 3. David Dreman, Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Psychological Edge (New York: Free Press, 2012), 176. 4. Roger Lowenstein, Buffett (New York: Random House, 2008), 62. 5. Ibid., 93. 6. Warren Buffett, Partnership Letter, October 9, 1967. 7.

Warren Buffett, 2000 Berkshire Hathaway annual letter, February 28, 2001. 24. Warren Buffett, 2014 Berkshire Hathaway annual letter, February 25, 2015. CHAPTER 9 Bill Ackman Get Of Your Soapbox Our satisfaction with our views of the world is part of our self esteem and personal identity. —Robert Shiller I once saw the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman say, “Ideas are part of who we are. They become like possessions. Especially publicly. I mean, flip flopping is a bad word. I love changing my mind!” This attitude stands in stark contrast to most investors, who loathe to do few things more than kill a previously held belief.


pages: 274 words: 93,758

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

Agarwal, Driscoll, Gabaix, and Laibson, “The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions over the Life Cycle and Implications for Regulation,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Fall 2009): 51–101. 13. But, of course, if Lightning could speak, as the parent of every two-year-old well knows, the taste would no longer be shrouded. 14. See, for example, Robert J. Shiller, “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?” American Economic Review 71, no. 3 (June 1981): 421–36; and John Y. Campbell and Robert J. Shiller, “Cointegration and Tests of Present Value Models,” Journal of Political Economy 95, no. 5 (October 1987): 1062–88. 15. J. Bradford De Long, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann, “Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets,” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 4 (August 1990): 703–38. 16.

Phishing for Phools Phishing for Phools THE ECONOMICS OF MANIPULATION AND DECEPTION GEORGE A. AKERLOF AND ROBERT J. SHILLER Princeton University Press • PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket illustration © Edward Koren. Jacket design by Jason Alejandro. “(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window?” Written by Bob Merrill. Copyright © 1953, 1981 Golden Bell Songs.

Paulson, On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (New York: Business Plus, 2010), on the US Treasury; Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), on the financial system; Robert J. Shiller, Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System (New York: Viking, 2009), on the US Treasury; Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.


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Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Dean Baker, Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (San Francisco: Berrett-Kochler, 2009), 75. 22. Robert Shiller. Irrational Exuberance (New York: Crown, 2006), xiii. 23. Edmund L. Andrews, “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation,” New York Times, October 23, 2008. 24. Alan Greenspan, Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin Press, 2002), 508. 25. Alan Greenspan, “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society,” speech to American Enterprise Institute, December 5, 1996. 26. Robert Rubin, In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington (New York: Random House, 2003), 257–258. 27. Lewis, “The End.” 28. Robert Shiller, “Challenging the World in Whispers, Not Shouts,” New York Times, November 2, 2008. 29.

Fourth, there was no evidence of an accelerated tightening of environmental restrictions since they had become common in the 1960s. Finally, noted Baker, as the prices of owner-occupied housing accelerated, rents had actually declined, suggesting that the housing-price boom was being driven not by a supply shortage but by a speculative boom. Other prominent analysts agreed. Robert Shiller, a codeveloper of the most widely used housing price index and the foremost U.S. housing economist, had been predicting a collapse of housing and stock market prices for several years. In a book called Irrational Exuberance, he wrote that “significant further rises in these markets could lead, eventually, to even more significant declines.”22 The late economist Edward Gramlich, then a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, raised concerns about subprime lending practices and an overheated housing market as early as 2000.

The treatment of Born by Rubin, Greenspan, and Gramm was a warning to everyone throughout the government that dissent from the new economic orthodoxy would not be tolerated. There would be no questioning of the system that was feeding the global expansion of the U.S. finance industry. Self-censorship followed. Robert Shiller, who was a member of the economic advisory panel to the Federal Reserve Board, observed that in professional circles, “people compete for stature, and the ideas just lag behind. The economists who advise the policymakers are no different. We all want to associate ourselves with dignified people and dignified ideas.


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A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

Of course not, but I acted as if I did, and “averaging down” continued to seem like an irresistible opportunity. I believed in the company, but greed and fear were already doing their usual two-step in my head and, in the process, stepping all over my critical faculties. Emotional Overreactions and Homo Economicus Investors can become (to borrow a phrase Alan Greenspan and Robert Shiller made famous) irrationally exuberant, or, changing the arithmetical sign, irrationally despairing. Some of the biggest daily point gains and declines in Nasdaq’s history occurred in a single month in early 2000, and the pattern has continued unabated in 2001 and 2002, the biggest point gain since 1987 occurring on July 24, 2002.

The discounting of future dividends and the future stock price is dependent on your estimate of future interest rates, dividend policies, and a host of other uncertain quantities, and calling them fundamentals does not make them immune to emotional and cognitive distortion. The tango of exuberance and despair can and does affect estimates of stock’s fundamental value. As the economist Robert Shiller has long argued quite persuasively, however, the fundamentals of a stock don’t change nearly as much or as rapidly as its price. Ponzi and the Irrational Discounting of the Future Before returning to other applications of these financial notions, it may be helpful to take a respite and examine an extreme case of undervaluing the future: pyramids, Ponzi schemes, and chain letters.

And the rates of return will fall because prices will be higher. And stocks will therefore be riskier because of their lower returns. Viewed as less risky, stocks become risky; viewed as risky, they become less risky. This is yet another instance of the skittish, self-reflective, self-corrective dynamic of the market. Interestingly, Robert Shiller, a personal friend of Siegel, looks at the data and sees considerably lower stock returns for the next ten years. Market practitioners as well as academics disagree. In early October 2002, I attended a debate between Larry Kudlow, a CNBC commentator and Wall Street fixture, and Bob Prechter, a technical analyst and Elliot wave proponent.


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Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

Within academic finance, models of asset pricing based only on efficient markets had been found wanting. Empirical work had increasingly added variables that reflected market inefficiencies, such as the observation that smaller and relatively less liquid firms attracted higher returns. More generally, skeptics of the efficient markets hypothesis such as Professor Robert Shiller of Yale University argued that consistently following simple strategies such as investing in firms with low share prices compared to their earnings could achieve long-term returns modestly above the average without taking on more risk (the trading philosophy used by Warren Buffett). Against this, however, was always the rejoinder that this could be a statistical fluke and that if such models worked then why was the proponent not rich?

But there is a very real issue as to how the North Atlantic crisis could have come as such a surprise to the vast majority of observers and policymakers—the rare exceptions being those who saw financial imbalances as a clear and present danger either because of their background in emerging markets (such as Professor Nouriel Roubini of New York University) or their belief that markets were often irrational and needed to be closely supervised (such as Bill White of the Bank of International Settlements, Professor Robert Shiller of Yale, and IMF Economic Counsellor Raghuram Rajan). The inadequate intellectual apparatus was not simply unfortunate in the sense that it allowed the crisis to build. It also meant that policymakers needed to respond hurriedly to unexpected challenges within badly designed structures. This led to policy missteps such as the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the premature tightening of fiscal policies in the Euro area.

The innate desire not to be seen as disruptive discourages individuals from questioning the perceived wisdom of other investors, as underlined, for example, in the account of how a few outliers did resist such pressure in the book about the financial crisis, Michael Lewis’s The Big Short. More generally, Professor Robert Shiller of Yale, one of the few prominent economists who recognized that the US housing market was in a massive bubble before the crisis, has been one of several financial economists to suggest that financial market bubbles can be modeled as social waves in which ideas catch fire and become self-reinforcing before eventually deflating.7 Such social eruptions can be modeled using similar tools to those used to examine epidemics, involving the probability of passing on an infection from one person to the other and a rate at which people stop being infectious, which define the height and longevity of the craze.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

Instead, they facilitated risk taking and overuse of leverage. They also connected disparate segments of the economy in ways that no one fully grasped at the time, ensuring that failure at one end would precipitate collapse at the other. With a few, but notable, exceptions, such as the future Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller and the future governor of India’s Central Bank and Chicago economist Raghu Rajan, economists overlooked the extent of problems in housing and finance. Shiller had long argued that asset prices were excessively volatile and had focused on a bubble in housing prices.5 Rajan had fretted about the downside of what was then praised as “financial innovation” and warned as early as 2005 that bankers were taking excessive risks, earning a rebuke from Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, as a “Luddite.”6 That economists were mostly blind-sided by the crisis is undeniable.

But economists had placed excessive faith in some models at the expense of others, and that turned out to be a big problem. Many of the favored models revolved around the “efficient-markets hypothesis” (EMH).7 The hypothesis had been formulated by Eugene Fama, a Chicago finance professor who would subsequently receive the Nobel Prize, somewhat awkwardly, in the same year as Robert Shiller. It says, in brief, that market prices reflect all information available to traders. For an individual investor, the EMH means that, without access to inside information, beating the market repeatedly is impossible. For central bankers and financial regulators, the EMH cautions against trying to move the market in one direction or another.

Greg Mankiw, “News Flash: Economists Agree,” February 14, 2009, Greg Mankiw’s Blog, http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists-agree.html. 4. Richard A. Posner, “Economists on the Defensive—Robert Lucas,” Atlantic, August 9, 2009, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/08/economists-on-the-defensive-robert-lucas/22979. 5. Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 6. Raghuram G. Rajan, “The Greenspan Era: Lessons for the Future” (remarks at a symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, WY, August 27, 2005), https://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2005/082705.htm; Charles Ferguson, “Larry Summers and the Subversion of Economics,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2010, http://chronicle.com/article/Larry-Summersthe/124790. 7.


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Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

It reminds us that volatility cuts in two directions. Two decades on from the collapse of its own bubble, the Japanese property market is more than 35% below its own ‘normal’ value. My own guess is that the US market will need to touch those levels before it will truly shake off the effects of the last decade. I’m not alone in thinking so. Robert Shiller himself said that a further fall of 10–25% ‘wouldn’t surprise me at all,’ commenting that, ‘in real terms, there has never been a bust of this proportion.’15 He’s right. We’re in new territory, desolate and hostile. We’ll talk about the implications for the banks in another chapter. Needless to say, those implications aren’t going to be pretty.

It’s no coincidence that the developed world’s most successful governments‌—‌currently Canada, Sweden, and Germany‌—‌have consistently resisted these temptations. If anything, the world economy (or at least the American, European, and Japanese parts of it) has lost value over the past two years. At the very least, the hole we’re in has just got a few trillion dollars deeper. But let’s return to the question of where equity markets ought to be. Robert Shiller, the un-Ponzi-ish economist who produced the housing index reviewed in the previous chapter, has produced a wonderful tool for examining fundamental value in the equity markets. We’ll look at that in a moment, but first a brief refresher on equity valuation. When you buy stock in a company, you become a part-owner of the firm, entitled to a share of its profits.

Now, we’ve already discussed the fact that the commercial property sector is in serious difficulties, but we’re simply going to set that aside for the time being‌—‌all $2.4 trillion of it‌—‌and simply examine the $11.3 trillion residential mortgage sector.8 We saw in an earlier chapter that the US housing market is in serious trouble. Almost a third of all home sales are triggered by financial distress. Almost a quarter of all homeowners are suffering negative equity. The noted economist Robert Shiller suggests that further house price falls of 10–25% are perfectly feasible.9 The truth is that house price falls of 25% simply don’t bear thinking about. If prices sank that low, countless homeowners would seek to walk away from their mortgages, or sell their houses, sooner than service their debts.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

So a number of economists have objected to my suggestion that the excesses of the financial markets have anything to do with economics at all. After all, many economists were in fact warning of unsustainable asset bubbles in the run-up to the crash (albeit that few specifically predicted a major banking crisis). Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance (2000) was a bestseller, and its warning featured widely in the media around the world. It is correct therefore to argue that political philosophy, the power of financial institutions, their lobbying of government, the incentives of credit rating agencies, and sheer greed and dishonesty all bear much greater responsibility than economics, or even than options markets.

If politicians and regulators had really been listening to economists, the crisis might have been averted. There is also a good case to be made for the potential for financial markets to improve society. A well-ordered financial system helps individuals and businesses manage risk, and channels savings into productive investments. Robert Shiller, although famous as one of the economists who predicted something like the GFC, has also argued for an expansion of financial markets—for example, to help countries insure each other against the costs of natural disasters (Shiller 2000, 2003, 2013). But this defence overlooks the fundamental role played by economics in giving birth to modern financial markets.

When the third quarter of 2014 GDP growth figure was published on the first day of the 2015 UK General Election campaign, 30 March, the Daily Telegraph headline was: ‘UK economy grew at fastest rate for nine years in 2014’, while the Guardian went with: ‘Data shows slowest recovery since 1920s’ (Khan 2015; Allen and Watt 2015). Subsequently, an apparent ‘double dip’ recession in the aftermath of the GFC has been revised away in the latest statistics. The idea of narrative economics has advocates (and narratives as an element in policy are cropping up in other domains such as the natural sciences or AI). Robert Shiller (2017, 967) compares economic narratives to epidemics, infections of the mind. He writes: ‘The field of economics should be expanded to include serious quantitative study of changing popular narratives,’ adding, ‘Narratives can be based on varying degrees of truth.’ Similarly, George Akerlof and Dennis Snower argue that neither conventional nor behavioural economics offers empirically valid general accounts of the way economies develop, whereas considering the role of narratives can account for the realisation of one among a number of indeterminate outcomes: narratives teach social norms, shape individuals’ identities and motivations, and prompt their decisions (Akerlof and Snower 2016).


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Work 4. Wealth 5. Health Conclusion: Towards a Fairer Society Acknowledgements Notes Index 1 Can We Afford the Superrich? The most important problem we are facing now, today … is rising inequality. Robert Shiller, recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics1 Growing income and wealth inequality is recognised as the greatest social threat of our times. Robert Shiller suggests that the renewed greed of the top 1 per cent has had worse effects than even the financial crash of 2008. The top 1 per cent contribute to rising inequality, not just by taking more and more, but by suggesting that such greed is justifiable and using their enormous wealth to promote that concept.

Leigh Scott, ‘How the American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps’, OpEdNews.com, 19 August 2012, at opednews.com. 3. Work 1. J. Stiglitz, ‘Inequality Is a Choice’, New York Times, 13 October 2013, at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. 2. Including a growing number of Nobel Laureates such as Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Shiller (see Chapter 1, above). Ever since Sweden’s own banking crisis, more laureates have been awarded to more sceptical economists. 3. K. A. Weeden and D. N. Grusky, ‘Inequality and Market Failure’, American Behavioural Scientist, 2013 (pre-print). 4. B. Bell and J. V. Van Reenen, ‘Extreme Wage Inequality: Pay at the Very Top’, Centre for Economic Performance, Occasional Paper 34 (2013), at cep.lse.ac.uk. 5.


pages: 389 words: 98,487

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

But what I saw was a message that it was bound to crash. Historically, long-term price-earnings ratios have always been around 16. They have often drifted away from 16 but have always returned to that figure. Yale economist Robert Shiller has devoted some effort to establishing this pattern of always drifting back to a P/E ratio of 16, and he has collected price/earnings ratios back to 1881. (Robert Shiller’s data is used in the graphs for both figures. In fact, the first figure is just an extract from the second. The impression the two graphs give is rather different.) What comes out very clearly from Shiller’s data is that a ratio over 30 is not normal.

(They are no longer emphasizing the fact that in Dow 36,000 they predicted that the market might take “three or five years” to soar . . . that is, until the end of 2004.) Glassman and Hassett argue that the stock market has been undervalued for a hundred years, so the historical data produced by Robert Shiller does not prove that investors in the future will make the same mistake. Perhaps investors have indeed been wrong for the past century. As we’ve already discovered, once economists abandon the view that people are acting sensibly, it is very hard for us to say very much at all. A more productive line of inquiry is to ask whether, as bubble valuations suggested, company profits will really be so dramatically much higher in the next few years.

Other sources for statistics: Amazon.com stock price data comes from the Amazon.com investor relations website and other information comes from Amazon.com’s 2003 Annual Report. Losses due to internet music piracy from “Rock profits and boogie woogie blues,” May 2, 2004, BBC Online News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/ 3622285.stm. Data from Robert Shiller are available at his home page, http:// aida.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/. Chapter 7 See Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone (New York: Doubleday, 1992) to find out more about Von Neumann and the use of game theory in the cold war. For an analysis of poker models by Emile Borel, Von Neumann, John Nash, and Lloyd Shapley, see chapter 12 of Ken Binmore’s textbook Fun and Games (Lexington: D.


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

Frei and Mathew Perlberg, “Discovering Hidden Gems: The Story of Daryl Morey, Shane Battier, and the Houston Rockets (B),” Harvard Business School case study (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, September 2010), 1. Chapter 7 1. Personal communication with author. 2. “Surveying the Economic Horizon: A Conversation with Robert Shiller,” McKinsey Quarterly, April 2009, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Surveying_ the_economic_horizon_A_conversation_with_Robert_Shiller_2345. 3. David Olive, “Getting Wise Before That ‘One Big Mistake,’” Toronto Star, December 17, 2007. 4. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012). 5. Gary Loveman, “Foreword,” in Thomas H.

Those who lack understanding can get into trouble easily, as the Joe Cassano example at AIG Financial Products in chapter 1 illustrates. Many businesses increasingly use statistical and mathematical models in their business operations. Therefore, a key principle is that managers shouldn’t build analytical models into their businesses that they don’t understand. As Yale economist Robert Shiller puts it (in the context of explaining some of the reasons for the 2008–2009 financial crisis, which he anticipated), “You have to be a quantitative person if you’re managing a company. The quantitative details really matter.”2 Some organizations insist on a familiarity with math and models. Ed Clark, the CEO of TD Bank Group, who has a PhD in economics from Harvard, avoided the problems that many US banks encountered in the financial crisis.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

This is because no individual will have more information than is already reflected in the market at any time, because the market is always efficient and prices change in fundamental factors (such as economic events) immediately. But theory is one thing and practice is another. Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller, for example, showed that while stock prices are extremely volatile over the short term, their valuation, or price/earnings ratio, provides information which makes them somewhat predictable over long periods (Shiller 1980), suggesting that valuation at least provides something of a guide to future returns.

Since the financial crisis, the interest in behavioural explanations and the psychology of markets has increased, and this information helps to better understand how and why financial cycles develop and can often significantly exaggerate the developments of economic and financial variables on which they are driven. Nobel Prize winners George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller wrote that ‘the crisis was not foreseen, and is still not fully understood … because there have been no principles in conventional economic theories regarding animal spirits’.21 It is the impact of human behaviour and the way in which information is processed by humans that makes the forecasting of markets so much more complicated than forecasting physical systems such as the weather.

This finding was strengthened by the work of Fama and French (2002), which used a discounted dividend model (the DDM) to show that investors from 1926 onwards had an expected equity risk premium that averaged about 3%. Others have emphasised that spot valuations can also distort the expectations for returns. In particular, Robert Shiller in his book Irrational Exuberance (2000) argued that stocks can become overextended, so that returns can be above normal and then below normal for extended periods. He introduced the valuation measure called CAPE (cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio), which uses 10 years of trailing earnings data in the denominator rather than just 1 year of forward expected earnings, as in the standard valuation tool of the P/E ratio.


pages: 411 words: 108,119

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

“A Survey of Behavioral Finance.” In George Constantinides, Milton Harris, and René Stulz, eds. Handbook of the Economics of Finance. New York: Elsevier Science. Campbell, John Y., and Robert J. Shiller (1987). “Cointegration and Tests of Present Value Models.” Journal of Political Economy 97, no. 5: 1062-1088. Higgins, Adrian (2005). “Why the Red Delicious No Longer Is.” Washington Post, August 5, p. A1. Jung, Jeeman, and Robert J. Shiller (2005). “Samuelson’s Dictum and the Stock Market.” Economic Inquiry 43, no. 2: 221-228. Keynes, John Maynard. (1936/2009). The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Professor Schoemaker received an MBA in finance, an MA in management, and a PhD in decision sciences from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He was Howard Kunreuther’s first PhD student at Wharton, with whom he co-authored several papers and the book Decision Sciences, An Integrated Perspective, with Paul Kleindorfer and Howard Kunreuther (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Robert J. Shiller, Yale University Robert Shiller is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University and Professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1972. Professor Shiller has written on financial markets, financial innovation, behavioral economics, macroeconomics, real estate, and statistical methods as well as on public attitudes, opinions, and moral judgments regarding markets.

“Coping Rationally with Lapses from Rationality,” Eastern Economic Journal (Summer): 251-269. Reprinted in Thomas Schelling, Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.) 2 Berserk Weather Forecasters, Beauty Contests, and Delicious Apples on Wall Street GEORGE A. AKERLOF AND ROBERT J. SHILLER No one has ever made rational sense of the wild gyrations in financial prices, such as stock prices.1 These fluctuations are as old as the financial markets themselves. And yet these prices are essential factors in investment decisions, which are fundamental to the economy. Corporate investment is much more volatile than aggregate GDP, and it appears to be an important driver of economic fluctuations.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2007. 38 “Like a city with a murder law” Gramlich, “Booms and Busts.” 39 “What we forgot” Johnson and Kwak, 13 Bankers, 142–44. 40 No Bush official wanted Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Stephen Labaton, “White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire,” The New York Times, December 21, 2008. 41 Mortgage debt had reached dangerous levels David Cay Johnston, “Business; In Debate Over Housing Bubble, a Winner Also Loses,” The New York Times, April 11, 2004. 42 Shiller’s warning was more stark Robert J. Shiller, “Household Reactions to Changes in Housing Wealth,” Discussion Paper 1459 (New Haven, CT: Cowles Foundation, Yale University, April 2004), http://​cowles.​econ.​yale.​edu. 43 “May be the biggest bubble in U.S. history” Robert J. Shiller, cited in Paul Krugman, “Running Out of Bubbles,” The New York Times, May 27, 2005. 44 “When home prices do start down” Fleckenstein, Greenspan’s Bubbles, 145. 45 Greenspan dismissed talk of a housing “bubble” Alan Greenspan, “The Economic Outlook,” opening statement, Joint Economic Committee, U.S.

“Falling Apart and Falling Behind: Transportation Infrastructure Report 2011.” http://​www.​bafuture.​org. Butz, William, Terrence K. Kelly, David M. Adamson, et al. “Will the Scientific and Technology Workforce Meet the Requirements of the Federal Government?” Rand Corporation, 2004. Case, Karl E., and Robert J. Shiller. “Is There a Housing Bubble?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2, no. 2 (2003): 299–342. Case, Karl E., John M. Quigley, and Robert J. Shiller. “Wealth Effects Revisited 1978–2009.” Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, February 2011. Cassidy, John. “The Greed Cycle.” The New Yorker, September 23, 2002. Congressional Research Service.

Operating at full steam in 2005, housing, construction, and real estate were pumping an enormous stimulus into the nation’s economy—more than $1 trillion a year, by one economist’s estimate. But danger lay in what became the meteoric rise of housing prices. Cheap money and rising home prices made people feel richer than they really were, so everyone took big risks. People borrowed more than they should have. Yale University’s Robert J. Shiller, one of America’s premier housing economists, compared the price binge to a “rocket taking off,” a spurt without precedent, except after World War II. In the 114 years from the 1890s to 2004, Shiller reported, housing prices had risen only 66 percent, adjusted for inflation, or less than ½ percent a year on average.


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The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

., December 2015. www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/2015-12-09_middle-class_FINAL-report.pdf 5. Yale economist Robert Shiller analyzed home prices and concluded that “From 1890 to 1990, real inflation-corrected home prices were virtually unchanged.” www.cnbc.com/2014/12/08/where-to-put-your-cash-a-house-or-a-stock.html and www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/05/10/why-your-home-is-not-a-good-investment/8900911/. Shiller’s housing market data is found at www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm See also, Robert Shiller, “Buying a House is a ‘Consumption Choice,’ Not an Investment,” theweek.com/speedreads/563510/economist-robert-shiller-buying-house-consumption-choice-not-investment 6.


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Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

While some economists urge abandonment of the fancy models and going back to the older theories of Keynes with a policy of greater public spending, the bulk of the economics profession in the best universities is as smug as ever. The award of the Nobel (actually the Royal Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economics in recent years is a clue to how unshaken the profession is in its self image. Thus in 2013 the Nobel Prize was given to Eugene Fama (Chicago), Lars Peter Hansen (Chicago) and Robert Shiller (Yale). Only Shiller is at all unorthodox, though a fully paid member of the mathematical macromodeling club. Thomas Sargent (formerly Minnesota now New York University) and Christopher Sims (Princeton) received the Prize in 2011 and both are original contributors to the “new classical economics” paradigm which is thought to have been discredited by the recession.

The idea is associated with the Chicago economist Eugene Fama, who did extensive statistical research on stock prices. The result was that the change in a stock price between today and tomorrow could not be predicted from the change over the previous 24 hours or earlier. When he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013 with Lars Peter Hansen, also of University of Chicago, and Robert Shiller of Yale University, it was for “empirical analysis of asset prices.” What this implied is that in any market where there are many participants and plentiful information, the buyers and sellers will form their best expectations depending on all the information available. An important ingredient of this information is their knowledge of how prices are determined by demand and supply.

The efficient market hypothesis became not just a hypothesis but also a revealed truth. Thus bubbles – the movement of the price of an asset, usually upward – were ruled out on the basis of EMH. There were long debates about the occurrence of bubbles, with new classical economists treating the possibility as absurd and Keynesians taking up bubbles as their disproof of EMH. Robert Shiller, who had argued that the stock market in the 1990s was in a fervor of “irrational exuberance” since stock prices bore little relation to underlying fundamentals, asserted the theoretical and empirical possibility of bubbles. A similar story can be told about rational expectations (RE). Expectations used to mean your notion of what might be the course of some variable tomorrow or next week.


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Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

Bureau of the Census, American Community Survey, www.census.gov/acs/www. 2 Peter Coy, “The Richest Zip Codes-and How They Got That Way,” Business Week, April 2, 2007. 3 Knight Frank, 2008 Annual Wealth Report: Prime Residential Property, Knight Frank UK, 2008. 4 Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 12355, July 2006. 5 Robert Shiller, “Superstar Cities May be Investors’ Superstardust,” Shanghai Daily, May 22, 2007, www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2007/05/20/2003361715. 6 Robert Shiller, Historic Turning Points in Real Estate, Yale University, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics Discussion Paper no. 1610, June 2007. Available at http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d16a/d1610.pdf. Detailed data from the Case-Shiller Home Price Index are available at http://macromarkets.com/csi_housing/sp_caseshiller.asp.

With the rise of a spiky world organized around a relatively small number of global megaregions, we may be entering a new phase in real estate in which the housing market splits into globally oriented centers where prices rise considerably over time and local ones where prices are stable or, in some cases, decline. However, not all economists think that high real estate prices in superstar cities are here to stay. Among those who see this trend ending is Yale economist Robert Shiller, author of the best-selling Irrational Exuberance, which predicted the collapse of tech stocks in the early 2000s. In a May 2007 op-ed, Shiller asked, “Why should home values in glamour cities increase forever?” 5 To be sure, there is no way to increase the size of superstar cities like New York or London.


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Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

narrative economics Robert J. Shiller narrative economics How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events princeton university press princeton & oxford Copyright © 2019 by Robert J. Shiller Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press.princeton.edu Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 9780691182292 ISBN (e-book) 9780691189970 Version 1.0 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Editorial: Peter Dougherty and Alena Chekanov Production Editorial: Terri O’Prey Text Design: Leslie Flis Jacket Design: Faceout Studio Contents List of Figures  vii Preface: What Is Narrative Economics?  

“Movie Ticker Blamed for Wild Trading in Stocks,” Austin Statesman, May 24, 1928, p. 3. 3. Kempton, 1998 [1955], prelude, location 153. 4. Alexander Dana Noyes, Globe (Toronto), October 22, p. 8, 1928, quoting “Financial Markets,” New York Times, October 22, 1928, p. 36. 5. Rappoport and White, 1994. 6. Robert Shiller, “Lessons from the October 1987 Market Plunge,” New York Times, October 22, 2017, p. BU3, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/business/stock-market-crash-1987.html. 7. Galbraith, 1955. He contradicted others’ claims: “Rise in Suicide Rate Laid to Depression: National Survey Shows 20.5 of 100,000 People Took Their Lives in 1931—Highest Figure since 1915,” New York Times, June 23, 1939, p. 24.

“The Missing Motivation in Macroeconomics” (AEA Presidential Address). American Economic Review 97(1):3–36. Akerlof, George A., and Rachel Kranton. 2011. Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Akerlof, George A., and Robert J. Shiller. 2009. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ________. 2015. Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Akerlof, George A., and Janet L.


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Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The probabilistic thinker would say, “Yes, it was extremely improbable that I would meet my partner that night, but I had to be somewhere and she had to be somewhere and happily for us our somewheres coincided.” The economist and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller tells the story of how Henry Ford decided to hire workers at the then-astonishingly high rate of $5 a day, which convinced both his grandfathers to move to Detroit to work for Ford. If someone had made one of his grandfathers a better job offer, if one of his grandfathers had been kicked in the head by a horse, if someone had convinced Ford he was crazy to pay $5 a day … if an almost infinite number of events had turned out differently, Robert Shiller would not have been born. But rather than see fate in his improbable existence, Shiller repeats the story as an illustration of how radically indeterminate the future is.

Holman, “Searching for and Finding Meaning in Collective Trauma: Results from a National Longitudinal Study of the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 3 (2008): 709–22. 29. Laura Kray, Linda George, Katie Liljenquist, Adam Galinsky, Neal Roese, and Philip Tetlock, “From What Might Have Been to What Must Have Been: Counterfactual Thinking Creates Meaning,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98, no. 1 (2010): 106–18. 30. Robert Shiller, interview with the author, August 13, 2013. 7. Supernewsjunkies? 1. David Budescu and Eva Chen have invented a contribution-weighted method of scoring forecasters that gives special weight to those who see things before others do; see D. V. Budescu and E. Chen, “Identifying Expertise to Extract the Wisdom of Crowds,” Management Science 61, no. 2 (2015): 267–80. 2.

Jean-Pierre Beugoms, in discussion with the author, March 4, 2013. 10. P. E. Tetlock and Richard Boettger, “Accountability: A Social Magnifier of the Dilution Effect,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 388–98. 11. For one of the earliest demonstrations of excess volatility in asset market prices, see Robert Shiller, “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 456, 1980; Terrance Odean, “Do Investors Trade Too Much?,” American Economic Review 89, no. 5 (1999): 1279–98. 12. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011), p. 63. 13.


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What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

[it] “relied on self-regulation that, in effect, meant no regulation; on market discipline that does not exist when there is euphoria and irrational exuberance; on internal risk management models that fail….”42 Behind Friedman’s Influence Market fundamentalism was pretty thin gruel for economists schooled in history. It quickly attracted as sharp critics the British economist Andrew Smithers and Yale economist Robert J. Shiller, who as early as 1984 judged the underlying theory “one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economic thought.”43 It actually faded in popularity quickly as the profession came to terms with its unreal assumptions. So an obvious question is this: How did laissez-faire economics, discredited as recently as the 1930s and lacking any theoretical basis, actually reemerge as American economic dogma?

As explained by his biographer, Robert Skidelsky, Keynes supported regulation to “redress the failings of society not because he loved it, but because he saw it, in the last resort, as the savior of capitalism from the temptations of collectivism or worse.”56, 57 In clarifying a capitalism that sanctified family prosperity, Keynes and others fended off the Bolsheviks and provided the intellectual heft and insights vital to victory later during the Cold War. As much as Adam Smith, Keynes created the moral high ground enjoyed by free-market capitalism today by explaining how the abusive greed of markets could be ameliorated and corralled to avoid the unemployment and periodic financial panics of laissez-faire Reaganomics. As Yale economist Robert Shiller explained, Keynes’ “… General Theory also had a deeper, more fundamental message about how capitalism worked, if only briefly spelled out. It explained why capitalist economies, left to their own devices, without the balancing of government, were essentially unstable. And it explained why, for capitalist economies to work well, the government should serve as a counterbalance….

And yet, the supervisory role of the government in the United States in particular has been, over the same period, sharply curtailed, fed by an increasing belief in the self-regulatory nature of the market economy. Precisely as the need for state surveillance has grown, the provision of the needed supervision has shrunk.”58 Now you understand why Bernanke was so frustrated with Greenspan and his acolytes. He rolled back regulation. He rejected warnings from private economists like Robert Shiller of Yale.59 He even overruled more insightful colleagues hoping to bolster regulation by enlisting the forces of the marketplace itself. And that brings us to Arthur Levitt, Jr. Greenspan faced a few courageous opponents in Washington who favored tighter regulation, but he succeeded in either chasing them from Washington (Brooksley Born, chairperson of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission from 1996–1999) or marginalizing them (Arthur Levitt, Jr.).


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The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Sunday Times CONTENTS Title Page Epigraph Introduction 1 An Economic Megashift 2 ‘Zapping Labour’ 3 The Vanishing Middle 4 A Faustian Pact 5 The Incessant Pressure to Transact 6 The Age of Turbulence 7 Living on Borrowed Time 8 A Consumer Society without the Capacity to Consume 9 The Cuckoo in the Nest 10 Walking away with Giant Jackpots 11 The Bigger Picture 12 The Scale of the Task Ahead Acknowledgements Also by Stewart Lansley: Copyright ‘The most essential long-term economic problem of this century is the risk that income inequality will get substantially worse… economic growth will be a positive development only if we do not see at the same time a huge increase in inequality, which could mean that the economic gains are concentrated in a rich class. The mere prospect of a winner-takes-all world ought to strike fear into our hearts.’ Robert J Shiller Notes 1 Robert J Shiller, Inequality-Indexing of the Tax System, The Tobin Project, 2007. 1 Introduction While personal fortunes at the top have soared to levels not seen since before the Second World War, living standards for most Britons have fallen well behind general rises in prosperity. In the United States, nine-tenths of the population has faced stagnant incomes over the last three decades.

To prevent high levels of earnings being disguised as a capital gain, such gains should be taxed at the same rate as income with an adjustment to tax windfall gains more heavily than entrepreneurial success. Wealth should be taxed more heavily, with, for example, capital transfers being more highly taxed.425 The American academic, Robert Shiller—an economist with a strong track record in predicting financial bubbles —has called for a much more radical proposal on the tax system, that it should be indexed to the level of income inequality. Under what he calls ‘The Rising Tide Tax System’, taxes would automatically become more progressive if inequality became more acute.

In 2006, before the onset of the credit crunch, the Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Solow claimed that an economy that doesn’t distribute its gain more widely is ‘poorly performing’. In the same year Ben Bernanke said that corporations should ‘use some of those (higher) profit margins to meet demands for higher wages from workers. 434 In 2007 Germany’s finance minister called on European companies to ‘give workers a fairer share of their soaring profits.’435 In 2007, Robert Shiller warned that: ‘The most essential long-term economic problem of this century is the risk that income inequality will get substantially worse… The mere prospect of a winner-takes-all world ought to strike fear into our hearts.’436 It was a theme echoed at the 2011 World Economic Forum at Davos.


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Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Economists do know, however, that human beings possess one predictable instinct: they will always try to maximise their profit. So economics tries to box as much human reaction as possible into this simple and universal theorem. But economics cannot proceed by ignoring the reality that human beings value – indeed, are passionate about – fairness. As economists Robert Shiller and George Akerlof prove,2 unemployment, recessions, swings in confidence and much other economic activity are simply inexplicable using the standard theorems of economics. But if progress is to be made, there has to be a capacity to model what human beings actually think and value reliably – and to get a grip on apparent inconsistencies.

Over the last thirty years, ordinary people have had to assume ever more risk as decent pensions and tenured work have become increasingly hard to find, while social insurance has become more means tested and miserly. Everyone lives within this environment, so everyone needs better tools to manage it. Thankfully, the intellectual climate is shifting away from the argument that meanness in social security provision spurs innovation and deters slacking. Instead, for example, Professor Robert Shiller argues that a switch from unemployment to employment insurance, so that employees can insure their wage or salary against job loss, would make them more ready to run and manage risks because their income would be higher than the minimal job-seeker’s allowance.50 Daron Acemoglu and Robert Shimer make a similar point, arguing that unemployment insurance is a tool of economic efficiency.51 If workers know that their income will be cushioned by unemployment insurance, they will be more likely to accept jobs in riskier enterprises at a lower risk premium.

commented David Sarnoff Associates in rejecting a proposal for investment in the radio in the 1920s. 24 Thérèse Delpech (2007) Savage Century: Back to Barbarism, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 25 National Intelligence Council (2008) Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed, US Government Printing Office. 26 George Orwell (1938; 1962) Homage to Catalonia, Penguin, p. 221. Chapter Two: Why Fair? 1 Literary analysis and history also testify to the importance of balance: see Margaret Atwood (2008) Payback – Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Bloomsbury. 2 George Akerlof and Robert Shiller (2009) Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism, Princeton University Press. 3 Some philosophical work is also beginning to take seriously concrete popular conceptions of justice: see David Miller (2001) Principles of Social Justice, Harvard University Press.


pages: 121 words: 31,813

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions by Lee Freeman-Shor

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, family office, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Pershing Square Capital Management, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Another possible explanation is a simple bandwagon effect: investors buy winning stocks because that is what the herd is doing. The longer a winning streak goes on, the narrower and narrower the market gets as all the buyers end up moving into the same winning stocks and sectors. Everyone loves a winner and a stock whose share price keeps going up and up becomes a market darling. Robert Shiller’s findings from research he conducted in 1981 suggest that stock prices are driven more by speculators than by company fundamentals.50 He showed that stock market prices move well beyond what would be predicted by a rational investment model. Quite simply, stock index returns are too volatile relative to aggregate dividends.

, EFA, by Brad Barber and Terrance Odean (1999). 40 ‘Trading is hazardous to your wealth: the common stock investment performance of individual investors’, The Journal of Finance, by Brad Barber and Terrance Odean (2000). 41 Kahneman and Tversky (1979). 42 ‘Focusing on the Forgone: How Value Can Appear So Different to Buyers and Sellers’, Journal of Consumer Research, by Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely (2000). 43 The Psychology of Finance, by Lars Tvede (1999). 44 More Than You Know, by Michael Mauboussin (2006). 45 Mauboussin (2006). 46 Mean Genes, by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan (2001). 47 Lynch (2000). 48 Thaler and Johnson (1990). 49 ‘Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency’, Journal of Finance, by Narasimhan Jegadeesh and Sheridan Titman (1993). 50 ‘Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?’, American Economic Review, by Robert Shiller (1981). 51 Druckenmiller is a very famous investor who achieved compounded returns of ~30% from 1986 to 2010 before announcing he was returning all outside investor capital from his Duquesne fund and forming a family office. 52 Schwager (1994). 53 Those of you with a keen eye will note that this was the same date as for Spirax-Sarco.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

That’s why it’s so ominous to see signs that America’s housing market, like the stock market at the end of the last decade, is approaching the final, feverish stages of a speculative bubble. Some analysts still insist that housing prices aren’t out of line. But someone will always come up with reasons why seemingly absurd asset prices make sense. Remember Dow 36,000? Robert Shiller, who argued against such rationalizations and correctly called the stock bubble in his book Irrational Exuberance, has added an ominous analysis of the housing market to the new edition, and says the housing bubble “may be the biggest bubble in U.S. history.” In parts of the country there’s a speculative fever among people who shouldn’t be speculators that seems all too familiar from past bubbles—the shoeshine boys with stock tips in the 1920s, the beer-and-pizza joints showing CNBC, not ESPN, on their TV sets in the 1990s.

Larry Summers, now the top economic adviser in the Obama administration, once mocked finance professors with a parable about “ketchup economists” who “have shown that two-quart bottles of ketchup invariably sell for exactly twice as much as one-quart bottles of ketchup,” and conclude from this that the ketchup market is perfectly efficient. But neither this mockery nor more polite critiques from economists like Robert Shiller of Yale had much effect. Finance theorists continued to believe that their models were essentially right, and so did many people making real-world decisions. Not least among these was Alan Greenspan, who was then the Fed chairman and a long-time supporter of financial deregulation whose rejection of calls to rein in subprime lending or address the ever-inflating housing bubble rested in large part on the belief that modern financial economics had everything under control.

In recent, rueful economics discussions, an all-purpose punch line has become “Nobody could have predicted . . .” It’s what you say with regard to disasters that could have been predicted, should have been predicted, and actually were predicted by a few economists who were scoffed at for their pains. Take, for example, the precipitous rise and fall of housing prices. Some economists, notably Robert Shiller, did identify the bubble and warn of painful consequences if it were to burst. Yet key policymakers failed to see the obvious. In 2004, Alan Greenspan dismissed talk of a housing bubble: “a national severe price distortion,” he declared, was “most unlikely.” Home-price increases, Ben Bernanke said in 2005, “largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.”


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

Kahneman and Tversky first observed this effect in their 1973 paper where they noted that an information signal is salient (i.e., memorable) if it has characteristics that differ from the background or a past state. Thus, we have a good memory for both the exceedingly commonplace (by virtue of repetition) and the exceptionally strange. Behavioral economist Robert Shiller suggested that the ubiquity of the internet made it easier for investors to bid up the prices of internet stocks to unprecedented levels during the dot.com bubble. Evidence of the usefulness of the WWW was everywhere, making it easy to create internal narratives about how the internet could be paradigm changing.

As Michael Batnick of Ritholtz Wealth Management writes in his summary of their research, “If shares in an industry increased by 50%, the probability of a crash over the next two years is just 20%. A 100% return increased the odds of a crash to 53%, and a 150% return increased the odds of a crash to 80%.” The takeaway? Only about half of bubbles burst, but when they do – watch out. Can you spot a bubble? Dr. Robert Shiller, Nobel Laureate in Economics, suggests that bubbles can be diagnosed using a checklist in much the same manner that a psychologist would examine the mental health of a patient against the diagnostic criteria for a given mental illness. Dr. Shiller offers the following as a starting point for spotting bubbles: Have asset prices increased sharply?

The process typically looks something like this: Price gains occur for fundamental reasons. Increasing prices attract attention. Narratives emerge to explain price gains. The positive narrative begets a cascade of increased price and volume. Narrative is broken, causing a return to fundamentals. Robert Shiller defines a bubble as “a social epidemic where price increases lead to further price increases” and stories are the means by which a spark of fundamental value becomes a raging fire of irrationality. Teeter and Sandberg speak to the power of story to create and sustain bubbles in the aptly named, ‘Cracking the Enigma of Asset Bubbles with Narratives’ and cite three specific reasons why narrative is so powerful.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Behavioral finance, a blend of traditional economics and experimental psychology, became a popular theory of boom-bust cycles after Alan Greenspan coined the phrase “irrational exuberance” in a 1996 speech.7 The idea that financial instability is a consequence of various forms of irrational behavior was elaborated and popularized a few years later by the Yale economics professor Robert Shiller in his best-selling book Irrational Exuberance, 8 published three months before the bursting of the technology stock bubble. Among the sources of irrationality discussed by behavioral economists and demonstrated in their financial experiments are herd instinct, overconfidence, and anchoring.

Despite the near-monopoly enjoyed by rational expectations and mathematical modeling in elite university departments since the 1980s, many new and interesting approaches to economics based on psychology, sociology, control engineering, chaos theory, psychiatry, and practical business insights have been developing in the shadows of the official doctrine. Some of these will doubtless spring to life in the years ahead. The approach receiving widest publicity during the crisis was behavioral economics. Popularized by Robert Shiller, behavioral economics considers a world in which investors and businesses are motivated by crowd psychology rather than the obsessive calculation of rational expectations. It is, however, the least radical of the alternative approaches because it does not challenge the central assumption of REH—that booms, busts, and recessions are all caused by various types of market failure and therefore that breakdowns in laissez-faire capitalism could, at least in principle, be prevented by making markets more perfect, for example, by disseminating information or strengthening the regulations against fraud.

Between January 2000 and the peak of the U.S. housing market in mid-2006, the NAR index increased by 68 percent, the CS National index by 92 percent, the CS 20 index by 106 percent, and the CS 10 index by 126 percent. By the middle of 2009, the Case-Shiller indices had fallen back and the CS National index showed a cumulative gain since 2000 only 2 percent higher than the NAR. 9 Professor Robert Shiller of Yale, probably the most famous and academically distinguished of these Cassandras, freely admitted in a talk he gave in January 2010 at the World Economic Forum in Davos that “many economists [presumably himself included] were predicting a housing crash for at least a decade before it occurred.”


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Asked to describe the job market: Daniel Larimer, interviewed by Michael J. Casey, April 8, 2014. As Tyler Cowen noted in his book: Tyler Cowan, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (Dutton, 2013). Yale’s Robert Shiller: Joe Weisenthal, “Robert Shiller: Bitcoin Is an Amazing Example of a Bubble,” Business Insider, January 24, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-shiller-bitcoin-2014-1#ixzz3Cmp0YFyx. New York University’s Nouriel Roubini: Erik Holm, “Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin Is a ‘Ponzi Game,’” March 10, 2014, Wall Street Journal, MoneyBeat blog, http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/03/10/nouriel-roubini-bitcoin-is-a-ponzi-game/.

They could blindly hope that this strange new way of handling finance will never amount to anything, much as Eastman Kodak mistakenly did about the digital camera. But you’ve probably gathered by now that we think that’s a dangerously naïve viewpoint. While it’s true that quite a few prominent economists see bitcoin as a passing fad—Yale’s Robert Shiller and New York University’s Nouriel Roubini were still in that camp in mid-2014—the longer that digital currency defies these expectations and the further along the innovation curve bitcoin businesses go, the more out of touch such views will seem. Former U.S. treasury secretary Larry Summers, one of the most influential economic minds on the planet, recognizes the risks of ignoring this technology for a financial sector that’s “ripe for disruption.”


pages: 261 words: 70,584

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy by Gregory Brandon Salsbury

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, buy and hold, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, hindsight bias, housing crisis, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mass affluent, Maui Hawaii, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, National Debt Clock, negative equity, new economy, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, Yogi Berra

America’s Housing Bust “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.” —Excerpt from an S&P employee email, December 15, 200616 Nationwide, housing values started to fall in the autumn of 2007.17 To the surprise of no one with the benefit of hindsight, the Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked then as well at 14,164 on October 9, 2007.18 As Robert Shiller, Yale professor, economist, and long-time real estate expert predicted, so much of America’s wealth—or at least the wealth effect, the feeling that we were wealthy—was tied to the rising values of our homes.19 When people’s homes stopped appreciating in value, a homeowner could no longer draw money from it...and that homeowner certainly couldn’t draw money from a bank account that never had any money in it.

During the housing boom, millions of Americans used the equity in their homes like house money for home improvements, vacations, new cars, or even more houses.31 And now, for those who rode the perpetual rise of home appreciation, many bets are off. On the House Although there were myriad culprits behind the credit crunch, Boomer behavior such as the wealth effect and house money effect played a prominent role. Robert Shiller’s book Irrational Exuberance, published in 2000, detailed the trouble that awaited us all when the impending Nasdaq bubble burst. He argued that it was the artificial rise in home values, not the tech stock boom, that was creating the dangerous wealth effect. And that was in spite of the fact that demand was decreasing in important markets such as Silicon Valley.32 As tech stock values were pushed higher by a bubble, the wealth effect took hold and had people feeling wealthier than they were, and the same thing happened with the housing bubble that followed.


pages: 263 words: 75,455

Quantitative Value: A Practitioner's Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors by Wesley R. Gray, Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, backtesting, beat the dealer, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, compound rate of return, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, intangible asset, Jim Simons, Louis Bachelier, p-value, passive investing, performance metric, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, transaction costs

Because the speculative public is clearly wrong in its attitude on this point, it would seem that its errors should afford profitable opportunities to the more logically minded to buy common stocks at the low prices occasioned by temporarily reduced earnings and to sell them at inflated prices created by abnormal prosperity. Graham suggested a methodology to avoid such errors and to exploit the variation in earnings: normalized earnings power. He recommended that investors calculate normalized earnings power by taking the average of earnings over a period of between 5 and 10 years. Robert Shiller extended Graham's recommendation by suggesting that investors adjust average earnings for inflation, and use a longer-term average with a minimum period of 10 years. Such a long-run, inflation-adjusted average smooths the peaks and valleys in earnings, making the earnings appear higher in the trough, and lower at the peak, than a single-year metric.

Earnings tend to be mean reverting, so we need to normalize the extremes to make them less attractive at the peak and more attractive at the trough. We can achieve this taking an average of earnings over the business cycle. We can't know how long a business cycle will last, so Graham recommended using an average of between 5 and 10 years. More recently, Robert Shiller, author of the book Irrational Exuberance, which took for its title the phrase then-chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan used to warn of the dot-com bubble in 1996, collaborated with John Campbell to argue2 that annual earnings are too “noisy” to use as the denominator in price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios.

We examine buy-backs, insider buying, activism, institutional investors, and short selling. NOTES 1. Benjamin Graham, and David Dodd, Security Analysis: The Classic 1934 Edition (McGraw-Hill, 1996). 2. J. Y. Campbell and R. J. Shiller, “Valuation Ratios and the Long-Run Stock Market Outlook.” Journal of Portfolio Management (Winter 1998): 11–26. 3. John Y. Campbell and Robert J. Shiller, “Valuation Ratios and the Long-Run Stock Market Outlook: An Update (April 2001).” NBER Working Paper Series, Vol. w8221, 2001. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=266191. 4. K. P. Anderson and Chris Brooks, “The Long-Term Price-Earnings Ratio.” Journal of Business Finance & Accounting 33(7–8) (September/October 2006): 1063–1086.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

Relaxed mortgage lending standards sent house prices soaring around the country, especially in California, Florida, and Nevada. Households were buying a lot more home than they could afford, courtesy of subprime mortgages. The market was so hot it had started to look suspiciously like another bubble. The classic definition of an asset bubble was coined by economist Robert Shiller, who called it an unsustainable condition in which “price increases beget further price increases.” I preferred Warren Buffett’s definition: “It’s like most trends—at the beginning it’s driven by fundamentals; in the end, by speculation. It’s just like the old adage: ‘What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.’”

Blamed for a 95-point drop: Scott Patterson, “Fed Comments Roil the Market,” Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2005, www.wsj.com/articles/SB112859671097461506. Unlike many other Fed District Bank presidents: Mark Gongloff, Scott Patterson, and David Gaffen, “Who Will Wield Influence After Greenspan Departs?,” Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2005, www.wsj.com/articles/SB113225663185000372. The classic definition of an asset bubble: Robert J. Shiller, “Speculative Asset Prices,” Nobel Prize Lecture, nobelprize.org, December 8, 2013, 460–61. His more detailed version of a bubble: “A situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increase and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of the investment are drawn to it partly through envy of others’ successes and partly through a gambler’s excitement.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research: Chris Isidore, “Recession Officially Ended in June 2004,” cnnmoney.com, September 20, 2010. “Most, probably, of our decisions”: “Animal Spirits—J. M. Keynes,” economicshelp.org, November 28, 2012. Keynes describes animal spirits in his 1936 book General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), 161–62. It was fitting that in 2009: George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). “There’s a large amount of money”: Cullen Roche, “1930’s Déjà Vu,” BusinessInsider.com, September 4, 2009. “There is plenty of cash”: Richard Barley, “Fretful Investors Sidelined by Rally,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2009.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

My suggestion: Apple should launch the world’s largest tuition-free university. “Do you hear that? It might be the growing sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut and the chickens coming home . . . .” AEIdeas, August 2016. http://bit.ly/2nHvdfr. Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller. http://amzn.to/2o98DZE. The education market is ripe, and I mean falling-off-the-tree ripe, to be disrupted. A sector’s vulnerability is a function of price increases relative to inflation and the underlying increases in productivity and innovation. The reason tech continues to eat more of the world’s GDP is a gestalt that says we need to make a much better product and lower price.

., Form 10-K for the Period Ending November 27, 2005 (filed February 14, 2006), p. 26, from Levi Strauss & Co. website. Cost of College “Do you hear that? It might be the growing sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut and the chickens coming home . . .” AEIdeas, August 2016. http://bit.ly/2nHvdfir. Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller. http://amzn.to/2o98DZE. Time Spent on Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp per Day, December 2016 “How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media?” MediaKix. Number of Timeline Posts per Day—Single vs. In a Relationship Meyer, Robinson. “When You Fall in Love This Is What Facebook Sees.”

Annual Report for the Period Ending December 31, 2016 (filed February 28, 2017), p. 42, from International Business Machines Corporation website. https://www.ibm.com/investor/financials/financial-reporting.html. Chapter 10: The Four and You 1. “Do you hear that? It might be the growing sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut and the chickens coming home . . .” AEIdeas, August 2016. http://bit.ly/2nHvdfr. 2. Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller. http://amzn.to/2o98DZE. 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/books/henry-lodge-dead-co-author-younger-next-year.html?_r=1. Chapter 11: After the Horsemen 1. Yahoo! Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/. 2. Facebook, Inc. https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/. 3. Yahoo!


Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David Aronson

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, Black Swan, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mental accounting, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, retrograde motion, revision control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Sharpe ratio, short selling, source of truth, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, systematic trading, the scientific method, transfer pricing, unbiased observer, yield curve, Yogi Berra

The failure of prices to respond rapidly is caused by a several cognitive errors that afflict investors, such as the conservatism bias and the anchoring effect. These are discussed later in this chapter. Another popular justification of TA is based on pop psychology. By pop psychology, I mean principles of human behavior that seem plausible but lack scientific support. According to noted economist and authority in the field of behavioral finance, Robert Shiller, “In considering lessons from psychology, it must be noted that the many popular accounts of the 334 METHODOLOGICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, STATISTICAL FOUNDATIONS psychology of investing are simply not credible. Investors are said to be euphoric or frenzied during booms or panic-stricken during market crashes.

However, information that diffuses slowly allows for gradual, systematic price movements that can be exploited by TA methods. Despite the prevalence of advanced communications technology, the preferred method of exchanging investment information is still a good story told person to person. This predilection, a result of several million years of evolution, has been confirmed by the studies of behavioral-economist Robert Shiller. He has shown that the word-of-mouth effect is strong even among people who read a lot. A story about a hot new issue has greater impact in conversation than a statistic about the high failure rate of new companies. The way stories spread among investors has been studied with mathematical models similar to those used by epidemiologists to study the spread of disease within a population.

However, before outcomes are known, we never know which details deserve our attention. Among the automatic unconscious rules used by the brain to filter relevant from irrelevant information is the rule to look to other people for cues. In other words, we presume that what grabs the attention of others must be worthy of our attention as well. According to economist Robert Shiller, “the phenomenon of social attention is one of the great creations of behavioral evolution and is critical for the functioning of human society.”79 Although communal attention has great social value, because it promotes collaborative action, it has a downside. It can lead an entire group to hold an incorrect view and take similar mistaken actions.


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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, financial engineering, fixed income, global village, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, power law, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Yogi Berra

There seems to be some evidence that conversations and correspondence with intelligent people is a better engine for personal edification than plain library-ratting (human warmth: Something in our nature may help us grow ideas while dealing and socializing with other people). Somehow there was the pre-and post-Fooled life. While the acknowledgments for the first edition hold more than ever, I would like to add here my newly incurred debt. Shrinking the World I first met Robert Shiller in person as we were seated next to each other at a breakfast panel discussion. I found myself inadvertently eating all the fruits on his plate and drinking his coffee and water, leaving him with the muffins and other unfashionable food (and nothing to drink). He did not complain (he may have not noticed).

Listening to the media, mostly because I am not used to it, can cause me on occasion to jump out of my seat and become emotional in front of the moving image (I grew up with no television and was in my late twenties when I learned to operate a TV set). One illustration of a dangerous refusal to consider alternative histories is provided by the interview that media person George Will, a “commentator” of the extensively commenting variety, conducted with Professor Robert Shiller, a man known to the public for his bestselling book Irrational Exuberance, but known to the connoisseur for his remarkable insights about the structure of market randomness and volatility (expressed in the precision of mathematics). The interview is illustrative of the destructive aspect of the media, in catering to our heavily warped common sense and biases.

This problem is similar to the weaknesses in our ability to correct for past errors: Like a health club membership taken out to satisfy a New Year’s resolution, people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.) Shiller Redux Much of the thinking about the negative value of information on society in general was sparked by Robert Shiller. Not just in financial markets; but overall his 1981 paper may be the first mathematically formulated introspection on the manner in which society in general handles information. Shiller made his mark with his 1981 paper on the volatility of markets, where he determined that if a stock price is the estimated value of “something” (say the discounted cash flows from a corporation), then market prices are way too volatile in relation to tangible manifestations of that “something” (he used dividends as proxy).


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The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

: Eugene Fama’s quote is in Douglas Clement, “Interview with Eugene Fama,” The Region, Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota, December 2007. Keynes’s quote is in John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965), p. 161. Robert Shiller’s theory is described in George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 240-246 Economics for a New World: Limits to the assumption of human rationality and self-regard are discussed in Herbert Gintis, “Five Principles for the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences,” Working Paper, May 13, 2008.

His experience in finance informed his perception that most of the time investors don’t know what they are doing. Investment decisions, he thought, are the result of “animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, has proposed a model based on Keynes’s insight. In it, rationality takes a hike: a plausible new economic opportunity—say the Internet or new trade routes across the Atlantic—leads early investors to make a lot of money. This generates enthusiasm. The prices of the hot new asset—dot-com stocks, shares in shipping companies, whatever—are bid up as investors rush to partake of the profits.


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A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression by Richard A. Posner

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, equity premium, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, very high income

There were plenty of warnings of a housing bubble, beginning in 2003; warnings about excessive leverage in financial firms; and even rather precise predictions of the debacle that has ensued, as in "When Bubbles Burst," an eerily prescient paper by Thomas Helbling and Marco Terrones published in October 2003. Robert Shiller wrote a similar paper in April of the following year, as did another economist, Avinash Persaud, the same month. The Economist magazine spotted the housing bubble in September 2002 and soon became obsessed with it and its possible broader implications for the financial system and the U.S. economy as a whole; in an article published on July 3, 2004, we read: "Housing optimists dismiss these fears by pointing out that doomsters such as The Economist began wringing their hands about a property bubble a year ago, and yet prices have continued to climb.

A restructuring of the immensely complex financial sector should await, if not the end of the depression, at least the beginning of the end. 8 The Economics Profession Asleep at the Switch One Of The biggest Puzzles about the failure to anticipate the financial crisis is the lack of foresight of so many academic economists. There were exceptions; Nouriel Roubini was only the most emphatic of the Cassandras. Raghuram Rajan issued strong warnings in 2005, Paul Krugman in the summer of 2007, Martin Feldstein that fall. I mentioned Robert Shiller. The collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008 elicited warnings from other economists, such as Alan Blinder and Lawrence Summers —the latter of whom, however, had sarcastically dismissed Rajan's warnings three years earlier as "leaden-eyed." But as far as I know, only Roubini among prominent academic economists forecast an actual depression.

Lubos Pastor and Pietro Veronesi, "Was There a NASDAQ Bubble in the Late 1990s?" journal of Financial Economics 81 (2006): 61. Raghuram G. Rajan, "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" in The Greenspan Era: Lessons for the Future: A Symposium Spon- sored hy the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (2005), 213. Robert J. Shiller, The Suhprime Solution: How To- day's Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It (2008). Andrei Shleifer, Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (2000). Mark Zandi, Financial Shock: A 5600 hmk at the Suhprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis (2008).


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Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Among the public, there has been tremendous interest in how economists think, with Paul Krugman’s hugely popular writing, bestsellers such as Freakonomics, and ongoing columns, such as David Leonhardt’s for the New York Times, devoted to the profession. But, with some notable exceptions, economists failed to see the financial, housing, and economic crises coming. Princeton’s Uwe Reinhardt noted that they “slept comfortably” while Wall Street imploded. Yale’s Robert Shiller has invoked the concept of “groupthink” to explain why. Whatever the reason, what occurred in 2007 and 2008 was a monumental blunder. We can’t afford a repeat when it comes to the health of the planet. And we don’t have to. What’s odd about the narrowness of the national economic conversation is that it leaves out theoretical advances in economics and related fields that have begun to change our basic understandings of what motivates and enriches people.

For a popular account of anthropogenic mass extinction, see Kolbert (2009). 9 oceans will be devoid of fish: Jackson (2008). 9 primary source of animal protein for a billion people: Tidwell and Allan (2001). 9 not to say that economists were intellectually stuck: The postcrash reaction of professional economists is discussed by Cohen (2009). 10 A declining fraction of the population considered appliances: Morin and Taylor (2009). 10 “goodbye homo economicus”: Context-Based Research Group and Carton Donofrio Partners (2008). 10 Surveys I worked on as early as 2004: Widmeyer Research and Polling (2004). 10 some notable exceptions: Examples of those who did see the crisis coming are Paul Krugman of Princeton, Nouriel Roubini of New York University, Robert Shiller of Yale, Jane D’Arista of the Financial Markets Center, and James Crotty and Gerald Epstein of the University of Massachusetts. 10 “slept comfortably”: Uwe Reinhardt (2009). 10 “groupthink”: Shiller (2008). In response to a query from Queen Elizabeth about why economists failed to see what was happening, a group of U.K. economists attributed the failure to the “feel-good” factor and a failure of the “collective imagination.”


No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans by Michael S. Barr

active measures, asset allocation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, information asymmetry, it's over 9,000, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market friction, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, p-value, payday loans, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, search costs, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked

his career to finding it.” k SHEILA BAIR, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation “It is inspiring to see such a thoughtful analysis of the deep financial problems that make life miserable for so many people, and to see that many of these problems can be solved with suitable behaviorally informed financial innovations. Barr faces the real subtlety and complexity of the problems that leave so many people with no slack.” k ROBERT SHILLER, Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, Yale University “In many respects the American economy is too financialized. But as Michael Barr highlights in this important book, millions lack access to basic financial services and protections. Barr draws on his unmatched combination of academic expertise and policy experience to define the challenge and suggest ways to meet it.

his career to finding it.” k SHEILA BAIR, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation “It is inspiring to see such a thoughtful analysis of the deep financial problems that make life miserable for so many people, and to see that many of these problems can be solved with suitable behaviorally informed financial innovations. Barr faces the real subtlety and complexity of the problems that leave so many people with no slack.” k ROBERT SHILLER, Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, Yale University “In many respects the American economy is too financialized. But as Michael Barr highlights in this important book, millions lack access to basic financial services and protections. Barr draws on his unmatched combination of academic expertise and policy experience to define the challenge and suggest ways to meet it.

his career to finding it.” k SHEILA BAIR, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation “It is inspiring to see such a thoughtful analysis of the deep financial problems that make life miserable for so many people, and to see that many of these problems can be solved with suitable behaviorally informed financial innovations. Barr faces the real subtlety and complexity of the problems that leave so many people with no slack.” k ROBERT SHILLER, Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, Yale University “In many respects the American economy is too financialized. But as Michael Barr highlights in this important book, millions lack access to basic financial services and protections. Barr draws on his unmatched combination of academic expertise and policy experience to define the challenge and suggest ways to meet it.


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Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In the worst, but not uncommon, excesses of the use of narratives in finance, traders propagate false narratives in schemes such as ‘Dr Evil’ and ‘Darth Vader’ with the aim of disrupting bona fide transactions in bonds and electricity to their advantage. Narratives, true and false, play a central role in financial markets. The American economist Robert Shiller has recently documented the importance and contagious nature of narratives in financial markets, and Tuckett’s ‘conviction narrative’ account of the behaviour of traders is based on extensive interview material. 27 Narratives in finance and business may be true or false, damaging or benign, but are rarely innocuous.

And no information about the production costs of textile mills refutes Ricardo’s exposition of the principle of comparative advantage. The efficient market hypothesis is one of the most controversial models in economics – so controversial that in 2013 Eugene Fama, who developed the model, shared the Nobel Prize with Robert Shiller, who has worked to refute it. The essential insight is that publicly available information is incorporated in securities prices. The explanation of the seemingly contradictory accolades – it is hard to believe that a similar award would be made in the natural sciences – is that it is a mistake either to believe that the hypothesis is true or to assert that it is false.

The more regulators attempt to define precise, detailed rules, which confuse more than clarify, the more likely is a counter-productive outcome. If only someone would stand back and ask ‘What is going on here?’ rather than tweak processes which have acquired their own seemingly irresistible momentum! More narratives of finance In chapter 12 we described how Robert Shiller has argued that swings in sentiment are important in understanding why large and disruptive changes in economic behaviour occur – whether stock market bubbles and crashes or sharp collapses in output during a depression. 11 But Shiller’s focus on narratives is rather one-sided. He uses the concept to explain behaviour which others have called ‘fads and fashions’.


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Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Of course, it is incorrect to say that no one saw this crisis coming. Some hedge fund managers and traders in investment banks put their money instead of their mouths to work. A few government and Federal Reserve officials expressed deep concern. A number of economists, such as Kenneth Rogoff, Nouriel Roubini, Robert Shiller, and William White, repeatedly sounded warnings about the levels of U.S. house prices and household indebtedness. Niall Ferguson, a historian, drew parallels to past booms that ended poorly. The problem was not that no one warned about the dangers; it was that those who benefited from an overheated economy—which included a lot of people—had little incentive to listen.

A number of financial innovations that would allow households to purchase insurance against home-price declines have been proposed, and in light of the recent crisis, demand for these instruments may increase.33 This is also a reason why the government’s focus on encouraging home ownership needs to be revisited. Although the modern economy needs some workers to specialize, workers like Badri, encountered in chapter 4, may tend to grow overly specialized in one industry. Robert Shiller of Yale University has argued for “livelihood” insurance—insurance that would protect workers against a decline in incomes or jobs in their particular areas of specialization. In a sense, long-term unemployment insurance is a form of livelihood insurance provided by society. The downside of such insurance is that it reduces worker incentives to keep their human capital relevant.

Fisher, and Amitabh Chandra, “Malpractice Liability Costs and the Practice of Medicine in the Medicare Program,” Health Affairs 26, no. 3 (May–June 2007): 841–52. 32 For the highly paid workers in the financial sector, I argue that having a stake in the firm can improve incentives. However, some reasonable portion of their savings should be independent of the health of their firms. 33 See, for instance, Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 118–19. 34 The next few paragraphs draw on my previous book with Luigi Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 35 Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler, “Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Savings,” unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago.


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After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

The data on housing show clearly that homebuilding peaked in 2005. Home prices tell a messier story, however: They peaked either in 2006 or in 2007, depending on what measure you use. Two major competing indexes of national average house prices are shown in figure 1.4. The upper line plots a celebrated index devised by Charles “Chip” Case of Wellesley and Robert Shiller of Yale, and now maintained commercially by Standard & Poor’s. The lower line plots an index maintained by the government—specifically, by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which is the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. You can see that they tell rather different stories. FIGURE 1.4 Take Your Pick Two indexes of national average house prices, 2000–2010 According to the Case-Shiller index, home prices peaked in May 2006, but the FHFA index dates the peak a year later.

The Housing Bubble All that said, there can be little doubt that the United States experienced a pretty gigantic housing bubble that blew up and then burst with disastrous consequences in, roughly, the years 2000–2009. Let’s look at some of the evidence, starting with the remarkable figure 2.1, which is due to the efforts of Robert Shiller, perhaps our nation’s most perspicacious chronicler of the housing bubble. Notice two things about this graph. First, the data go all the way back to 1890—over 120 years! That should be long enough to give us historical perspective. Second, the graph plots real house prices—that is, house prices deflated by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

House prices did fall quite a bit then, but so did other prices. Ranges in which the graph is relatively flat—such as the half century from the late 1940s to the late 1990s—connote periods when house prices moved more or less in tandem with other prices. FIGURE 2.1 Real House Prices: The Long View (index, 1890 = 100) SOURCE: Robert Shiller and author's calculations. Now compare the value of the index in 1890 with its value in the 1990s. The two look about the same. Specifically, the index, which is constructed to start at 100 in 1890, averages about 110 in the years 1995–1997. That historical comparison reveals a stunning—and virtually unknown—fact: On balance, the relative prices of houses in America barely changed over more than a century!


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The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

It was also possible to do much larger deals without calling attention to oneself and thus prematurely forcing the price up or down, depending on the nature of the hedge. Overall, more and more money was coming into the oil market, through all the different kinds of funds and financial instruments. All this engendered increased activity, and more and more “investor excitement,” to borrow a phrase from Professor Robert Shiller, the student of financial bubbles and the explicator of the term “irrational exuberance.” Traders saw momentum in the market, which meant rising prices, and as they put money to work and prices went up, it added to the momentum, providing yet more reason to put more money to work, further fueling the momentum.

On the basis of the transaction’s success, Mexico’s finance minister received a unique honor—he was dubbed the “world’s most successful, but worst paid, oil manager.”28 How much of what happened in the oil market can be ascribed to the fundamentals, to what was happening in the physical market, and how much to financialization and what was happening in the financial markets? In truth, there is no sharp dividing line. Price is shaped by what happens both in the physical and financial markets.29 A couple of years later, Robert Shiller, who had become prominent for calling the Internet stock bubble and then the real estate bubble, was having breakfast in the restaurant of the Study, a new hotel on Chapel Street in New Haven, before walking over to lecture in his famous Yale class on financial markets. By then, with recovery well along in the global economy, the price of oil had more than doubled from its lows back to a range of $70 to $80 a barrel.

Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, June 25, 2008; Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2004 (“guidelines,” “curious,” “skeptically”). 4 IHS CERA, “Capital Costs Analysis Forum—Upstream,” January 2009. 5 Ke Tang and Wei Xiong , “Index Investment and the Financialization of Commodities” January 2011, p. 13 (“co-move”). 6 Daniel O’Sullivan, Black Gold, Paper Barrels and Oil Price Barrels (London: Harriman House, 2009). 7 Joe Roeber, The Evolution of Oil Markets: Trading Instruments and Their Role in Oil Price Formation (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1993). 8 CME Group, “2010 Commodities Trading Challenge: Competition Rules and Procedures” (“anticipating”). 9 Interview. 10 Jim O’Neill to author; Jim O’Neill, “Building Better Global Economic BRICs, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper No. 66, November 30, 2001; Financial Times, January 15, 2010. 11 Interview with Mark Fisher. 12 Interview with Robert Shiller. Shiller’s definition of a speculative bubble: “A situation in which news of price increases spur investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increases and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of an investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others’ successes and partly through a gambler’s excitement.”


Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

If the prices of some stocks are extremely low and about to rise, leaving neglected investment opportunities, then many minds aren’t doing so well. 128 / Infotopia So, too, if the prices of some stocks are extremely high and about to fall, ensuring that many minds are losing a lot of money. Is it possible for stocks to be significantly overvalued or undervalued? Many specialists think so. Robert Shiller argues that the increase in the stock market from 1994 to 2000 was not justified “in any reasonable terms. Basic economic indicators did not come close to tripling,” even though stock prices did. In that period, the ratio between stock prices and stock earnings was extreme by historical standards, with prices wildly inflated as compared to an objective measure of the profit-making ability of corporations.50 On this view, many minds were prone to error, leading to overvaluation.

For a good overview, see Andrei Shleifer, Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 48. See Richard Thaler, ed., Advances in Behavioral Finance, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 49. In fact, some rigorous tests have raised doubts about it. See ibid. 50. Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2d ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2, 5. 51. Ibid., 11. 52. See Erica Klarreich, “Best Guess,” Science News, Oct. 18, 2003, 252, available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20031018/ bob9.asp. Notes to Pages 119–30 / 249 53. Note, however, that Hewlett Packard produced good predictions even in a thin market.


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The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

But when the people who have delivered the same kind of one-size-fits-all suburban subdivisions over the past few decades are tearing up their blueprints, venturing gingerly into urban markets, and actually fainting at the thought of what the future holds, something big is afoot. The reliable expansion of our suburbs, the steady growth of the housing industry, and the seemingly unending supply of new single-family homes—and home owners—that we became used to over the past several decades may well be a thing of the past. Robert Shiller, a Yale University economist, founder of the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, and the forecaster who predicted both the dot-com and housing bubbles, has said we may be in for a new normal. According to Shiller, U.S. suburban development since the 1950s was “unusual” in its reliance on the automobile and the highway system; the bursting of the bubble may result in a bigger, more structural change.

Census Bureau, “Texas Dominates List of Fastest-Growing Large Cities Since 2010 Census, Census Bureau Reports,” June 28, 2012. Construction permit data shows: Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions, 2010 ed., Development, Community and Environment Division, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Robert Shiller: Yen, “Census Finds Record Low Growth in Outlying Suburbs.” On March 27, 2012, in an interview with Yahoo! Finance’s Aaron Task, Shiller also suggested that dispersed single-family homes are not adequately built for management as rentals, and “that’s one reason why dispersed suburban housing may not do well in decades to come.”


pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

That collective right, as b oth a working slogan and a political ideal, brings us back to the age- old question of who it is that commands th e inner connection between urb an ization and surplus produc tion and use. Perhaps, after all, L efebvre was right, more than forty years ago, to insist that the revolution in our times has to be urban-or nothing. C HAPT E R TWO T h e U rba n Roots of Ca p ita l i st C ri ses I "Housing Bubbles Are Few and Far B e tween ;' Robert Shiller, the econo­ n an article in the New York Times o n February 5 , 2 0 1 1 , entitled mist who many consider the great housing expert in the US, given his role in the construction of the Case-Shiller index o f housing prices, reas­ sured everyone that the recent housing bubble was a "rare event, not to be repeated for many decades:' The "enormous housing b ubble" of the early 2000s "isn't comparable to any national or international housing cycle in history.

Prahalad, The Fortu ne at the Bottom of the Pyram id: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, New York: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. 2 1 . Scott Larson, "Building Like Moses with Jane Jacobs in Mind;' PhD dis­ sertation, Earth and Environmental Sciences Program, City University of New York, 20 1 0 . C HA PT E R TWO : T H E U R BA N ROOTS OF CA PITALI ST C R I S ES 1 . Robert Shiller, "Housing Bubbles are Few and Far Between;' New York Times, February 5, 20 1 1 . 2 . "It is indeed shocking;' writes Charles Leung, i n "Macroeconomics and Housing: A Review of the Literature;' Journal of Housing Econom ics 1 3 (2004): 249-67, "that there has been so little overlap and i nteraction between the macroeconomics and the housing literature:' 3.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

These are the first sentences of his article ‘The macroeconomist as scientist and engineer’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 20, no. 4 (2006). 2. For a similar view, see the article, ‘Is economics a science?’ by Robert Shiller, one of the 2013 Nobel Economics laureates. The article can be downloaded at: http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/nov/06/is-economics-a-science-robert-shiller. CHAPTER 1: LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING: WHAT IS ECONOMICS? 1. R. Lucas, ‘Macroeconomic priorities’, American Economic Review, vol. 93, no. 1 (2003). This was his presidential address to the American Economic Association. 2.

* The most important regional multilateral banks are the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). * There is a huge amount of evidence, well presented in accessible form in books like Peter Ubel’s Free Market Madness, George Akerlof’s and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits and the psychologist and 2002 Nobel Economics laureate Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. * A very rough but useful rule of thumb is that the value-added figure is usually around one-third of sales (turnover) figure of a company. * What really represents a nation’s productivity is how much people have to work in order to produce a given amount of output, rather than what the output is for each person alive.


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The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

When you can’t state your innocence, proclaim your ignorance: this is often the first line of defense when there is a failed forecast.13 But Sharma’s statement was a lie, in the grand congressional tradition of “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and “I have never used steroids.” What is remarkable about the housing bubble is the number of people who did see it coming—and who said so well in advance. Robert Shiller, the Yale economist, had noted its beginnings as early as 2000 in his book Irrational Exuberance.14 Dean Baker, a caustic economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, had written about the bubble in August 2002.15 A correspondent at the Economist magazine, normally known for its staid prose, had spoken of the “biggest bubble in history” in June 2005.16 Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, wrote of the bubble and its inevitable end in August 2005.17 “This was baked into the system,” Krugman later told me.

And yet, while the ratings agencies bear substantial responsibility for the financial crisis, they were not alone in making mistakes. The story of the financial crisis as a failure of prediction can be told in three acts. Act I: The Housing Bubble An American home has not, historically speaking, been a lucrative investment. In fact, according to an index developed by Robert Shiller and his colleague Karl Case, the market price of an American home has barely increased at all over the long run. After adjusting for inflation, a $10,000 investment made in a home in 1896 would be worth just $10,600 in 1996. The rate of return had been less in a century than the stock market typically produces in a single year.47 But if a home was not a profitable investment it had at least been a safe one.

Of the eight times in which the S&P 500 increased in value by twice its long-term average over a five-year period,43 five cases were followed by a severe and notorious crash, such as the Great Depression, the dot-com bust, or the Black Monday crash of 1987.44 A more accurate and sophisticated bubble-detection method is proposed by the Yale economist Robert J. Shiller, whose prescient work on the housing bubble I discussed in chapter 1. Shiller is best known for his book Irrational Exuberance. Published right as the NASDAQ achieved its all-time high during the dot-com bubble, the book served as an antidote to others, such as Dow 36,000, Dow 40,000 and Dow 100,00045 that promised prices would keep going up, instead warning investors that stocks were badly overpriced on the basis of the fundamentals.


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Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

He also renominated Greenspan for a third term, proof to Wall Street that he understood their concerns. It was, after all, a presidential election year. But Greenspan had a new worry. In October 1996, the Dow Jones Industrials exceeded 6,000, compared to roughly 4,000 in early 1995. The Yale economist Robert Shiller, a stock market historian, had warned repeatedly that stock prices were running at historically high levels. If stock prices were forming a speculative bubble that was likely to burst, it could jeopardize the economic expansion. Both business and consumers would reduce their spending. Raising interest rates to subdue the stock market might diminish the market enthusiasm, but it might also weaken the economy.

They made up in quantity what was lacking in quality. The high dollar coupled with the trade deficit, which put even more dollars in foreign hands, which they in turn confidently invested in U.S. securities, provided ample funds. Between 2000 and 2005, according to Wellesley economist Karl Case and Yale’s Robert Shiller, house prices rose faster than at any time in modern history, and the number of mortgages being written exploded. But when Greenspan raised rates in 2004—on which adjustable rate mortgages were based—the clock began to tick. The rates on tens of billions of dollars of ARMs would be reset upward in 2006.

Glantz went on: “It is an open secret that ‘strong buy’ now means ‘buy,’ ‘buy’ means ‘hold,’ ‘hold’ means that the company isn’t an investment banking client, and ‘sell’ means that the company is no longer an investment client.” Rising stock prices made overly optimistic recommendations seem correct and reinforced the practice. Most stocks rose in the first half of the 1990s. But from 1994 on, they soared. It was what economist Robert Shiller, as noted, a historian of stock trends, labeled “the biggest historical example to date of a speculative upsurge in the stock market.” The economy’s prospects improved markedly. But they did not improve as rapidly as the market did. From the end of 1994 to 2000, stock prices roughly tripled while corporate profits rose by only one and a half times.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Banks and investors worldwide wanted their share of the growing financial bounty in the United States, or else they sought easy riches nearer home. The risk was real that US and global asset prices would keep rising and then quickly and sharply reverse, as they had in Japan in 1990. The person who sounded the loudest warning was Yale University economist Robert Shiller. He emphasized that bouts of irrational exuberance had recurred throughout history. Each bout arose from the same fundamental “human vulnerability to error” and did not just cause gyrations in financial markets but created pervasive instability in the “capitalist system.”6 Many European policymakers believed that Europe was less susceptible to irrational exuberance and to the instability it could spawn than the United States was.

In 2006, by which time the bubble was surely a mania, the words “boom” and “bubble” found no place in the IMF’s annual review.111 To the contrary, the IMF’s special assessment of the Irish financial sector delivered a glowing report. Yes, some tweaking was necessary, but it was all good, the IMF concluded.112 Nyberg wrote that the IMF’s endorsement reinforced confidence in the “soundness” of the banking system and in the system’s guardians, the central bank and the financial regulator.113 Yale University’s Robert Shiller says that in all episodes of irrational exuberance, initial concerns give way to the belief that this time is different. Some of those who see the craziness and hold back are sucked in to the euphoria eventually. “People who thought there was a bubble, and that prices were too high, find themselves questioning their own earlier judgments, and start to wonder whether fundamentals are indeed driving the price increase.”

John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most renowned economist of the twentieth century, had vigorously argued the need for fiscal stimulus to pull an economy out of a recession.121 The direct beneficiaries of lower taxes and recipients of larger government transfers begin spending more, which creates additional incomes for others, thus activating a “multiplier effect” through a steadily widening circle of consumers and investors. George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics, have noted that the mere knowledge that others have increased their spending creates a more optimistic view of the future. Hesitant consumers make purchases that they were postponing; investors take new initiatives. The optimism spreads through a “confidence multiplier.”122 Production increases, and economic recovery gathers momentum.


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Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

McClure, David I Laibson, George Loewsenstein, and Jonathan D. Cohen, “Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards,” Science 306 (October 15, 2004), 503–507. 28. Jerome Groopman tells a similar story. See Groopman, How Doctors Think, 225–233. 29. George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 36–37; and Whitney Tilson and Glenn Tongue, More Mortgage Meltdown: 6 Ways to Profit in These Bad Times (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 29–47. 30.

Prediction markets are real-money exchanges where people can bet on events with binary and temporally defined outcomes; hence the price reflects the probability of the event occurring. See Kenneth J. Arrow, Robert Forsythe, Michael Gorham, Robert Hahn, Robin Hansen, John O. Ledyard, Saul Levmore, Robert Litan, Paul Milgrom, Forrest D. Nelson, George R. Neumann, Marco Ottaviani, Thomas C. Schelling, Robert J. Shiller, Vernon L. Smith, Erik Snowberg, Cass R. Sunstein, Paul C. Tetlock, Philip E. Tetlock, Hal R. Varian, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitzewitz, “The Promise of Prediction Markets,” Science 320 (May 16, 2008):877–878; Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitzewitz, “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google,” working paper, 2008. 4.

Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington, “Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 2, no. 1 (1989): 25–38. 9. Warren E. Buffett, “Chairman’s Letter,” Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report to Shareholders, 1996. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abernathy, Charles M., and Robert M. Hamm. Surgical Intuition: What It Is and How to Get It. Philadelphia, PA: Hanley & Belfus, 1995. Akerlof, George A., and Robert J. Shiller. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters For Global Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Alicke, Mark D., and Olesya Govorun. “The Better-Than-Average Effect.” In The Self in Social Judgment, edited by Mark D. Alicke, David A. Dunning, and Joachim I.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The notion that fads and bubbles and panics drive security prices far from their fundamental value — deviations that end not by returning to that fundamental value but typically by overshooting it to the other extreme — now enjoys a scholarly respectability that it didn't 15 or 20 years ago. In an influential series of papers published during the 1980s, Robert Shiller developed a theory of financial market volatility powered by horde psychology. His 1981 paper, "Do stock prices move too much to be justified by subsequent changes in dividends?" (reprinted in Shiller 1991) took aim at the EMH's claim that stock prices are the rational discounted present value of rationally anticipated future dividends or profits.

(By pension funds he means their managers, of course.) This accountability represents a check on what Monks admits to be the rather anomalous position of corporations in a professedly democratic society. 25. The Twentieth Century Fund's (1992) most recent take on governance, Who's Minding the Store?, is built around an essay by Robert Shiller on excess volatility. Yet the policy conclusions the Fund draws from Shiller's work are the weakest tea imaginable: encouraging patient capital through moral suasion, while taking no tax or regulatory steps towards that goal. 26. In some cases, like Japan and South Korea, the protectionist strategies succeeded; in Latin America, however, they often protected corrupt and incompetent friends of the government.

The latter institutions have contributed greatly to creating the borderless world Tobin bemoans, but liberals rarely seem to have problems with contradictions like this. Tobin has also argued for a similar tax on stock trades. Tobin lodged a dissent from the tame official recommendations of the Twentieth Century Fund's (1992) Task Force on Market Speculation and Corporate Governance. The report's centerpiece was a long essay by Robert Shiller (1992) on markets' excessive volatility, and the dangers of taking guidance on how to run real corporations from movements in their stock prices. But having raised that interesting question, the worthies on the Fund's panel decided against a transactions tax, preferring instead a revolution in the consciousness of institutional investors — the sprouting of a new culture of patience and self-discipline, as incredible as that may sound to any student of the markets.


pages: 303 words: 84,023

Heads I Win, Tails I Win by Spencer Jakab

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fear index, fixed income, geopolitical risk, government statistician, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, price anchoring, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, transaction costs, two and twenty, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

As I said earlier, that measure gave false comfort by showing that in October 2007, at the end of a bull market, stocks were just as cheap as when it had begun five years earlier. We only knew with the benefit of hindsight that the forecast “E” was completely wrong. There’s a much more stable and reliable P/E ratio you should use instead. Though he wasn’t the first person to tweak the measure in some way, Yale University professor Robert Shiller has done so much excellent work on valuing assets that his version of a modified P/E ratio is the most famous. It’s also free to see on his public Web site. The “Shiller P/E,” also known as a cyclically adjusted P/E, or CAPE, mostly gets rid of the problems of corporate margins bouncing up and down that I mentioned earlier and also adjusts for inflation.

That went down to 17 percent for the next cheapest, 15 percent for the following one, and so forth, all the way down to below 6 percent for the most expensive one. The same pattern repeats over ten-year periods. Returns were 11.5 percent a year for the cheapest decile and just 3.3 percent for the most expensive one. If the regular old P/E sounded like a virtual crystal ball to you, then Robert Shiller must seem like Nostradamus. But curb your enthusiasm. The CAPE would be a disastrous short-term timing tool because what I just described is what happens on average. Valuations can stay low or high for years. For example, there was an occasion when the market fell by 18 percent in the following year after one of the cheapest readings.


pages: 267 words: 71,941

How to Predict the Unpredictable by William Poundstone

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, Brownian motion, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, centre right, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Thorp, Firefox, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, index fund, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, market bubble, money market fund, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, transaction costs

The market is supposed to take a long-term outlook and price stocks according to the whole future stream of earnings. But investors, like everyone else, believe in the representativeness of small samples. PE valuations have too much to do with the latest news cycle, the latest quarter, and the last few years. Yale economist Robert Shiller devised a better way of gauging stock market valuation. It’s the current S&P 500 price divided by a ten-year moving average of earnings. This has the merit of smoothing out business cycles and much of the duplicity in corporate earnings reports — for there are cycles of candor as well as profit.

“NCAA Brackets: How to Win Your March Madness Pool.” CBS News, Mar. 12, 2010. www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-51403055/ncaa-brackets-how-to-win-your-march-madness-pool/. Camerer, Colin F. (1989). “Does the Basketball Market Believe in the ‘Hot Hand’?” American Economic Review 79, 1257–1261. Campbell, John Y., and Robert J. Shiller (1998). “Valuation Ratios and the Long-Run Stock Market Outlook.” Journal of Portfolio Management, Winter 1998, 11–26. Cassidy, John (2007). “The Blow-Up Artist.” New Yorker, Oct. 15, 2007. Chapanis, Alphonse (1953). “Random-number Guessing Behavior.” American Psychologist 8, 332. ——— (1995).


pages: 239 words: 69,496

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin, 2013; and Berk, Jonathan B., and Peter M. DeMarzo. Corporate Finance. Boston: Pearson Addison Wesley, 2013. A more accessible treatment of these ideas for practitioners is provided in Higgins, Robert C. Analysis for Financial Management. 11th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2016. Robert Shiller’s Finance and the Good Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, is another excellent general source. My own effort at making finance accessible is the HBX online course “Leading with Finance.” MOV. Boston: President & Fellows of Harvard College, 2016. Author’s Note “My object in living”: The Frost quote is an excerpt of the last stanza of “Two Tramps in Mud Time.”

For a discussion of the rise of the alternative asset industry and its effect on Wall Street, see Desai, Mihir A. “The Incentive Bubble.” Harvard Business Review 90, no. 3 (March 2012): 123–29. For an excellent but rigorous overview of the state of play in asset pricing generally, see Campbell, John Y. “Empirical Asset Pricing: Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller.” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 116, no. 3 (2014): 593–634; and Cochrane, John H. Asset Pricing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. A slightly more accessible version of these ideas is provided in Cochrane, John H., and Christopher L. Culp. “Equilibrium Asset Pricing and Discount Factors: Overview and Implications for Derivatives Valuation and Risk Management.”


Early Retirement Guide: 40 is the new 65 by Manish Thakur

Airbnb, diversified portfolio, financial independence, hedonic treadmill, index fund, lifestyle creep, Lyft, passive income, passive investing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, side hustle, time value of money, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, Zipcar

In reality, if we were evaluating houses as an investment, they would have a terrible return, or even a negative return when including interest, property taxes, and repairs. In most economic times, houses only retain their value, increasing with the rate of inflation, rather than growing in actual value. Yale professor Robert Shiller found that when property taxes, maintenance, and other housing costs are accounted for, houses usually have a negative return. Since our timeline to become financially independent is much shorter than 30 years, we don't want those large mortgage payments eating away at our 4% withdrawal each year just to have a larger home.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

S. Eliot speaks of ‘raids on the inarticulate.’ Humboldt, for his part, posits a drive [Trieb] ‘to couple everything felt by the soul [mind] with a sound.’ ” 85. Robert J. Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 86. Steve LeVine, “The Economist Who Wants to Ditch Math,” Marker: Medium, November 5, 2019, https://marker.medium.com/robert-shiller-says-economics-needs-to-go-viral-to-save-itself-f157eceb4c7d. 87. Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk, eds., Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 88.

It is a feature of social meanings crystallized into resonant language reinforcing sense with sound, inner feeling with an outward objective correlative. Narratives about the future are drivers of the economy and society, and not simply post hoc efforts to understand what has already happened. This insight, going back to Keynes, has recently been recapitulated in Nobelist Robert Shiller’s book Narrative Economics.85 There is no physics of markets; economics is a human science, all the way down, and will be unpredictable as long as humans have free will. As Dennis Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, has observed, “The standard statistical analyses are no longer valid.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

If economists want to enhance their public engagement, they will need to pay greater attention to these and other questions discussed in the next few chapters. Nobel Confusion? When the 2013 Nobel Prize in economics (technically the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded to Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller, along with Lars Peter Hansen, many were puzzled by the selection. Fama and Shiller are both distinguished and highly regarded scholars, so it was not their qualifications that raised eyebrows. What seemed odd was that the committee had picked them together. The two economists seem to hold diametrically opposed views on how financial markets work.

They had spoken with near unanimity when it came to the “dangers of government over-regulation.” Their technical expertise—or what seemed like it at the time—had given them a privileged position as opinion makers, as well as access to the corridors of power. Very few among them had raised alarm bells about the crisis to come (Robert Shiller was one such Cassandra). Perhaps worse, the profession failed to provide helpful guidance in steering the world economy out of its mess. Economists’ opinion on monetary, fiscal, and regulatory remedies for longer term recovery and growth never converged. Many outsiders concluded that economics was in need of a major shake-up.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

And the decline in interest rates across the region fuelled speculative bubbles, as we shall see. The build-up to the crisis The crisis that ended this era had its roots in an unexpected place – the American housing market. What happened to US house prices in the late 1990s and early 2000s was most unusual. Robert Shiller of Yale University had looked at the long-term history of house prices in the US and found that the real price increase between 1890 and 1997 was about 12%. Then, in the eight years between 1998 and 2006, they rose 85%. Nothing like it had been seen before. This was not caused by population growth, which was only rising steadily, nor by building costs.

Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929–1945 35. Source: https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-consumer-price-index-decade-commentary/inflation-cpi-consumer-price-index-1920–1929/ 36. Ahamed, Lords of Finance, op. cit. 37. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1109BUSM293NNBR 38. The figures come from Robert Shiller of Yale University and his website: www.irrationalexuberance.com 39. “Florida’s land boom”, https://fcit.usf.edu/florida/lessons/ld_boom/ld_boom1.htm 40. The city’s name had been changed from St Petersburg during the war. It would be changed again to Leningrad before reverting to St Petersburg in the post-communist era. 41.

Barry Eichengreen and Charles Wyplosz, “The unstable EMS”, https://www.Brookings.Edu/Wp-Content/Uploads/1993/01/1993a_Bpea_Eichengreen_Wyplosz_Branson_Dornbusch.Pdf 39. Source: https://www.nber.org/cycles.html 40. The day was dubbed Black Wednesday although, in fact, it allowed Britain to slash interest rates and let the economy recover. Longer term, it soured British politics by making many on the right hostile to the EU in general. 41. Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, third edition 42. Judith Yates, “Housing in Australia in the 2000s: on the agenda too late?”, https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/confs/2011/yates.html 43. Tobias Buck, “Spain: boom to bust and back again”, Financial Times, April 6th 2017 44. Ben S. Bernanke, “The global saving glut and the US current account deficit”, the Sandridge Lecture, Virginia Association of Economists, Richmond, Virginia, March 10th 2005 Chapter 15 – Government: an ever-present force 1.


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Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

By 2010, well over two thousand metric tonnes a year was being mined; by 2018 that figure had risen to well over three thousand metric tonnes a year.29 Consumers suspect that the prices of neither gold nor homes are determined or altered by supply and demand. In 1988, economists Karl Case and Robert J. Shiller sent 2,030 questionnaires to recent home buyers in four U.S. cities asking them what they thought had determined recent changes in housing prices where they lived. “Not a single person from among the 886 respondents cited any quantitative evidence about future trends in supply or demand, or professional forecasts of future supply or demand.”30 At the time, the economists concluded, “There is a peculiar lack of interest in objective evidence about fundamentals.”

“Not a single person from among the 886 respondents cited any quantitative evidence about future trends in supply or demand, or professional forecasts of future supply or demand.”30 At the time, the economists concluded, “There is a peculiar lack of interest in objective evidence about fundamentals.” They would have been more insightful if they had recognized that buyers knew that supply and demand is not a fundamental determinant of price—how could it be, when housing supply in the United States had also been growing so quickly throughout the childhoods of Generation X? Robert J. Shiller was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for economics twenty-five years after sending out those questionnaires with his colleague Karl Case. So if it is not supply and demand that determines housing prices, what could it be? What consumers thought did matter were speculative considerations. Housing economists don’t have the answer.

Becky Tunstall, “Relative Housing Space Inequality in England and Wales, and Its Recent Rapid Resurgence,” International Journal of Housing Policy 15, no. 2 (2015): 105–26, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616718.2014.984826. 29. “Gold Supply and Demand Statistics,” World Gold Council, accessed 6 May 2019, https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold-supply-and-demand-statistics. 30. Robert Shiller, “Speculative Prices and Popular Models,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4, no. 2 (1990): 59, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1942890. Note: Case and Shiller worked together for decades, but this paper was written by Shiller alone. 31. John Muellbauer and Anthony Murphy, “Booms and Busts in the UK Housing Market,” Economic Journal 107, no. 445 (1997): 1701–27, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0297.1997.tb00076.x/full. 32.


pages: 490 words: 117,629

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by David F. Swensen

asset allocation, asset-backed security, Benchmark Capital, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, classic study, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, junk bonds, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pez dispenser, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, the market place, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

If highly compensated, specially trained, handsomely supported investment professionals fail, what leads part-time, financially untutored, resource-deficient individuals to believe they can succeed? The unrealistic belief in success emanates from a failure by individuals to recognize their investment limitations. Yale economist Robert Shiller observes that “a pervasive human tendency towards overconfidence” causes investors “to express overly strong opinions and rush to summary judgments.”2 Overconfidence contributes to a litany of investor errors, including inadequate diversification, overzealous security selection, and counterproductive market timing.

Suggesting that TIAA-CREF participants learned little from the experience of the 1990s, during 2003 a resurgent stock market once again increased participant equity holdings, setting the stage for another leg of the roller coaster trip. Market forces provided a wild ride for TIAA-CREF participants. RETURN AND RISK BENEFITS FROM REBALANCING When markets exhibit excess volatility, rebalancing enhances portfolio returns. Excess volatility, a phenomenon described by Yale economist Robert Shiller, refers to a situation in which market prices fluctuate more than necessary to reflect changes in fundamental drivers of security values, such as corporate earnings and interest rates. Since stock prices tend to fluctuate around fair value, excess volatility allows systematic rebalancers to buy low (on relative declines) and sell high (on relative increases).

The Vangard Group, Vanguard REIT Index Fund Investor Shares Prospectus, 25 November 2003: 3. 39. Wells Real Estate Funds, Wells STP REIT Index Fund Prospectus, 25 November 2003: 3. CHAPTER 3: PORTFOLIO CONSTRUCTION 1. John Maynard Keynes, Monetary Reform (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924): 88. 2. Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000): 142. CHAPTER 4: NON-CORE ASSET CLASSES 1. Marie Nelson, “Debt Ratings,” Moody’s Investors Service, 23 July 2003. 2. “WorldCom’s Credit Rating Sliced to Junk by Moody’s,” Bloomberg, 9 May 2002. 3. Sharon Ou and David T.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

(In the last quarter of 2007, Glasgow house prices fell by 2.1 per cent. The only consolation was that in Edinburgh they fell by 5.8 per cent.) In cities all over the world, house prices soared far above what was justified in terms of rental income or construction costs. There was, as the economist Robert Shiller has said, simply a ‘widespread perception that houses are a great investment’, which generated a ‘classic speculative bubble’ via the same feedback mechanism which has more commonly affected stock markets since the days of John Law. In short, there was irrational exuberance about bricks and mortar and the capital gains they could yield.74 This perception, as we have seen, was partly political in origin.

ID=18579. 72 CNN, 9 July 2000. 73 Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Board’s semi-annual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress, before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, US Senate, 16 February 2005. 3. Blowing Bubbles 1 For a recent contribution to a vast literature, see Timothy Guinnane, Ron Harris, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, ‘Putting the Corporation in its Place’, NBER Working Paper 13109 (May 2007). 2 See especially Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (2nd edn., Princeton, 2005). 3 See Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (3rd edn., New York / Chichester / Brisbane / Toronto / Singapore, 1996), pp. 12-16. Kindleberger owed a debt to the pioneering work of Hyman Minsky. For two of his key essays, see Hyman P.

Litan, ‘Sharing and Reducing the Financial Risks of Future Mega-Catastrophes’, Brookings Issues in Economic Policy, 4 (March 2006). 87 William Hutchings, ‘Citadel Builds a Diverse Business’, Financial News, 3 October 2007. 88 Marcia Vickers, ‘A Hedge Fund Superstar’, Fortune, 3 April 2007. 89 Joseph Santos, ‘A History of Futures Trading in the United States’, South Dakota University MS, n.d. 5. Safe as Houses 1 Philip E. Orbanes, Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game - And How It Got That Way (New York, 2006), pp. 10-71. 2 Ibid., p. 50. 3 Ibid., pp. 86f. 4 Ibid., p. 90. 5 Robert J. Shiller, ‘Understanding Recent Trends in House Prices and Home Ownership’, paper presented at Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Jackson Hole Conference (August 2007). 6 http://www.canongate.net/WhoOwnsBritain/DoTheMathsOnLand Ownership . 7 David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven, 1994), p. 170. 8 I am grateful to Gregory Clark for these statistics. 9 Frederick B.


Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Bernie Madoff, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, different worldview, high net worth, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Shuttleworth, market bubble, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, subprime mortgage crisis, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

Not all philanthrocapitalists talk or feel this way, but the mix of arrogance and ignorance revealed in these quotations sure takes some explaining. What lies behind the rise of this phenomenon? The philanthrocapitalists are drinking from a heady and seductive cocktail, one part “irrational exuberance,” as Robert Shiller puts it,10 that is characteristic of market thinking; two parts believing that success in business equips them to make the same impact on society at large; a dash or two of the excitement that accompanies any high-profile new solution; and an extra degree of fizz from the oxygen of publicity that is created when philanthropists get the chance to mix with the world’s richest and most famous people.


pages: 58 words: 18,747

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think by Matthew Yglesias

Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, gentrification, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, land reform, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, pets.com, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, statistical model, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white picket fence

This is stuff you’re going to have to fix, not stuff that’s going to increase in value. The house probably comes with some grass and other plants that you’ll have to take care of, a roof that might leak, and windows that will get dirty. Lots of people buy RVs, but nobody “invests” in them. And what’s a house but a giant RV with no wheels? Yale economist Robert Shiller observes in his book Subprime Solution that, once upon a time, “People thought of their homes as depreciating manufactured goods, like cars and boats, which require a lot of upkeep and eventually go out of style.” When people buy new cars, they consider the car’s resale value. But that doesn’t mean they expect to turn a profit when selling it.


pages: 358 words: 104,664

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

These decisions depend on the type of asset in question (is it a yacht, an art collection, or a stock portfolio?) as well as on the goals of the client. What wealth managers do As a practical matter, wealth managers’ daily practice is somewhat like that of architects, in that they design complex, multifunction structures. Indeed, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller recently defined finance as “the science of goal architecture—of the structuring of the economic arrangements necessary to achieve a set of goals and the stewardship of the assets needed for that achievement.”21 From this perspective, wealth management is a profession operating at the very core of finance.

Harrington, “Trust and Estate Planning.” 19. Lawrence Friedman, Dead Hands: A Social History of Wills, Trusts, and Inheritance Law (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 20. Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 21. Robert Shiller, Finance and the Good Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 22. Michael Parkinson, Trustee Investment and Financial Appraisal, 4th ed. (Birmingham, UK: Central Law Training, 2008), 20. 23. Michael Parkinson, Trust Creation: Law and Practice (Birmingham, UK: Central Law Training, 2005), 220. 24.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

.), The Elgar Companion to Adam Smith, Edward Elgar 2009 OTHER WORKS Acemoglu, Daron and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail, Profile Books 2012 Akerlof, George A. and Rachel E. Kranton, Identity Economics, Princeton University Press 2010 Akerlof, George A. and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits, Princeton University Press 2009 Akerlof, George A. and Robert J. Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, Princeton University Press 2015 Allen, Robert, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Cambridge University Press 2009 Anderson, James, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Corn Laws, Mrs Mundell 1777 Ariely, Dan, The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, HarperCollins 2012 Arrow, Kenneth, Social Choice and Individual Values, John Wiley 1951 Arrow, Kenneth and Frank Hahn, General Competitive Analysis, Holden-Day 1971 Bagehot, Walter, Economic Studies, ed.

The rich and the great, the proud and the vain, will not admit into their gardens an ornament which the meanest of the people can have as well as they.’ History of manias, bubbles and crashes: there is considerable controversy as to the correct explanation for different bubbles or manias. See e.g. Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 4th edn, John Wiley 2000; Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, Princeton University Press 2000; Peter Garber, Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias, MIT Press 2000; and for finance, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time is Different, Princeton University Press 2011 Keynes’s beauty competition: J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan 1936 Asset markets and credit creation: see George Cooper, The Origin of Financial Crises, 2nd edn, Harriman House 2010 Hyman Minsky: see his Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, Yale University Press 1986.

On progress and inequality—and the dynamic ebb and flow between them—see Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, Princeton University Press 2013 GDP disparity between West and East Germany: CIA World Factbook, 1990 Incentives within capitalism encouraging rip-offs and exploitation: see George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, Princeton University Press 2015 ‘“Free Trade” is an accepted maxim of tedious orthodoxy’: Walter Bagehot, ‘Adam Smith and our Modern Economy’, reprinted in Economic Studies, ed. R. H. Hutton, Longman, Green 1895 Hamiltonian arguments for managed trade: cf.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

In a way, they did—eventually and violently—by succumbing to a massive “correction”—much to the sorrow of millions of hapless investors, pension funds and others who had gotten no timely warnings from their government about what was ahead. Greenspan could not claim ignorance. In private meetings with Federal Reserve Board colleagues as far back as 1996, he was repeatedly warned of the dangers posed by the growing stock-price bubble. He declined to take any action or even warn the public. Yale economist Robert Shiller, whose book Irra- tional Exuberance impressively predicted the coming blood-bath, was a rare critic. A public official who fails to alert investors to such risks “is no better than a doctor who, having diagnosed high blood pressure in a patient, says nothing because he thinks the patient might be lucky and show no ill effects,” Shiller wrote.

The logical response is a fundamental policy shift in favor of work and wages—boosting incomes and demand—but that approach would require taboo measures from the Keynesian past that even most Democrats don’t understand or support. Meanwhile, the financial froth of speculative bubbles—and their dangers—are another enduring legacy of the Greenspan era. “Irrational exuberance really is still with us,” Robert Shiller wrote in the new, revised edition of his book. Notwithstanding the earlier meltdown, the stock market remains dangerously overvalued by historical measures, Shiller warns, and is now accompanied by dramatic price inflation in real estate. These two bubbles are false valuations by markets and will burst sooner or later.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The term “American Dream” had originally been popularized by James Truslow Adams in 1931, who explained, “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of their birth.”39 That high-minded understanding of the “American Dream” persisted into the 1960s. As Nobel Laureate economist Robert Shiller has observed, “it meant freedom, mutual respect and equality of opportunity. It had more to do with morality than material success.” References to the American Dream became even more common in the 1960s, Shiller points out, including “Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in 1963, in which he spoke of a vision that was ‘deeply rooted in the American Dream.’

When we speak to quantitative social scientists about the I-we-I curve, they often say that they would fully believe our story only if we can identify a “cause” of the curve; but when we speak to historians they usually say that if we did identify a “cause” of the curve, they would not believe our story, because “history is always more complicated than that.” In short, social scientists tend to prefer causal analysis, while most historians prefer narratives.12 Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, has recently argued that historians may be on to something that social scientists should not ignore. Shiller’s book Narrative Economics opens with him reminiscing about an enlightening undergraduate history class in which he read an account of the 1920s by, coincidentally, Frederick Lewis Allen, the same historian whose image of “streams of events run[ning] side by side down the channel of time” we cited earlier in this chapter.

Ngram analysis shows no similar pattern for “fanfare” nor for “Common Man,” so this chart does not primarily reflect the impact of the musical composition itself. 38 As noted in Chapter 2, from 1945 to 1975 the national distribution of income gradually became somewhat more equal, implying that working-class Americans were getting a slightly larger share of annual growth than upper income Americans, though the actual distribution of income itself remained far from equal. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974, The Oxford History of the United States, vol. 10 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 321–22. 39 James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Garden City, NY: Blue Ribbon Books, 1941), 404. 40 See Robert J. Shiller, “The Transformation of the ‘American Dream,’ ” New York Times, August 4, 2017. 41 Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 256. 42 Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” African Studies Center—University of Pennsylvania, accessed November 22, 2019, https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. 43 John F.


Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

Benchmark interest rates, monthly Sources: Federal Reserve Board and Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey® via Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) ANTECEDENTS Home prices across the country had been rising rapidly for nearly a decade. Real home price index, percentage change from 1890 Source: U.S. Home Price and Related Data, Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance ANTECEDENTS Household debt as a share of income had risen to alarming heights. Aggregate household debt as a share of disposable personal income Source: Federal Reserve Board Financial Accounts of the United States, based on Ahn et al. (2018) ANTECEDENTS Credit and risk had migrated outside the regulated banking system.

Outcomes OUTCOMES The severity of the stress of the 2008 financial crisis was, in some respects, worse than in the Great Depression. Sources: Stock prices: The Center for Research in Security Prices at Chicago Booth via Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS); housing prices: U.S. home price and related data, Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance; GD household wealth: Mishkin (1978); GR household wealth: Federal Reserve Board Financial Accounts of the United States OUTCOMES The U.S. government response ultimately stopped the panic and stabilized the financial system . . . Bank CDS spreads and Libor-OIS spread Sources: Libor-OIS: Bloomberg Finance L.P.; CDS spreads: Bloomberg Finance L.P., IHS Markit Note: Credit default swap spreads are equal-weighted averages of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.

Dept. of Treasury NOTES Cumulative growth in average income: Re-created with data underlying Figure 10, “The Distribution of Household Income, 2014,” Congressional Budget Office (2018), www.cbo.gov/publication/53597. See link for definitions of income and income groups. Real home price index: Based on Figure 3.1, U.S. home price and related data, Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), as updated by the author, www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. Aggregate household debt: Based on Figure 1, Panel 1, Michael Ahn, Michael Batty, and Ralf Meisenzahl, “Household Debt-to-Income Ratios in the Enhanced Financial Accounts,” FEDS Notes (Washington, DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, January 11, 2018), https://doi.org/10.17016/2380-7172.2138.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

A home, if it’s your primary residence, shouldn’t be seen as an investment to leverage, and it shouldn’t be counted on to produce a gigantic return. But wait, haven’t we always been told that your home is your best investment because it always goes up in value? In my search for answers, I sat down with the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller, the leading expert on real estate markets, and creator of the Case-Shiller home price index of housing prices. His breakthrough insights were used to create the following chart. Shiller found that when he adjusted for inflation, US housing prices have been nearly flat for a century! He exploded one of the biggest myths of our time: that home prices keep going up and up.

These are trusts that own big chunks of commercial real estate (or mortgages) and sell shares to small investors, like mutual funds. REITs trade like stocks, and you can also buy shares of a REIT index fund, which gives you a diversity of many different REITs. For growth, the Nobel economist Robert Shiller told me that you’re better off investing in REITs than owning your own home (which belongs in the Security Bucket, anyway). “Buying an apartment REIT sounds to me like maybe a better investment than buying your own house,” he said, “because there seems to be a tilt toward renting now.” That could change, of course.

I think in many ways you’re either born with leadership or not, but that doesn’t mean you’re not constantly working at it, honing it, and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. The style of leadership will change with different people or different situations, but the basic tenets of leadership are consistent. TR: I recently interviewed Dr. Robert Shiller, who just won the Nobel Prize in economics, and he was talking about all the good that financial institutions do in the world that people take for granted. Why do you think their reputations have shifted, and what can be done to turn it around? ME: Following the financial crisis, it’s easy to understand why some people lost trust in the industry.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

So yes, economics research focused on empirical evidence has recently become more common. Yet economists are still reluctant to ‘get their hands dirty’ with the messiness of real life. Most contemporary economists mainly use just one type of empirical evidence – large statistical datasets – which can be accessed without leaving your office. Nobel laureate Robert Shiller describes the problem as ‘an attitude in the profession that collecting data is for lesser people’.9 Before ‘physics envy’ led mainstream economics from the 1960s onwards to become dominated by mathematical modelling, economists had drawn on a broader mix of evidence including case studies and interviews – often involving going out and talking to people in the real economy.

Van Horn (2012), ‘Inland Empire: Economics’ Imperialism as an Imperative of Chicago Neoliberalism’, Journal of Economic Methodology, 19 (3), 259–82. 7 Fourcade, M., Ollion, E., and Algan, Y. (2015), ‘The Superiority of Economists’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29 (1), table 2. 8 Van Noorden, R. (2015), ‘Interdisciplinary Research by the Numbers’, Nature, 525 (7569): 306–30. 9 Sommer, Jeff, ‘Robert Shiller: A Skeptic and a Nobel Winner’, New York Times, 19 October 2013. 10 Backhouse, R., and Cherrier, B. (2017), ‘The Age of the Applied Economist’, History of Political Economy, 49 (supplement), 1–33. 11 Backhouse, R., and Cherrier, B. (2017), ‘“It’s Computers, Stupid!” The Spread of Computers and the Changing Roles of Theoretical and Applied Economics’, History of Political Economy, 49 (supplement), 103–26. 12 http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html. 13 At the ASSA meetings, Chicago, January 2017.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

The trouble, explained his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, was the ‘Taliban wing’ of the Treasury who thought Snowden was right.8 The global turning point can be dated from the meeting of the G7’s finance ministers at Iqaluit in Canada in February 2010, which, dominated by the Greek crisis, committed governments to slashing deficits.9 Orthodox economists argued that cutting public spending would boost output by reducing borrowing costs and increasing confidence. 224 t h e di s a bl e m e n t of f i s c a l p ol ic y In a pallid echo of Keynes’s ‘paradox of thrift’, the larger G20 acknowledged, in a declaration following its 2010 Toronto summit, that ‘synchronised financial adjustment [i.e. if all governments tried to reduce their deficits simultaneously] across several major economies could adversely impact the recovery’,10 but only President Obama stood out against the stampede towards what Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble approvingly dubbed ‘expansionary fiscal consolidation’. Obama was supported by economists Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Shiller, Larry Summers, Nouriel Roubini and Brad DeLong. But ‘expansionary fiscal consolidation’ became the consensual view of Europe’s finance ministers.11 The majority of financial economists supinely followed the lead of the consolidators. Of the UK’s top economic journalists, Martin Wolf and Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times and Larry Elliott of the Guardian were lonely dissenters.

It presents a vulgarized picture of the discipline, the way, perhaps, it is understood by non-economists (including politicians and some badly trained officials), but remote from the mental universe of practising economists. They will also point to the progressive elements in the economists’ research programme. What is called ‘behavioural economics’ only really took off after the crisis, although in 1984 Robert Shiller, the doyen of behavioural economics, had already labelled the Efficient Market Hypothesis ‘one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economic thought’.53 Behavioural economics utilizes empirical psychology to explain why individual behaviour does not conform to the neo-classical model of rationality.

What follows is about the views of the economists ‘in power’. To a number of economists outside the mainstream, such as William Black, Stephen Keen, Randall Wray and James Galbraith, it was obvious that the financial system was on an unsustainable roll. Of those in the mainstream, Raghuram Rajan and Robert Shiller can claim credit for having foreseen a crisis, for various reasons. The general cause of the financial collapse had been previsioned by Hyman Minsky in his ‘financial instability hypothesis’: see Minsky (1992). 3. Quoted in Kynaston (2017), p. 358. Montagu Norman to Henry Clay. 4. The original is a bit more verbose than the familiar form given above.


pages: 407 words: 114,478

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William J. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, carried interest, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the second place, there is voluminous evidence that excess corporate cash from “retained earnings” (that is, earnings not paid out to the shareholders, but instead reinvested in the company) tends to be wasted. And finally, it just isn’t happening. In Figure 2-4, I’ve plotted the dividends and earnings of the stock market since 1900 (courtesy of Robert Shiller at Yale). Figure 2-4 is another one of those confusing “semilog” graphs. Their major advantage is that they allow you to estimate the percent rate of increase of earnings and dividends across a wide range of values. This is not true of standard “arithmetic” plots. With a semilog graph, a constant growth rate produces a plot that moves up at a fairly constant angle, called the slope.

Clearly the rapidly accelerating trend of earnings and dividend growth frequently cited by today’s New Era enthusiasts is nowhere to be seen. This analysis also demolishes another one of the supposed props of current stock valuations: stock buybacks, which should also increase per-share stock dividends. This is what is actually plotted in Figure 2-4. Figure 2-4. Nominal earnings and dividends, S&P 500. (Source: Robert Shiller, Yale University). • Bogle’s speculative return—the growth of the dividend multiple—could continue to provide future stock price increases with further growth of the dividend multiple. Why, you might ask, can’t the dividend multiple grow at 3% per year from here, yielding 3% of extra return?


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

Society initially changes gradually, Jenga block by Jenga block, but when it tumbles, the collapse happens all at once. Preparing for this is easier to do while the edifice still appears sound. “It’s going to be much harder if we wait until 70% of the population is out of a job,” said the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller, during a McKinsey talk in 2014. The new normal This isn’t about temporary acceleration. This is not a phase through which you can simply hold your breath and cling on tight while you wait for stability to resume. That won’t happen because this is permanent. Permanent acceleration is our new normal.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

If markets are affected by crowd psychology, then prices could be efficiently reflecting delusions. Certainly you wouldn't need a lot of heavy math to prove this to someone who's lived through the past few years. Cracks began appearing in the EM consensus in the early 1980s. In a classic 1981 paper, Robert Shiller—later more famous as the author of Irrational Exuberance —showed that stock prices were far more volatile than were dividends, typically exaggerating the up-and-down moves through the economic cycle; if the market were rationally valuing shares, prices and underlying dividends should move more or less in tandem.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

These examples upend the central verity of modern economics, that people always have rational expectations. They often make choices which they ought to know will leave them worse off. Advertisers were exploiting this propensity long before economists started to notice it. In their book, Phishing for Phools (2015), Nobel Laureates George Akerlof (b.1940) and Robert Shiller (b.1946) show, with many examples both amusing and appalling, that misperception and deception are rampant in market economies. ‘Phishing’ is a ‘fraud on the internet in order to glean personal information from individuals’ to get them to do things in the interest of the ‘phisherman’ rather than the ‘phools’.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

It was beyond time to remove the punchbowl by tightening access to credit, yet the Fed resisted doing so. By now, any stock in a company with any claim to a digital future was red-hot. Do you remember Pets.com and Webvan, or Worldcom and Global Crossing? With so many companies skyrocketing in paper value, the phrase “irrational exuberance” was coined by economist Robert Shiller. The dot-com craze popped in 2000, erasing three-fourths of the market value of technology stocks listed on the Nasdaq. By 2002, a time frame that included the deadly attack on the World Trade Center, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled by 43 percent. The dot-com bust led to the demise of many firms—tech and otherwise—that had loaded themselves with debt.

Many academic colleagues—some with invaluable policy and/or markets experience—have been a source of great food for thought and important ideas: Ken Rogoff, Barry Eichengreen, Dani Rodrik, Maury Obstfeld, Jeff Frankel, Bill Nordhaus, Larry Kotlikoff, Jeff Sachs, Michael Pettis, Alberto Alesina, Richard Portes, Helen Rey, Paul Krugman, Carmen Reinhart, Nassim Taleb, Raghu Rajan, Joe Stiglitz, Niall Ferguson, Robert Shiller, Kishore Mahbubani, Willem Buiter, Giancarlo Corsetti, Brad DeLong, and Steven Mihm (my co-author of Crisis Economics). There are many current or former policy makers—some with a distinguished academic or markets background—whom I have interacted with over the decades. While they may not share some of my views I learned a lot from all of them: Larry Summers, Janet Yellen, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Christine Lagarde, Mario Draghi, Jens Weidman, Lael Brainard, Richard Clarida, Randy Quarles, Jean-Claude Trichet, Mark Carney, Francois Villeroy de Galhau, Kevin Rudd, Jason Furman, Jacob Frenkel, Horuhiko Kuroda, Stanley Fischer, Gita Gopinath, David Malpass, Mario Monti, Enrico Letta, Paolo Pesenti, Adam Posen, Ted Truman, David Lipton, Anna Gelpern, Dan Tarullo, John Lipsky, Bill White, Olivier Blanchard, Federico Sturzenegger, Andrés Velasco, Felipe Larraín, Hans-Helmut Kotz, Dina Powell, Vittorio Grilli, Fabio Panetta, Ignazio Visco, Catherine Mann, Laurence Boone, Luis de Guindos, Philip Lane, Hyun Shin, Claudio Borio, Andy Haldane, Thomas Jordan, Stefan Ingves, Ilan Goldfajn, Alejandro Werner.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Even the Wall Street Journal editorial team has warned that the Trump trade team is like Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley, promotors of the disastrous 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that aided and abetted the onset of the Great Depression with the introduction of tariffs of up to 60 percent on twenty thousand types of goods imported into the United States.11 The net effect of the act was to squash any hope of an economic recovery in the aftermath of the Great Depression and to cut world trade by 33 percent. In addition, readers might tremble to know that Hoover took office with US equity valuations at very high levels. Robert Shiller’s excellent database highlights that the US long-term market’s price to earnings ratio was at 32 in January 1929 (the highest it reached was 44 in December 1999) and that it reads 28 today, which is 69 percent higher than the historical average of 16 and thus puts the market in expensive territory from a valuation standpoint.12 Eight months into Hoover’s term the Wall Street Crash occurred, and the United States lurched first into recession and then into the Great Depression.

An NBER working paper by Grace Xing Hu, Jun Pan, and Jang Wang gives a very good overview of the development of China’s capital market development. Hu, Pan, and Wang, “The Chinese Capital Market.” 11. “Trump’s Trade Folly,” editorial, Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2018. 12. Analysis drawn from data in Robert Shiller’s historic stock market data found at http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. 13. See, for example, Bernanke, “The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression.” 14. One of Ben Bernanke’s fields of expertise is the Great Depression; see, for example, his Essays on the Great Depression. 15. Buckles, Hungermann, and Lugauer, “Is Fertility a Leading Economic Indicator?.”


pages: 172 words: 54,066

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

This explains the fact that the statistical discrepancy shifted from being positive through most of the postwar period to being a large negative at the peaks of the stock and housing bubbles. [28] The evidence is laid out in Baker (2002b). [29] The existence of a 100-year-long trend was uncovered in research by Robert Shiller (2006), which was not yet available in 2002. However, it was possible to use publicly available data sources to determine that nationwide home prices had just tracked inflation since 1953 (see Baker 2002b). [30] Greenspan (2002). [31] There was the possibility that the gap between home sale prices and rent was driven by the extraordinarily low mortgage rates available at the time.


pages: 130 words: 32,279

Beyond the 4% Rule: The Science of Retirement Portfolios That Last a Lifetime by Abraham Okusanya

asset allocation, diversification, diversified portfolio, high net worth, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market design, mental accounting, Paul Samuelson, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, tail risk, The 4% rule, transaction costs, William Bengen

Because equity past performance tells us that they’ll most likely outperform cash over the long term. How do we know that equities tend to outperform bonds over the long term? Past performance tells us so. And of course, basic reasoning backs this up. Renowned academics, from Harry Markowitz, Paul Samuelson and William Sharpe to Robert Shiller and Gene Fama, have greatly improved our understanding of how the capital markets work. In the process, they’ve won Nobel Prizes! Much of their work is based on the exploration of asset classes using extensive historical performance data. If it’s good enough for Fama or Sharpe, it’s good enough for me.


How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter D. Schiff, Andrew J. Schiff

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business climate, currency peg, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, price stability, Robert Shiller, technology bubble

The process turned houses into tax-free ATM machines. People used the money to renovate their homes, take vacations, pay for college, buy cars and electronics, and just generally live better than they would have if their homes had not appreciated in value. But the wealth was simply a mirage. In his book Irrational Exuberance economist Robert Shiller determined that in the 100 years between 1900 and 2000, home prices in the United States increased by an average of 3.4 percent per year (which is just slightly higher than the average rate of inflation). There were good reasons for this. Prices were firmly tied to people’s ability to pay, which is a function of income and credit availability.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Fifth, there is widespread sentiment that much of what goes on in our economy is inauthentic and unreliable. The Golden Age and the Great Divide: Two Stories about the Great Economic Disappointment Faced with this unsettling combination of economic events, commentators and academics have come up with a variety of explanations. In a recent book, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller makes a powerful case for the importance of narratives in economics.21 Ed Leamer has written similarly, as have Yuval Noah Harari and John Kay and Mervyn King.22 Humans cleave to narratives, Shiller argues, to understand and describe how the economy works. These narratives tend to be archetypal; there are a few recurrent stories to which we are naturally drawn, and which we seek to recognise, just as our eyes recognise a man’s face in the shadows and craters of the moon.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

On the first day of trading, the coin momentarily achieved a price of 3,300 bitcoin, or more than $2 million dollars per zcash, on Poloniex.24 Within two days it had crashed below 1 bitcoin per zcash and continued to fall, closing out 2016 at a price of .05 bitcoin per zcash, or roughly $48.25 While zcash has since stabilized and continues to hold great promise as a cryptoasset, its rocky start was caused by mass speculation. Words of Warning for the Innovative Investor Tempted by Bubbles Robert Shiller, author, professor, and Nobel Prize winner, defined a bubble as “a social epidemic that involves extravagant expectations for the future.”26 We’ve talked much about the expectations for the future of cryptoassets. However, we also believe innovative investors must be grounded in common sense in order to identify proper investments from improper ones, and they need to recognize when buying opportunities exist and when the madness of the crowd has taken over.

Recall that a coinbase transaction is the transaction that pays the miner with newly minted units of a cryptoasset in exchange for the miner having appended a new block to the blockchain. 23. https://cryptohustle.com/zcash-launch-breaks-records. 24. http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-breaks-700-zcash-steals-show/. 25. https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/zec/charts/BTC?p=ALL. 26. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-29/robert-shiller-unlike-1929-time-everything-stocks-bonds-and-housing-overvalued. 27. https://hbr.org/2014/01/what-alan-greenspan-has-learned-since-2008. 28. Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost. 29. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9806E6DF1639E03ABC4E52DFB6678382639EDE&legacy=true. 30. http://time.com/3207128/stock-market-high-1929/. 31.


pages: 398 words: 111,333

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham by Joe Carlen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business intelligence, discounted cash flows, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, full employment, index card, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, laissez-faire capitalism, margin call, means of production, Norman Mailer, oil shock, post-industrial society, price anchoring, price stability, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, the scientific method, Vanguard fund, young professional

Buffett, “Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville.” 18. Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, expanded 3rd ed., ed. Peter D. Kaufman (Florence, KY: Wadsworth, 2005), p. 63. 19. Buffett, “Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville.” 20. Ibid. 21. Robert Shiller (Yale University Economics Department) and Yahoo! Finance, “CAGR of the Stock Market (Annualized Returns),” MoneyChimp, http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm (accessed November 14, 2011). 22. Buffett, “Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville.” 23. Ibid. 24. Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 135. 25.

“Notes to Financial Statements: Note A—Liquidation-Dissolution- Liquidating Distributions,” Graham-Newman Corporation, January 31, 1958. 2. Letter, Graham-Newman Corporation, 1946. 3. Irving Kahn and Robert Milne, Benjamin Graham: The Father of Financial Analysis (Charlottesville, VA: Financial Analysts Research Foundation, 1977). 4. Robert Shiller (Yale University Economics Department) and Yahoo! Finance, “CAGR of the Stock Market (Annualized Returns),” MoneyChimp, http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm (accessed November 14, 2011). 5. Ibid. 6. “Stockholder's Letter,” Graham-Newman Corporation, February 25, 1949, p. 6. 7.


pages: 367 words: 110,161

The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All by Mary Childs

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, break the buck, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, index card, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, skunkworks, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Central bankers, finance ministers, professors, and the most important market participants checked into Jackson Lake Lodge in late August 2007, passing the lobby’s huge picture windows where the Teton Range lined up at the horizon. Every evening, amid the “howls of coyotes and bugling of elk,” as Yale economics professor Robert Shiller recalled, regulators and economists tried to gauge just how bad the current housing slowdown was. It looked like a classic bank run and yet was worse, scarier. Was it just a correction? A bubble popping? Whose fault was it? Should the Fed do something? What? Part of the problem: the Fed could touch really only the banking system.

“I remember the day”: Paul McCulley, “After the Crisis: Planning a New Financial Structure Learning from the Bank of Dad,” Pimco.com, May 10, 2010. “the effect of U.S. subprime loans”: John Ward Anderson, “E.U. Central Bank Injects More Cash as Markets Tumble,” The Washington Post Foreign Service, August 11, 2007. “howls of coyotes”: Robert Shiller, “Bubble Trouble,” Project Syndicate, September 17, 2007. “the whole alphabet soup”: Brooke Masters and Jeremy Grant, “Finance: Shadow Boxes,” Financial Times, February 2, 2011. “smoked”: Christine Benz, “Our 2007 Fund Managers of the Year,” Morningstar, January 3, 2008. “When Humpty Dumpty cracked”: Julie Segal, “War Stories over Board Games: How Bill Gross and Warren Buffett (Almost) Saved America,” Institutional Investor, April 2017.


pages: 504 words: 139,137

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

EFFICIENTLY INEFFICIENT MARKETS To search for trading strategies that consistently make money over time, we need to understand the markets where securities are traded. The fundamental question concerning financial markets is whether they are efficient, a question that remains hotly debated. For instance, the Nobel Prize in economics in 2013 was awarded jointly to Eugene Fama, the father and defender of efficient markets, Robert Shiller, the father of behavioral economics, and Lars Hansen, who developed tests of market efficiency.2 As seen in Overview Table I, an efficient market, as defined by Fama, is one where market prices reflect all relevant information. In other words, the market price always equals the fundamental value and, as soon as news comes out, prices immediately react to fully reflect the new information.

For instance, the lowest observed dividend yield of 1.1% happened in 2000 during the height of the Internet bubble. Based on the regression estimates, this translates into an equity premium of . The highest observed dividend yield of 13.8% happened during the stock market trough of 1932, implying an equity premium of 41%. Figure 10.1. Dividend yield in the United States, 1871–2013. Source: Robert Shiller’s data, http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. How could you trade on the insights that come out of this regression? Let us consider a simple backtest. Table 10.1 shows that when the dividend yield has been high, the annualized market return in the following month has been high on average, 11.2%.


pages: 483 words: 141,836

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, Eric Kim

Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Basel III, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, central bank independence, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, fail fast, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, global macro, illegal immigration, implied volatility, independent contractor, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, pre–internet, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Bayes, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

Each of these cycles has its own form of money and its own form of risk management. Even in the paid economy, more and more goods are distributed on the basis of status, such as club memberships for airlines, hotels, discount shopping stores, and so on. Status becomes a kind of money. My final suggestion comes from Robert Shiller, who envisions derivatives for all major life decisions. Going to medical school next year? Why not sell half the median income of a cohort of medical school entrants similar to you and reduce your exposure to future changes in doctors’ wages? You couldn’t sell half of your personal income, because once you did, you might work less.

The view of quantitative finance described in Red-Blooded Risk has a lot of overlap with two pathbreaking but eccentric works: The Handbook of Portfolio Mathematics: Formulas for Optimal Allocation & Leverage by Ralph Vince and Finding Alpha: The Search for Alpha When Risk and Return Break Down by Eric Falkenstein. A more famous pathbreaking and eccentric work is Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)behavior of Markets. Two of the best books on the future of finance are The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century by Robert J. Shiller and Financing the Future: Market-Based Innovations for Growth by Franklin Allen and Glenn Yago. Both cover quite a bit of history to ground their predictions in something solid. If you like to study your quantitative finance through people, Espen Haug’s Derivatives Models on Models is an excellent choice.

French gathered some of the world’s top financial economists in Squam Lake, New Hampshire, to discuss the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Martin N. Baily, John Y. Campbell, John H. Cochrane, Douglas W. Diamond, Darrell Duffie, Anil K. Kashyap, Frederic S. Mishkin, Raghuram G. Rajan, David S. Scharfstein, Robert J. Shiller, Hyun Song Shin, Matthew J. Slaughter, Jeremy C. Stein, and Rene M. Stulz collaborated to write The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System. The result has the strengths and weaknesses of a consensus report, but it remains one of the best places to start understanding recent financial events.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

And this lowered private investment bodes poorly for future growth.50 There is a further effect that has already been noted: innovation that should be directed at creating more efficient ways of producing better products is instead directed at better ways of creating and maintaining market power and exploiting consumers. While our financial firms have excelled in the latter arena, they are not alone, as Nobel Prize winners George Akerlof and Robert Shiller demonstrate forcefully in their 2015 book Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception.51 We’ve described, for instance, how our cigarette, pharmaceutical, and food companies have profited from producing products that are addictive, and not only not needed, but are also actually harmful.

Big Data is increasing these asymmetries, and thereby potentially making resource allocations less efficient. 19.Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Jeremy Singer-Vine, and Ashkan Soltani, “Websites Vary Prices, Deals Based on Users’ Information,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 24, 2012. 20.To use the colorful language of Nobel Prize winners George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, to “phish for phools.” See Akerlof and Shiller, Phishing for Phools. 21.See Tüfekçi’s TED talk, “We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads,” Oct. 27, 2017. 22.Others joined in the suit against Myriad, including the University of Pennsylvania and researchers at Columbia, NYU, Emory, and Yale.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Places that boast of deep and liquid markets, the financial equivalent of an infinity pool, should be aware that their depth is variable, with a long shallow end that is sometimes drained. In the 1980s, economists debated with some passion whether the stock market was ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’. Three participants in the debate were subsequently awarded Nobel Prizes in Economic Science.43 One of them, Robert Shiller, argued that it was impossible to explain the volatility of stock prices by reference to the volatility of the dividend stream that is the return to stocks. Others argued that expectations of large surprises in the distant future, not captured in the data for dividends in any observable sample, justifies the volatility apparent in stock markets.

Since such a large proportion of the existing stock of financial instruments uses LIBOR as the reference rate, a switch to an alternative would raise yet another prisoner’s dilemma: no one firm on its own could change the benchmark for derivative contracts. A much-needed change will take coordinated action among market participants, prodded by regulators and central banks. 43 The three were Eugene Fama, Robert Merton and Robert Shiller. 44 Schumpeter (1942). 45 Keynes (1936), p. 156. 46 See Tuckett (2012), who argues, ‘given that the prices of financial assets cannot be set by fundamentals – which are unknowable – they are set by stories about fundamentals – specifically the stories which market consensus at any one moment judges true.


pages: 487 words: 151,810

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

Denis Diderot. 21 This mode, as Guy Claxton Guy Claxton, The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious (New York: Little, Brown Book Group, 2006). 22 Lionel Trilling diagnosed Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), ix–xx. 23 “deals with introspection” Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 81. 24 Paul Samuelson applied Clive Cookson, Gillian Tett, and Chris Cook, “Organic Mechanics,” Financial Times, November 26, 2009, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d0e6abde-dacb-11de-933d-00144feabdc0.html. 25 George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1. 26 Jim Collins argues Jim Collins, “How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs,” Businessweek, May 14, 2009, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_21/b4132026786379.htm.

On the finance side, Emanuel Derman was a physicist who became a financier and played a central role in developing the models for derivatives. While valuable tools for understanding economic behavior, mathematical models were also like lenses that filtered out certain aspects of human nature. They depended on the notion that people are basically regular and predictable. They assume, as George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller have written, “that variations in individual feelings, impressions and passions do not matter in the aggregate and that economic events are driven by inscrutable technical factors or erratic government action.” Within a very short time economists were emphasizing monetary motivations to the exclusion of others.


pages: 287 words: 62,824

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli

Airbnb, asset allocation, Big Tech, bitcoin, buy and hold, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial independence, Hans Rosling, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, lifestyle creep, mass affluent, mortgage debt, oil shock, payday loans, phenotype, price anchoring, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Sam Altman, side hustle, side project, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, time value of money, transaction costs, very high income, William Bengen, yield curve

No matter how you look at it, renters face long-term risks that many homeowners don’t face. However, one risk that renters are unlikely to face is whether they will get a good return on their investment. Housing as an Investment When it comes to housing as an investment, unfortunately, the data isn’t that promising. Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, calculated the inflation-adjusted return on U.S. housing was “only 0.6% a year” from 1915–2015.⁴⁴ More importantly, most of that return came after the year 2000. As the following chart illustrates, from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, U.S. housing was basically flat after adjusting for inflation.


pages: 229 words: 64,697

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need by Scott Pape

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Robert Shiller, Snapchat

It's the slow rise in prices year on year, so that a loaf of bread may cost twice as much in 20 years' time as it does now. I'll have a really good look at inflation later in Step 5.) But wait, there's more: that 2.1 per cent doesn't include the money spent on paying interest to the bank, or renovations done on the home. Professor Robert Shiller, of Yale University, looked at long-term US property prices from 1890 to 2004 and found that inflation-adjusted house prices increased by a miniscule 0.4 per cent annually. And just to round out the Western world, Professor Piet Eichholtz of Maastricht University looked at property prices in Europe, specifically on one of Amsterdam's most significant canals, Herengracht.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The solution to scaling the network is always 18 months always. It’s like Godot. He never arrives,” says Sirer, invoking Samuel Beckett’s famous existential play. Sirer isn’t the only one to point out how the crypto movement is driven as much by mythology as it is by technology. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller’s latest book, Narrative Economics, devotes its first chapter to bitcoin. The cryptocurrency, Shiller says, has no intrinsic value but has been propped up by a contagious belief that it does. Academics like Shiller who are deeply skeptical of crypto, however, belong to a shrinking minority. In recent years, there’s been an explosion of crypto and blockchain research on campuses in the United States and around the world.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

: What It Is, Why It Happened, How It Will Play Out, and What Will Follow’, April 2012, The Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, http://levyforecast.com/jlwp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Contained-Depression-April-2012.pdf. 16. Mark Easton, ‘The Great Myth of Urban Britain’, 28 June 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096. 17. The behavioural economist, Robert Shiller, understood the dynamics of the housing-market excess better than most, including most economists. See Robert Shiller, The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 18. Data come from the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook database, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2013/01/weodata/index.aspx. 19.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

Mark Bils and Peter J. Klenow, “The Acceleration in Variety Growth,” American Economic Review 91, no. 2 (2001): 274–280. 15. Diane Coyle, The Weightless World (Oxford: Capstone, 1996). CHAPTER 5: OUR TIMES: THE GREAT CRASH 1. James Glassman and Kevin Hassett, Dow 36,000 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999). 2. Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 3. See John Kay, Obliquity (London: Profile Books, 2010). 4. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5. “Has China Already Passed the U.S. as the World’s Largest Economy?”


pages: 184 words: 46,395

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

Robust as well as relevant Behavioural science provides answers to many advertising conundrums. But more important than this relevance is the robustness of the findings. The field is based on the experiments of some of the most respected scientists of the day: Nobel Laureates like Daniel Kahneman, Herbert Simon and Robert Shiller. This evidence-based foundation contrasts with many marketing theories which are based on anecdote or tradition. Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, has been highly critical of marketers’ reliance on untested assumptions. He has compared the situation with medieval bloodletters who shunned experimentation: The study of marketing is so young that we would be arrogant to believe that we know it all, or even that we have got the basics right yet.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

And millions more are stuck with homes whose mortgages exceed their value. According to one study, 30 percent of people age forty-five to fifty-four and 18 percent of those between fifty-five and sixty-four were underwater in their homes in 2009.3 Except for some exceptional boom periods, housing has never been a good financial investment. Yale University’s Robert Shiller, the world’s leading student of bubbles, housing and otherwise, found that from “1890 to 1990, the rate of return on residential real estate was just about zero after inflation.”4 Even if a house isn’t underwater, chances are good that its owners are house poor in the traditional sense: too much of their income is being sucked up by house payments and house-related expenses.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that in 2020 approximately one third of US jobs will be in occupations with a median wage of $25,000 or less. See Bureau of Labor Statistics 2012a. 65. For similar sentiment, see Gans 2011. 66. Baumol 2012; Carlin 2012. 67. My suggestion is similar in spirit to the idea of “inequality insurance” proposed by Robert Shiller; see Shiller 2003, ch. 11. See also Reich 2010. 68. Average compensation tends to rise in sync with GDP per capita. See Pessoa and Van Reenen 2012. 69. Note that to be effective, a rising earnings subsidy will need to be coupled with a rising minimum wage. Otherwise, the subsidy may lead to reductions in low-end wage levels, which will offset the improvement in income achieved by the subsidy.


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

Progress in Managing Cyclical Crises 215 To sustain some of this feverish activity, market makers propagated the myth that there was no history of any appreciable national price decline in housing. Declines were thought to be local or regional and usually of limited extent and duration. The view was promoted that any broad investment in housing, or the financing to support it, would basically be immune to substantial economic cycle exposure. Of course, the signs were there. Robert Shiller, the Yale economist, posited in advance of the cataclysm that the boom in real estate values might be driven by these psychological factors. After all, one could not explain the rises in housing prices by decomposition of increases in rents or construction costs.37 The practical manifestation of this was the boom in new construction, the growth in the phenomenon of flipping homes, and the increased tapping of built-up equity by homeowners.

William Seyfried, “Monetary Policy and Housing Bubbles: A Multinational Perspective,” Research in Business and Economics Journal 2 (March 2010), http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/09351.pdf, 1–2. 36. Kathryn J. Byun, “The US Housing Bubble and Bust: Impacts on Employment,” Monthly Labor Review (Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor), December 2010, http://www.bls.gov/opub /mlr/2010/12/art1full.pdf, 7. 37. Robert J. Shiller, “Understanding Recent Trends in House Prices and Home Ownership” (working paper 13553, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, October 2007), http://www.nber.org /papers/w13553.pdf, 3–7. 38. Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (London: King, 1873). 39.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The higher the ratio, the greater the optimism of investors; they are willing to pay a high price, relative to past earnings, in the belief that future earnings will grow rapidly. (Just as banks are willing to lend a higher proportion of a house’s value when they think asset prices are rising.) The graph below shows the data for the US market, compiled by Professor Robert Shiller at Yale University.15 For years, many people had regarded the 1929 boom as the height of investor folly. Back then, they were willing to pay a ratio of nearly thirty-five. In effect, had profits stayed unchanged, investors would have had to wait until 1964 to get their money back. But in 2000, even that valuation was surpassed.


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Eventually shopkeepers, cabdrivers and teachers were buying shares in their lunch hours. In the late 1990s, the stock market leapt by 20, even 30 per cent a year. The problem was that the income of the economy hadn’t risen anything like as fast. A few economists warned that the trend couldn’t go on. One was Robert Shiller (b. 1946), who’d applied behavioural economics to financial markets. The market was being lifted up by overexcited investors and soon it would thud to the ground, he said. In March 2000 he was embarking on a tour to promote his new book Irrational Exuberance – just when, with perfect timing, the stock market was about to crash.


pages: 302 words: 84,428

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side by Howard Marks

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, uptick rule, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

It had stood since then, virtually unaltered, and had changed hands six times, but its location in the Herengracht canal neighborhood had remained Amsterdam’s most desirable throughout. Thus the article provided insight not as to whether the price of the average home had risen, but how the price of a particular home had performed. In contrast to the long-term optimists on housing quoted earlier, Yale’s Robert Shiller said of the Fransz house and its neighbors, “Looking at the Herengracht data is very instructive, because you can see 50-year intervals of growth, then it turns around. That’s more realistic than the superstar-cities argument.” The author of the study, Piet Eichholtz, was described as being “skeptical of those who claim that property values can continue to increase ad infinitum.”


pages: 332 words: 81,289

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Future Shock, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Experiments have shown that two groups, presented with opposing series of events leading to the same stated outcome, will both believe that the outcome could have been predicted in advance, based on the information they hold. Interestingly, when these same scenarios are presented as educated guesses about future events, participants become very less certain about their own predictive abilities. Renowned behavioural economist, Robert Shiller (1997), undertook some research relating to the Japanese market crash in 1989. Prior to the event 14% of those asked thought that the market was overvalued, but post-event 32% of those asked said they thought the market was overvalued. Hindsight delusion, combined with overconfidence and susceptibility to seeing trends where none exist is a recipe for wealth destruction.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

By joining them up into a causal chain, actions that are not in our immediate self-interest may then look rational, creating enlightened self-interest. At its best, this expands our knowledge. At its worst, it creates a rupture between reality and what we believe – narratives as ‘fake news’.15 True or false, stories are powerful. In their devastating analysis of the financial crisis, two Nobel Laureates, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, conclude that ‘stories no longer merely explain the facts, they are the facts’.16 What is true of financial crises turns out also to apply to the outbreak of mass violence. New research finds that the best way of predicting such outbreaks is to monitor the narratives circulating in the media.17 The three types of narrative – belonging, obligation and causality – fit together to forge a web of reciprocal obligations.


All About Asset Allocation, Second Edition by Richard Ferri

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, inverted yield curve, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Mason jar, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, pattern recognition, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

A common measure of stock value is the price/earnings ratio, more commonly referred to as the P/E ratio. Many investors track the market P/E ratio in an attempt to determine when stocks are cheap and when they are expensive. Figure 11-10 illustrates the P/E ratio from 1950 to 2009 using a 10-year earnings average from Professor Robert Shiller ’s database that is available to be public at www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. There have been several periods when the ratio was high, although none quite match the speculative premium on stocks that existed in the late 1990s. There are a couple of items that P/E ratio watchers should consider: 1.

A fledgling field of study in the early 1960s, behavioral finance has grown to be an important area of research at How Behavior Affects Asset Allocation Decisions 273 several influential institutions. Professors recognized as experts in the field include Daniel Kahneman (Princeton), Meir Statman (Santa Clara), Richard Thaler (University of Chicago), Robert J. Shiller (Yale), and Amos Tversky. Tversky is frequently cited as the forefather of the field. He died in 1996. The following list touches on a few observations made by behavioral finance researchers. Unfortunately, the list only scratches the surface. Much more information about this fascinating field is available on the Internet and in your local library: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● People tend to be more optimistic about stocks after the market goes up and more pessimistic after it goes down.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

In experiments with wage insurance, both the United States and Canada have found that it results in workers becoming more likely to accept jobs that they otherwise would have scorned. That’s better for those individuals and for the American economy as a whole. “Wage insurance may not be on your radar, but it should be,” argues Robert Shiller, the eminent Yale economist, who advocates it as a way to reduce inequality. He notes that wage insurance has bipartisan support and was introduced in a very limited way by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. We should also experiment with programs to encourage people to move to areas where there are more jobs, or to subsidize employers for each new job they create in high-unemployment areas.

., Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2019). Congress pulled the plug on funding for an IDA program: These individual development accounts are extensively discussed in Robert E. Friedman, A Few Thousand Dollars (New York: The New Press, 2018). wage insurance has bipartisan support: Robert J. Shiller, “How Wage Insurance Could Ease Economic Inequality,” The New York Times, March 11, 2016. federal job guarantee: L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler et al., “Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment,” Levy Economic Institute of Bard College, April 2018. “As an economist, I am always asked”: Joseph E.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

For every Bill Gates there is a Kent Evans who was just as skilled and driven but ended up on the other side of life roulette. If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems. Years ago I asked economist Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, “What do you want to know about investing that we can’t know?” “The exact role of luck in successful outcomes,” he answered. I love that response, because no one actually thinks luck doesn’t play a role in financial success. But since it’s hard to quantify luck and rude to suggest people’s success is owed to it, the default stance is often to implicitly ignore luck as a factor of success.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Moore, Horizontalists and Verticalists: The Macroeconomics of Credit Money, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 20 For further analysis of this point, see Costas Lapavitsas, ‘The Banking School and the Monetary Thought of Karl Marx’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 18:5, 1994, pp. 447–61. 21 For a simple presentation see Costas Lapavitsas, ‘The Theory of Credit Money: A Structural Analysis’, Science and Society 55:3, 1991, pp. 291–322. 22 See, for instance, John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan, 1973, p. 174. 23 For instance, Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow: Progress, 1970, pp. 118–19. 24 This was one of the main claims made in John Fullarton, On the Regulation of Currencies, London: John Murray, 1845. 25 See, for instance, Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 102; and Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, London: Penguin/NLR, 1976, p. 210. 26 By the middle of the 2000s mainstream economics had become aware of the extraordinary conditions in financial markets but there was no agreement on an appropriate policy response. Note that Karl Case and Robert Shiller realized that bubble conditions were in place already by the early 2000s, but expected the situation to stabilize (‘Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2, 2003). At the BIS, however, William White argued that central bank should ‘lean against the wind’ by raising interest rates when bubbles threatened, even if price stability and growth targets were not compromised (‘Procyclicality in the Financial System’, BIS Working Paper No. 193, 2006; ‘Is Price Stability Enough?’

Carchedi, Guglielmo, ‘The EMU, Monetary Crisis, and the Single European Currency’, Capital and Class 19:63, 1997, pp. 85–112. Card, David, and Thomas Lemieux, ‘Can Falling Supply Explain the Rising Return to College for Younger Men? A Cohort-Based Analysis’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 116:2, 2001, pp. 705–46. Case, Karl, and Robert Shiller, ‘Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2, 2003, pp. 299–362. Castells, Manuel, End of Millenium, 2nd ed., vol. 3 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Castells, Manuel, The Internet Galaxy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Famously, Ronald Coase in his Nobel Prize lecture argued that “inspiration is most likely to come through the stimulus provided by the patterns, puzzles, and anomalies revealed by the systematic gathering of data, particularly when the prime need is to break our existing habits of thought” (1992, 718). In a recent column celebrating the award of the 2017 Sveriges Riksbank Nobel Economics prize to Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, who won the prize in 2013, noted that there had been antagonism within the profession to the research agenda of the behavioral economists, which includes him. Shiller notes that “many in economics and finance still believe that the best way to describe human behavior is to eschew psychology and instead model human behavior as mathematical optimization by separate and relentlessly selfish individuals, subject to budget constraints.”

Adam Ozimek, “The Value of Empirical Economics,” Economy.com, March 8, 2017, https://www.economy.com/dismal/analysis/datapoints/294247/The-Value-of-Empirical-Economics/. 38. Noah Smith, “Anti-empiricism Is Not Humility,” http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com, March 10, 2017. 39. John Cochrane, “Russ Roberts on Economic Humility,” Grumpy Economist, March 3, 2017, http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/03/russ-roberts-on-economic-humility.html. 40. Robert Shiller, “Richard Thaler Is a Controversial Nobel Prize Winner—but a Deserving One,” Guardian, October 11, 2017. Six percent of all Nobels have been awarded, says Shiller, to people who can be classified as behavioral economists including Richard Thaler (2017), Bob Shiller (2013), George Akerlof (2001), Robert Fogel (1993), Daniel Kahneman (2002), and Elinor Ostrom (2009). 41.


The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

The lesson: In evaluating corporate performance and predicting the course of business, investors should use more reliable gauges than earnings, like those proposed in Part III. This lesson is particularly important to individual investors who tend to rely on a few summary measures, primarily earnings and the price-to-earnings ratio, in their investment decisions. Investors’ Fault or Accounting’s? 59 NOTES 1. Robert Shiller, one of the 2013 Nobel winners in economics, was awarded this highest recognition mainly for his research on investors’ irrationality. See his book Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2005). 2. The tech bubble burst in 2000, as NASDAQ lost 50 percent of its value, a slide that continued through 2002. 3.


pages: 383 words: 92,837

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

Subprime mortgage offers were perfectly optimized to take advantage of the I-want-it-now system: buy this beautiful house now with very low payments, impress your friends and parents, live more comfortably than you thought you could. At some point the interest rate on your adjustable-rate mortgage will go up, but that’s a long way away, hidden in the mists of the future. By plugging directly into these instant-gratification circuits, the lenders were able to almost tank the American economy. As the economist Robert Shiller noted in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, speculative bubbles are caused by “contagious optimism, seemingly impervious to facts, that often takes hold when prices are rising. Bubbles are primarily social phenomena; until we understand and address the psychology that fuels them, they’re going to keep forming.”19 When you begin to look for examples of I-want-it-now deals, you’ll see them everywhere.


Deep Value by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, financial engineering, fixed income, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, John Bogle, joint-stock company, low interest rates, margin call, passive investing, principal–agent problem, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple

As he had many times before, Icahn again acknowledged the intellectual underpinnings of his Icahn Manifesto strategy as Benjamin Graham and David Dodd’s Security Analysis, and revealed that his brand of deep value activism is as old as value investing itself. Notes 1. United States Government Printing Office. Washington. 1955. Available at http:// www4.gsb.columbia.edu/filemgr?file_id=131668. 2. Carl Icahn and Robert Shiller. “Financial Markets (ECON 252) Guest Lecture.” Yale University, November 19, 2008. 214 DEEP VALUE 3. Alon P. Brav, Wei Jiang, Randall S. Thomas, and Frank Partnoy. “Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance (May 2008).” Journal of Finance, Vol. 63, pp. 1729, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/ abstract=948907. 4.


pages: 350 words: 109,220

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, break the buck, business cycle, central bank independence, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, debt deflation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, price stability, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, too big to fail

The Fed agreed to put up $180 billion, giving the TALF a total of $200 billion in loans at very sweet terms to offer hedge funds and other big investors to buy securitized consumer loans. The beauty of it was that the Treasury needed only $20 billion from its $700 billion congressionally authorized TARP to get $200 billion into the economy. “TALF shows us there are two sides to creative finance,” wrote Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof along with Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who had predicted the housing bust. “It may have gotten us into this crisis. But its genius may also get us out of it.” The Fed and the Treasury offered investors an additional carrot to borrow this money to buy auto or credit card loans packaged into securities. If the ultimate consumer didn’t pay back the loans, then the big-money investors wouldn’t have to pay back the Fed.

Bernanke, “The Crisis and the Policy Response,” Federal Reserve Board, January 13, 2009. http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/ bernanke20090113a.htm 254 “What justification is there” John B. Taylor, “The Need to Return to a Monetary Framework,” January 2009. http://www.stanford.edu/∼johntayl/NABE%20Business%20Economics%20Article%20-%20Taylor.pdf 255 “TALF shows us” George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 92. 256 “Will we face challenges” Charles I. Plosser, “The Economic Outlook and Some Challenges Facing the Federal Reserve,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, January 14, 2009. http://www.philadelphiafed.org/publications/ speeches/plosser/2009/01-14-09_university-of- delaware.cfm 257 “In a committee such as the FOMC” Richard W.


pages: 425 words: 122,223

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, martingale, means of production, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, the market place, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

This avalanche in the sheer number of orders coming into the system overwhelmed the whole communications network and explains the unanswered telephones in the brokerage offices and the darkened computer screens that intensified the chaos and fed investor panic. If you do not know what the last price was, you are incapable of making an informed decision; if you cannot reach your broker at all, you are in never-never land. A survey of investors conducted immediately after the crash by Robert Shiller of the Cowles Foundation at Yale reported that 20 percent of the respondents admitted to “difficulty concentrating, sweaty palms, tightness in the chest or rapid pulse.” More than half who had sold on October 19 said that they were “experiencing a contagion of fear.” Close to 40 percent who sold had stop-loss orders in place, orders to sell whenever a stock breaks below a specified price and a strategy that is just as “mechanical” as portfolio insurance.27 Shiller hypothesizes that all investors worry that somebody else knows something that other investors do not know.


pages: 415 words: 125,089

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

The following people also made significant contributions to my work and warrant my deepest appreciation: Kenneth Arrow, Gilbert Bassett, William Baumol, Zalmon Bernstein, Doris Bullard, Paul Davidson, Donald Dewey, David Durand, Barbara Fotinatos, James Fraser, Greg Hayt, Roger Hertog, Victor Howe, Bertrand Jacquillat, Daniel Kahneman, Mary Kentouris, Mario Laserna, Dean LeBaron, Michelle Lee, Harry Markowitz, Morton Meyers, James Norris, Todd Petzel, Paul Samuelson, Robert Shiller, Charles Smithson, Robert Solow, Meir Statman, Marta Steele, Richard Thaler, James Tinsley, Frank Trainer, Amos Tversky,* and Marina von N. Whitman. Eight people generously undertook to read the manuscript in its entirety and to give me the benefit of their expert criticisms and suggestions.


pages: 199 words: 61,648

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Landlord’s Game, means of production, moral hazard, new economy, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, precariat, Robert Shiller, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, wages for housework

But I still don’t understand the inner workings of contemporary capitalism, the nuts and bolts of the markets, the push and pull of bubbles and recessions. Even economists, Dan says, don’t understand that. Three men won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2013, he tells me—two of them for theories that directly contradicted each other. They disagreed about bubbles, to begin with. Robert Shiller described the rapid rise of housing prices in 2005 as a bubble, and warned that prices would fall dramatically. Eugene Fama didn’t think the market would produce something as silly as a bubble. Even after the housing crash, Fama denied that the housing market had been a bubble and was skeptical that bubbles existed.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

I owe a great debt to Yuan Chen for her thoughtful editing of the sections of the book pertaining to China. Over the years, Ulla Kasten has helped me with access to the Yale Babylonian Collection. I also thank the many scholars who gave me advice and pointed me in the right direction: Ben Foster, Marc Van De Mieroop, Elisabeth Köll, Robert Shiller, Timothy Young, Catherine Labio, Jonathan Spence, Steven Pincus, and Naomi Lamoreaux. I thank William Fitzhugh and Harvey Weiss for including me in their pathbreaking archaeological expeditions early in my career. And I thank my friend William S. Reese for introducing me to many of the extraordinary documents in financial history that have become part of the narrative of this book.

For example, we would not understand the birth of finance in the ancient Near East without Professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the University of Texas, who discovered the origins of cuneiform writing—along with the origins of financial contracts. We owe a lot to the Shanghai financier and monetary historian Peng Xinwei 彭信威, who devoted his life to Chinese financial history before disappearing in the Cultural Revolution. We might never understand the first inflation-indexed security if not for economist Robert Shiller’s personal mission to help people insure themselves against everyday economic risks. A third perspective is empirical: the world of things and places. Technology requires actual tools and locations. For finance, this means coins, documents, correspondence, and places where these things were made and exchanged.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

On my way, I crossed paths with Bill Gates, who gave me a friendly nod; IMF chief Christine Lagarde, who said hello; and private equity billionaire Steve Schwarzman, with whom I exchanged pleasantries. At the coat check, where I replaced my messy boots with elegant dress shoes, I ran into Larry Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary and Harvard economics professor, and Robert Shiller, Nobel laureate and one of the most influential economists in the world. Although I have attended the WEF several years in a row, I am still regularly amazed by the fact that everyone around me is famous, and that every financial titan who is regularly featured in prime-time news and on the front pages seems to have materialized simultaneously in front of me.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

(Perhaps the best was a 2002 analysis by Bruce Weinberg and his colleagues that looked at crime rates across an eighteen-year period in the United States.8 All the increases, they discovered, could be explained by rising unemployment and falling wages among men without college educations.) It isn’t only that people become disgruntled when they lack the income that flows from a good job. They miss having the job itself. This was what economics Nobel laureate Robert Shiller had in mind when he called advancing machine intelligence “the most important problem facing the world today.” He elaborated: It’s associated with income inequality, but it may be more than that. Since we tend to define ourselves by our intellectual talents, it’s also a question of personal identity.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

the prediction had to have some timing attached to it. (Bezemer 2009: 7) Bezemer came up with twelve names: myself and Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Jakob Brøchner Madsen and Jens Kjaer Sørensen, Kurt Richebächer, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller. He also identified four common aspects of our work: 1 a concern with financial assets as distinct from real-sector assets, 2 with the credit flows that finance both forms of wealth, 3 with the debt growth accompanying growth in financial wealth, and 4 with the accounting relation between the financial and real economy.

Given the poor response of the economy to the stimulus and QE1, I think it’s reasonable to argue that it’s time Obama – and politicians in general – looked elsewhere for their economic advice. From tranquility to breakdown To a neoclassical economist, the most striking aspect of the Great Recession was the speed with which apparent tranquility gave way to sudden breakdown. With notable, noble exceptions like Nouriel Roubini, Robert Shiller, Joe Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, economists paid little attention to the obvious Bonfire of the Vanities taking place in asset markets, so in a sense they didn’t see the warning signs, which were obvious to many others, that this would all end in tears. My model, in contrast, is one in which the Great Moderation and the Great Recession are merely different phases in the same process of debt-financed speculation, which causes a period of initial volatility to give way to damped oscillations as rising debt transfers income from workers to bankers, and then total breakdown occurs when debt reaches a level at which capitalists become insolvent.


pages: 519 words: 104,396

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

Summers sketched one, a model in which stock prices have a strong arbitrary component yet adjust coherently to the day’s financial news. Summers’s idea is a scary one. It proposes that stock prices could be a collective hallucination. Once investors stop believing, it all comes tumbling down. “Who would know what the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average should be?” asked Yale’s Robert Shiller in 1998. “Is it really ‘worth’ 6,000 today? Or 5,000 or 7,000? Or 2,000 or 10,000? There is no agreed-upon economic theory that would answer these questions.” The chart on the previous page shows the history of the price-to-earnings ratio of the stocks in the S&P Index. The S&P is a broad index computed from 500 companies presently accounting for about three-quarters of American’s total investment in domestic stocks.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

They indicate that between 1947 and 1973, wages and productivity increased together, but after 1973, wages stagnated even while productivity roughly doubled. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call this the Great Decoupling. Other leading economists have also sounded the alarm, including Nobel laureates Robert Shiller, Mike Spence, and Paul Krugman; Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum; and Larry Summers, former chief economist of the World Bank and Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton. Those arguing against the notion of technological unemployment often point to bank tellers, whose work can be done in part by ATMs, and retail cashiers, whose work is sped up by barcodes and RFID tags on merchandise.


pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

Without computers they had to be compiled and calculated manually, an arduous task for benchmarks with more than a handful of members. But Standard & Poor’s launch of its own index of America’s biggest companies in 1957 was a landmark, “a symbol of the beginning of the electronic era in finance,” according to Robert Shiller, the Nobel laureate.17 The S&P 500, as it was called, despite initially tracking only 425 companies, was calculated by a Datatron computer linked directly to the stock market ticker machines now set up on Wall Street, and could continuously measure the new index. That was a tremendous improvement.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

My naturally pessimistic view of the world proves useful, coinciding with the times. People are forgiving if things turn out better than predictions. In 2009, an Asian stockbroking firm invites me to speak at investment conferences in Tokyo and Hong Kong. I am part of the chorus, support for the mega-stars. In Japan, celebrity anti-exuberance advocate9 Robert Shiller in the course of a short speech, manages to mention his forthcoming book at least a dozen times. In Hong Kong, the world’s first and only celebrity economic historian10 Niall Ferguson gives a keynote address on Chimerica, the relationship between China and America. Well-known for his books and Channel 4 series, Ferguson was named by Time magazine in 2004 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Michael Schuman (2009) The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth, Harper Business, New York. Jack D. Schwager (1992) The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders, John Wiley, New Jersey. Fred Schwed Jr (2006) Where Are The Customers’ Yachts? Or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street, John Wiley, New Jersey. Robert Shiller (2005) Irrational Exuberance, Currency Doubleday, New York. Georg Simmel (1990) The Philosophy of Money, Routledge, London. Robert Skidelsky (2003) John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, Penguin Books, London. Robert Skidelsky (2009) Keynes: The Return of the Master, Public Affairs, New York.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

After the three Wall Streeters were done, the microphone was passed to the two academics in the group: John Campbell of Harvard and Robert Shiller of Yale. The professors presented a series of charts comparing stock prices to dividends. According to this means of valuing equities, the market was wildly overvalued. If the Fed raised interest rates, the market would crater. After a morning of meetings, the experts filed into the Fed dining room. They sat down to lunch, and Cohen remarked that the food had improved since her visits to the employee cafeteria in the 1970s.50 Alluding to the question that had been debated that morning, Robert Shiller asked Greenspan when a Fed chairman had last used his bully pulpit to sound a warning about the stock market’s level.

“You told us you had convinced Greenspan that the market wasn’t overvalued.” A little while later, Wien’s phone rang again. This time it was Morgan’s head equity trader on the line. He was not brimming with charity, either.54 When the New York Stock Exchange opened, it followed foreign markets downward. Robert Shiller was driving his child to school in New Haven when he heard the news about Greenspan’s remarks. “I wonder if I had anything to do with that,” he said to himself.55 But then, just as quickly, the market recovered. Once traders got hold of the text of Greenspan’s comments, the gap between his speech and the alarming headlines became obvious.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It was better just to let the bubble run its course, since cleaning up the mess afterward would be cheaper than distorting the economy to prevent a bubble from surfacing. If the leaders of the Fed hadn’t been so wedded to the notion that there were no bubbles, it would have been obvious to them (as it was to economists like Robert Shiller, of Yale, one of the country’s leading experts on housing),54 that the unprecedented rise in housing prices relative to incomes almost surely represented a bubble. In addition, the Fed didn’t have to rely on interest rate changes to dampen the bubble—it could have increased down payment requirements or tightened lending standards.

See the Boskin report, “Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living,” December 4, 1996, available at http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html. 53. Countries in which there is persistent high and variable unemployment typically put in clauses that provide for automatic adjustments in wages to changes in the cost of living (called COLA, cost of living adjustment). 54. See, e.g., Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 2005. For S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices see http://www.standardandpoors.com/indices/sp-case-shiller-home-price-indices/en/us/?indexId=spusa-cashpidff--p-us--- (accessed March 5 2012). 55. That requires that the deceleration of inflation from an increase in unemployment is weaker than the acceleration of inflation from a decrease in unemployment.


pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Bernanke and his inner circle—New York Fed president Tim Geithner, Board of Governors vice chairman Donald Kohn and member Kevin Warsh, Fed monetary affairs director Brian Madigan—spent much of the two days of proceedings in their secure conference room on the second floor, plotting their response to the emerging panic. It was too bad: The topic of that year’s conference was housing finance, and some of the presentations were quite prescient. Robert Shiller of Yale, for example, warned that the long housing boom was soon likely to go bust, with severe economic consequences. “It does not appear possible to explain the boom in terms of fundamentals such as rents or construction costs,” he argued. “A psychological theory, that represents the boom as taking place because of a feedback mechanism or social epidemic that encourages a view of housing as an important investment opportunity, fits the evidence better.”

“I’d like to tell you about the Millennium Bridge in London”: Hyun Song Shin, “Commentary: Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier,” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Symposium, Jackson Hole, WY, August 2005. CHAPTER 9: THE COMMITTEE OF THREE “It does not appear possible”: Robert J. Shiller, “Understanding Recent Trends in House Prices and Homeownership,” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Symposium, August 31, 2007. “I am convinced”: Jean-Claude Trichet, “Europe: Cultural Identity,” speech, Center for Financial Studies, Frankfurt, March 16, 2009. “It was . . . a very emotional moment”: Corinne Lhaik, “Interview with Jean-Claude Trichet,” L’Express, September 29, 2004, http://www.ecb.int/press/key/date/2004/html/sp041009.en.html.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

I am also indebted to the following authors whose works continue to be treasure troves of information and insight: Morton Baratz, Peter Bernstein, Clayton Christensen, Jim Collins, Jay Forrester, Tom Friedman, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Goleman, Stephen Jay Gould, Alan Greenberg, Larry Harris, Robert Koppel, Edwin Lefevere, Michael Lewis, Jesse Livermore, Roger Lowenstein, Acknowledgments Ludwig von Mises, Lois Peltz, Ayn Rand, Jack Schwager, Denise Shekerjian, Robert Shiller, Van Tharp, Edward Thorp, Peter Todd, Brenda Ueland, and Dickson Watts. This book could only have come to fruition with the editorial guidance of Jim Boyd at FT Press, as well as the able assistance and attention to detail of Dennis Higbee. I also want to thank Donna Cullen-Dolce, Lisa Iarkowski, Stephen Crane, John Pierce, and Lucy Petermark.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

It’s not just because customers are reluctant to complain about a seller who is donating money from their purchase price to charity; philanthropically inclined sellers also have about half as many unresolved disputes on their noncharity listings. 15. Akerlof never imagined that all consumers were aware of their own ignorance; for him the lemons model was merely a next step in a larger agenda. In Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), Akerlof and his coauthor Robert Shiller lay out a theory of markets where there are economic agents who are unaware of their ignorance (and hence buy too many subprime mortgages) or lack self-control (and eat too much ice cream). Such problems lead to what they call a “phishing equilibrium” where weak or ignorant consumers (“phools”) are taken advantage of by exploitative firms.


pages: 300 words: 77,787

Investing Demystified: How to Invest Without Speculation and Sleepless Nights by Lars Kroijer

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, compound rate of return, credit crunch, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, fixed income, high net worth, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, market bubble, money market fund, passive investing, pattern recognition, prediction markets, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Just be honest with yourself as you consider your edge. It can be expensive to think you have it if you don’t. Has residential property really been that great? The best estimate of residential property performance is the Case-Shiller House Price index which represents the price changes in US residential homes. Professor Robert Shiller describes the housing index along with other interesting ideas in his excellent book Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2005). To my knowledge there isn’t a property index that covers all forms of residential property investment across many countries that goes back many decades for us to analyse.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

The disconnect between the concerns and warnings of the economists—among them Roubini Global Economics’ Nouriel Roubini and David Rosenberg, then with Merrill Lynch—and the indestructible optimism of the investment bankers and insurers was startling. This series of meetings subsequently led to a session at Davos in January 2007 aptly titled “Housing Deflation: What’s the Hissing Sound?” Among other panelists, economist Robert Shiller and then president of the central bank of Germany Axel Weber warned about the impending real estate crisis and its possible cascading effects on other asset classes. A lively discussion ensued with the few people in the room who had bothered to attend the session. Several of them argued convincingly that it “would all end up in tears.”


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

So did hedge fund masters such as Julian Robertson, whose Tiger Management fund was beaten to the ground by his doggedly rational addiction to value. George Soros, who broke the Bank of England, was broken the same way—fighting the equity crowds clamoring to buy more stock. His book Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2000) earned Robert Shiller notoriety for his call that we were in the middle of a bubble, but in fact many investment professionals recognized it for what it was, the chorus getting louder as the bubble swelled. However, it is one thing to say the market has run amuck; it is another thing to trade against it. One of the most surprising fallouts of the Internet bubble was the closing, in rapid succession, of both Robertson’s and Soros’s long-admired funds.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

The UF is nominally the Chilean currency, but corrected for inflation. It remains in use today for wage contracts, for instance, so pay rises are awarded in real terms. The UF made indexing to inflation transparent, and Chile is the most inflation-indexed country in the world. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller, in the spirit of Irving Fisher, has proposed that contracts in the US be expressed in terms of baskets reflecting the real value of a consumer’s need, or in Fisher’s terminology, a set of commodities they buy. He also suggested that governments could issue debt, so sell government bonds, denominated in terms of shares of nominal GDP and proposed calling these shares Trills.


pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

See also specific search engines auditing your data on search warrants Secret New York (Rives) secret police Secrets & Lies (Schneier) Secret Service security, privacy vs. Security Engineering (Anderson) security questions Security Theater September 11, 2001, attacks sexual orientation Shahzad, Faisal Shearson, Julia Shilkin, Rob Shiller, Benjamin Reed Shopping.com Shutova, Ekaterina Shutterfly Signal conference Silent Circle Silent Phone Silent Text Sinclair, Upton Singer-Vine, Jeremy Skyhook Skype Slobogin, Christopher smart card Smith, Stephen Smith, Will Snowden, Edward social networking sites. See also specific sites social network mapping social security numbers Soghoian, Christopher Soltani, Ashkan Sonic.net “sousveillance” South Africa Southern District of New York (federal court) Soviet Union spamgourmet.com spam messages SpiderOak Spokeo spoofing Sputnik spy satellites spyware Staas, David stalkers Standard Oil Company Staples Stasi state and local governments stealth wear Stecklow, Steve Steel, Emily Strauchs, John J.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

More and more examples of Collaborative Consumption are popping up every day, everywhere. We have created a Collaborative Consumption icon for all to use to show they are part of this exciting groundswell. With thanks, Rachel and Roo Selected Bibliography Akerlof, George A., and Robert J. Shiller. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2009). Andersen, Kurt, and Tom Brokaw. Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America (Random House, 2009). Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, 2006).

This is a working article written by Butts while on the Knight-Bagehot fellowship for business journalists at Columbia Journalism School and Columbia Business School, http://www.mickeybutts.com/wj_business.html. 19. Ibid. 20. Joe Nocera, A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class, as quoted in Vanity Fair, “Rethinking the American Dream,” www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904. 21. George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2009), 128. 22. Steve Rhode, founder of myvesta.org, found that 26 percent of his company’s clients say they never look at the statement. Quoted in Mickey Butts, “Why We Charge: What Behavioral Economics Can Tell Us.” 23.


The Gene Machine by Venki Ramakrishnan

CRISPR, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, ghettoisation, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Much later, in 1969, an economics prize ‘in memory of Alfred Nobel’ was instituted by the Bank of Sweden to cash in on the Nobel name. It has been awarded to economists with quite different and, to an outsider, contradictory views of their field. A particularly amusing year was 2013 when Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller shared the prize, which would be a bit like Darwin and Lamarck sharing a prize for evolution. The prize is also subject to some rather arbitrary rules. Nobel specified that the prize was to be for a discovery or invention made during the previous year, but because it often takes years or even decades for the importance of something to become clear, this rule was very quickly discarded.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Irving Fisher, “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions,” Econometrica 1, no. 4 (1933): 337–57; Richard Koo, “Balance Sheet Recession Is the Reason for ‘Secular Stagnation,’ ” VoxEU, 11 August 2014, https://voxeu.org/article/balance-sheet-recession-reason-secular-stagnation. 14. See Robert Shiller, Finance and the Good Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, for more on equity-like financial products to make people’s lives less risky. 15. Shiller. 16. There are many other reasons for such a move. One is the inefficient provision of electronic money transfers by private financial institutions, especially across borders.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

People who traded shares knew about stock markets, but not about companies and their products. People who traded interest rate derivatives knew about derivatives, but not about politics and government finance. The forces that led to these extensive failures in credit markets in 2007–8 had been evident earlier elsewhere. Robert Shiller received the Nobel Prize in economics for providing in the early 1980s the first careful demonstration of a proposition that seems intuitively obvious to anyone who watches stock markets: volatility is far greater than can be explained by changes in the fundamental value of securities. The ‘explanations’ provided nightly by market commentators and newspaper headlines are little more than rationalisation of the noise generated by this market volatility.3 Equity markets experienced more and more activity in secondary markets, while primary issuance had become less and less important.4 Intermediaries in these markets knew less and less about the companies in which funds were invested, and expertise rested in knowing what ‘the market thinks’.


pages: 357 words: 91,331

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Sethi, Ramit

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, geopolitical risk, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Paradox of Choice, prediction markets, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, Vanguard fund

If your house is your biggest investment, how diversified is your portfolio? If you pay $2,000 per month to a mortgage, are you investing $6,000 elsewhere to balance your risk? Of course not. Second, the facts show that real estate offers a very poor return for individual investors. Yale economist Robert Shiller found that “from 1890 through 1990, the return on residential real estate was just about zero after inflation.” I know this sounds crazy, but it’s true. We fool ourselves into thinking we’re making money when we’re simply not. For example, if someone buys a house for $250,000 and sells it for $400,000 twenty years later, they think, “Great!


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

Chapter 11 1. The authors of this study analyzed Cramer’s recommendations from June 2005 and February 2009. Joseph Engelberg, Caroline Sasseville, and Jared Williams, “Market Madness? The Case of Mad Money,” Management Science 58(2, 2012): 351–364. 2. See Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Crown Business, 2006); George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2010); Jason Zweig, Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Make You Rich (Simon & Schuster, 2007); Hersh Shefrin, Beyond Greed and Fear: Finance and the Psychology of Investing(Oxford University Press, 2000); Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (Plume, 2000); Gur Huberman and Tomer Regev, “Speculating on a Cure for Cancer: A Non-Event That Made Stock Prices Soar,” Journal of Finance 56(2001): 387–396.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

,” FT Alphaville, May 5, 2017, https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/05/04/2188305/how-should-a-workers-party-cut-taxes/; Peter B. Edelman, “Poverty and Welfare: Does Compassionate Conservatism Have a Heart?,” 2001 Edward C. Sobota Memorial Lecture, Albany Law School, Albany, N.Y. 3. FRB, “Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization—G.17,” https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/; Robert Shiller, stock market data used in Irrational Exuberance, http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. 4. Based on BEA, “National Income and Product Accounts,” tables 1.1.5, 1.14, 5.1, 5.2.6, https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/index_nipa.cfm. 5. Robert Skidelsky, “Winning Back Europe’s Heart; Rogue Dollar,” New York Times, February 20, 2005; George P.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

But what particularly irks him is travel insurance. In a 2015 New York Times op-ed, he railed against the fact that airlines like United routinely require us to actively turn down travel insurance even when buying a fully refundable airline ticket. And in a larger sense, he railed against the idea that these dark nudges—what Robert Shiller and George Akerlof called phishing in their 2015 book Phishing for Phools—are being deployed by the private sector. Critics of his and Sunstein’s work have complained that government policies that nudge us to make better decisions are paternalistic, maybe even unconsciously dictatorial. But, he wrote, one has a voice in what a representative government does.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Afonso, Antonio, Ludger Schuknecht, and Vito Tanzi, 2005, “Public Sector Efficiency: An International Comparison,” Public Choice 123, pp. 321–347. 2010, “Public Sector Efficiency: Evidence for New EU Member States and Emerging Markets,” Applied Economics 42 (17), pp. 2147–2164. Ahamed, Liaquat, 1999, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: The Penguin Press). Akerlof, George A., 1970, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality, Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3) (August), pp. 488–500. Akerlof, George A. and Robert Shiller, 2009, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy: And Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 2015, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Alesina, Alberto, 1998, “The Political Economy of Macroeconomic Stabilization and Income Inequality: Myths and Reality” in Income Distribution and HighQuality Growth, edited by Vito Tanzi and Ke-young Chu (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Unlike other investors who suspected the housing bubble was near its top, Paulson had the resources, skills, connections, and good fortune to see his bet through to completion. But what if we wanted not to profit from the catastrophe, but to prevent it? Unfortunately, the record of such attempts looks rather bleak. In January 2005, the Yale economist Robert Shiller made his beliefs clear. Shiller was (and is) one of the world’s leading experts on housing prices. The index of home prices he constructed with Karl Case is the most important measurement we have of how housing prices change over time. He stated, “There is no hope of explaining home prices solely in terms of population, building costs or interest rates.


pages: 342 words: 99,390

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history by Gregory Zuckerman

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Robert Shiller, rolodex, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, technology bubble, zero-sum game

It was fortuitous that Paulson was a merger pro, and not a veteran of the mortgage, housing, or bond markets. He wasn’'t fully aware of the long-ignored arguments of housing bears and how many investors were refusing to buy into real estate. Just as important, he wasn’'t deterred by the dismal track record of those who already had bet against housing. In 2004, Professor Robert Shiller of Yale University produced data showing that U.S. residential real estate prices rose by only 66 percent between 1890 and 2004, or by just 0.4 percent a year. He contrasted that meager gain with the heady rise of 52 percent, or 6.2 percent a year, between 1997 and 2004. Shiller presented a series of lectures on the topic and included the charts and figures in an updated version of his best-selling book, Irrational Exuberance, in February 2005, trying to demonstrate how overpriced real estate had become.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

If you can’t handle that, and would change course were it to happen, stock market investing may not be for you. (Google “Risk Tolerance Calculator”.) I wouldn’t blame you. There’s oodles of research showing that the Chimp side of our nature is unsuited to the vicissitudes of the stock market. Nobel prize for economics-winning economists such as Robert Shiller have found that: “Put concisely – it’s actually much smarter to admit that you aren’t perfectly rational, and to plan and invest accordingly, rather than deny your true nature[347].” Read up on risk tolerance, take into account your circumstances, work out your goals and timings based on how old you are, and see what you can afford to lose.


pages: 311 words: 99,699

Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

As in the post–World War II era, financial policymakers sought to conjure animal spirits, but also to keep them moving in the right direction by systematically deploying statistics, as Wells Fargo does in its animal spirits index. Such exercises have led observers to discern a contemporary revival of Keynes’s ideas. In 2009, two behavioral economists, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, appeared to signal the return of Keynes when they published Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. But they defanged animal spirits, reducing them to mere confidence—the sort of emotion that seems quantifiable in surveys, not to mention assimilable to neoclassical economic assumptions.


pages: 339 words: 109,331

The Clash of the Cultures by John C. Bogle

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, Occupy movement, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, random walk, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

As shown in Exhibit 2.4, during the 1970s the fundamentals of investment, measured by earnings growth and dividend yields on the S&P 500 Index, provided a return of 13.4 percent per year, and the total stock market return was but 5.9 percent annually. (The reduction in valuation of −7.5 percent per year reflected a drop in the earnings ratio from 15.8 to 7.3 times.) Exhibit 2.4 Stock Returns: A Tin Decade, Two Golden Decades, Then Another Tin Decade Source: Robert Shiller, www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. During the 1980s, by contrast, the fundamental return of 9.6 percent came hand-in-hand with an annual valuation increase of 7.7 percent, as P/E ratios more than doubled, from 7.3 to 15.2 times, bringing the total annual return to 17.3 percent. Incredibly—and bereft of historic precedent—the same sort of scenario continued during the 1990s.


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

Law’s idea was to rid money-users of even this last resort of risk aversion. At the heart of his new financial world was to be not sovereign debt, but sovereign equity. Once again, it is an idea that sounds incredible to modern ears—but it is one that has its influential advocates today. The U.S. economist Robert Shiller—a modern Projector, as well as one of the world’s most distinguished academic economists—has for many years urged sovereigns to share with investors the risk to the public finances inherent in uncertain economic growth by issuing bonds that pay interest linked to GDP.24 Shiller’s proposals urge a gradual shift towards such innovative financial instruments.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Perhaps the appropriate takeaway from the debate about taxing robots and AI is not that similar employment taxes should be imposed on them (whatever they are) but rather that such taxes should be abolished for human employees. But, of course, other things equal, this would leave a hole in the public finances that would have to be filled by increasing some other sort of tax (or by cutting expenditure). Yet people are not queuing up for any sort of tax increase or expenditure reduction. Moreover, as Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller points out, all taxes impose distortions of some sort, so the argument that a robot tax would cause distortions does not satisfactorily close the matter. It is all about how serious the distortions are and what the alternatives are.13 But the definitional problems of separating out robots and AI from other forms of capital investment, referred to above, surely suggest that the distortions caused by a “robot tax” would be very damaging.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Kinetz, T. Goldenberg, D. Estrin, and R. Satter, “AP Investigation: How Con Man Used China to Launder Millions,” AP News, March 28, 2016 [https://apnews.com/article/business-middle-east-israel-europe-africa-7500da6eb1d94e1dbb7e5650d1c20bd6]. 5. Writers like Maria Konnikova, Dan Davies, George Akerlof, Robert Shiller, Eugene Soltes, and Edward Balleisen have covered these topics well in recent years. We recommend the following books: M. Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It… Every Time (New York: Viking, 2016); D. Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World (New York: Scribner, 2021); G.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

They also understand that trading is a zero-sum game that divides up winners and losers, and visualize themselves on the winning side at all times, regardless of short-term results.32 Unfortunately, the 2008–2009 global financial crisis is the perfect example of how unbridled market optimism (or as economist Robert Shiller calls it, “irrational exuberance”33) proved to be catastrophic, plunging the world into the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, and leaving ravages in the Western world that are still felt a decade later. Much like the title of a recent book on eight centuries of financial crisis,34 “this time is different” seems to be our perennial reassurance that our optimism (especially when served with a side order of greed) always gets in the way of learning from past mistakes.


Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

New Canaan, Connecticut 2021 APPENDIX A FURTHER READING BOOKS Trading classics Market Wizards (series), Jack Schwager (1989) Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre (1923) Luck vs. skill, process vs. outcome The Success Equation, Michael Mauboussin (2012) Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke (2018) Be disciplined Willpower, Baumeister and Tierney (2012) The Science of Self-Discipline, Peter Hollins (2017) The Disciplined Trader, Mark Douglas (1990) Behavioral finance bibles Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (2011) Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller (2000) Get organized The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey (1988) The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande (2009) The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg (2012) Be self-aware The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle (1997) Breath, James Nestor (2020) The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, John Coates (2012) Get quantitative Fortune’s Formula, William Poundstone (2005) Superforecasting, Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock (2015) Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb (2001) Fooled by Technical Analysis, Michael Harris (2015) A Man for All Markets, Edward Thorp (2017) Risk, Dan Gardner (2008) How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff (1954) BLOGS, PODCASTS AND NEWSLETTERS Aspen Trading daily and intraday trading newsletter, Dave Floyd Epsilon Theory website, podcast and newsletter, Ben Hunt and Rusty Guynn Exante blog on Substack, Jens Nordvig et al.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

The UF is nominally the Chilean currency, but corrected for inflation. It remains in use today for wage contracts, for instance, so pay rises are awarded in real terms. The UF made indexing to inflation transparent, and Chile is the most inflation-indexed country in the world. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller, in the spirit of Irving Fisher, has proposed that contracts in the US be expressed in terms of baskets reflecting the real value of a consumer’s need, or in Fisher’s terminology, a set of commodities they buy. He also suggested that governments could issue debt, so sell government bonds, denominated in terms of shares of nominal GDP and proposed calling these shares Trills.


Concentrated Investing by Allen C. Benello

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, Claude Shannon: information theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, family office, fixed income, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Louis Bachelier, margin call, merger arbitrage, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, prudent man rule, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, survivorship bias, technology bubble, Teledyne, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”6 He later elaborated on his brief reference to speculation by saying, “Speculative operations are all concerned with changes in price.”7 Keynes independently developed the idea that the price of a security is distinct from its intrinsic value, which Graham codified in Security Analysis. He also seems to have extended beyond Graham to develop his own unique form of value investment. That investment philosophy led Keynes to be described as “one of the most innovative investors ever, inspiring investors and economic thinkers from Warren E. Buffett to Robert J. Shiller.”8 Many investors have acknowledged the influence of Keynes on their own process, including Buffett, George Soros,9 and David Swensen.10 Buffett in particular embraced Keynes’s philosophy, discussing in detail in his annual Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., Chairman’s Letters his own evolution from Grahamite value investor to a value investment strategy that is remarkably similar to the one Keynes finally adopted.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

The impaired investors took more risks when there were high potential payoffs and got less emotional when they made losses.7 This book is not prescribing brain injury as an investment strategy. However, behavioral economists do believe that by anticipating the flawed decisions that regular investors are likely to make, we can beat the market (or at least avoid being ravaged by it). Yale economist Robert Shiller first challenged the theory of efficient markets in the early 1980s. He became much more famous for his book Irrational Exuberance, which argued in 2000 that the stock market was overvalued. He was right. Five years later he argued that there was a bubble in the housing market. He was right again.


pages: 519 words: 118,095

Your Money: The Missing Manual by J.D. Roth

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, book value, buy and hold, buy low sell high, car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, estate planning, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, index card, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, mortgage tax deduction, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Paul Graham, random walk, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, traveling salesman, Vanguard fund, web application, Zipcar

Deciding whether to rent or buy is a complicated financial and emotional decision. Real-estate agents like to say, "Renting is like throwing your money away." On its surface, this advice seems to make sense, so it gets repeated a lot in popular culture. But in a 2008 issue of Newsweek (http://tinyurl.com/nw-rentok), Robert Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale University, wrote, "The popular argument that renting is equivalent to throwing money down the drain is really fallacious." In some cases, it does make financial sense to buy a home. But in other situations, renting is the better choice. And often, there's not a lot of difference between the two, especially if you're smart and keep costs low.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

First, it might prompt people to see that they all have an interest in what happens to those around them, if only for selfish reasons. Those previously unconcerned about the homeless might want to improve their conditions just to reduce the risk that they might provide a reservoir for a pathogen. Second, some observers, such as economist Robert Shiller, speculated that a pandemic might decrease economic inequality over the intermediate term by reducing the wealth of those who had invested in the stock market or by leading to more progressive taxation.14 Those at the top have more to lose than those at the bottom, so reducing wealth increases equality.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

His investment multiplied forty times in fifty-four years, for a compound annual return of 7 percent. Also, his expenses of a few percent a year in property taxes and maintenance were less than what he would have paid to rent a similar property. Although stories like this abound, my uncle was lucky. According to economist Robert Shiller, average US home prices after inflation increased from 1890 to 2004 by about 0.4 percent a year, with the rate being about 0.7 percent in the later 1940–2004 period. It follows from this that making a profit should not be a primary reason for owning your home. You can rent instead and do about as well financially.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

That means it’s possible that we could become individually smarter but collectively dumber.” But the Hype Machine makes social influence ubiquitous, and I’m not sure Surowiecki saw it coming. “Do cascades exist?” he wrote. “Without a doubt. They are less ubiquitous than the restaurant-going model suggests, since, as Yale economist Robert Shiller has suggested, people don’t usually make decisions in sequence. ‘In most cases,’ Shiller writes, ‘many people independently choose their action based on their own signals, without observing the actions of others.’ ” Clearly neither Surowiecki nor Shiller had experienced Instagram, Yelp, Twitter, hashtags, viral memes, trending topics, or social media influencers when they drew this conclusion.


pages: 726 words: 172,988

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Wall, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, open economy, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, Yogi Berra

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freedman, Abraham L. 1928. “Imprisonment for Debt.” Temple Law Quarterly 2: 336. French, Kenneth, Martin N. Baily, John Y. Campbell, John H. Cochrane, Douglas W. Diamond, Darrell Duffie, Anil K. Kashyap, Frederic S. Mishkin, Raghuram G. Rajan, David S. Scharfstein, Robert J. Shiller, Hyun Song Shin, Matthew J. Slaughter, Jeremy C. Stein, and René M. Stulz. 2010. The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Friedman, Milton. 1960. A Program for Monetary Stability. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 1969. The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

New York: Trident Press. Roberts, Stanley (1978). “Welcome, Dr. Thorp.” Gambling Times, Aug. 1978, 11–14. Rogers, Everett M. (n.d.). “Claude Shannon’s Cryptography Research During World War II and the Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Roll, Richard (1988). “R2.” Journal of Finance 43:541–66. ———, and Robert J. Shiller (1992). “Comments: Symposium on Volatility in U.S. and Japanese Stock Markets.” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 5:25–29. Rotando, Louis M., and Edward O. Thorp (1992). “The Kelly Criterion and the Stock Market.” American Mathematical Monthly, Dec. 1992, 922–31. Rubinstein, Mark (1975).


pages: 670 words: 194,502

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

If the investing public gets greedy again and sends stocks back into orbit, then that speculative fever will temporarily drive returns higher. If, instead, investors are full of fear, as they were in the 1930s and 1970s, the returns on stocks will go temporarily lower. (That’s where we are in 2003.) Robert Shiller, a finance professor at Yale University, says Graham inspired his valuation approach: Shiller compares the current price of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index against average corporate profits over the past 10 years (after inflation). By scanning the historical record, Shiller has shown that when his ratio goes well above 20, the market usually delivers poor returns afterward; when it drops well below 10, stocks typically produce handsome gains down the road.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

For such thinkers, the problem is not that money exists at all but rather that it has been badly designed. They have all made important contributions to a tradition of practical schemes that use innovations in the design of money and the price system to improve economic conditions, including proposals by renowned economists, such as Irving Fisher’s stamp scrip (Fisher, Cohrssen, et al. 1933) and Robert Shiller’s baskets (Shiller 2008). Finally, there are now several thousand alternative monetary systems in operation worldwide, using a range of different media and accounting schemes designed to foster local economic growth, resist financial exclusion, and even challenge what many believe to be the persistent and damaging hegemony of states and banks in the way that money is produced and managed.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

The comic point of the book is that the Don is invulnerable to reason, calculation, cool rhetoric, conversation, not to speak of nicely-calculated less or more. (Yet in modern economic life the role of identity and impulse needs to be acknowledged, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the management theorist James March, the economic historian John Nye, and the economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller have all affirmed. Not many business decisions could be made without identity and impulse.11) Austen laughs at thoughtless aristocratic gestures and Christian pseudo-martyrdoms. In Austen’s novels, strategic thinking is the means, and if the end is wisely chosen (as it is at the last by the major and developing characters), all is well.

Adhia, Nimish. 2013. “The Role of Ideological Change in India’s Economic Liberalization.” Journal of Socioeconomics 44:103–111. Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84:488–500. Akerlof, George A., and Robert J. Shiller. 2009. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Alfani, Guido. 2013. “Plague in Seventeenth-Century Europe and the Decline of Italy: An Epidemiological Hypothesis.” European Review of Economic History 17:408–430.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Historically, U.S. infrastructure spending has returned almost $2 for every $1 invested, but investment has been tailing off for decades.2 Today America’s clogged roads and tunnels cause wasteful congestion, its crumbling bridges cause accidents and delays, and its ailing ports and refineries lack both the efficiency and the capacity to meet global demand. Since the financial crisis, dozens of prominent economists including Yale’s Robert Shiller have advocated infrastructure-led investment as a way to create jobs and boost economic confidence. The American Society of Civil Engineers has called for $1.6 trillion in spending for an overhaul of America’s transportation system. Only now—and just before it is too late—is such a national overhaul near the top of America’s agenda with proposals for the creation of a national infrastructure bank.


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The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

A researcher at the John F. Kennedy Library has told us that Kennedy used this phrase at a number of times and in slightly different versions. The library’s earliest record of the phrase was on October 15, 1960, during Kennedy’s presidential campaign. 10. See, for example, the discussion of livelihood insurance in Robert J. Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). This page intentionally left blank INDEX Abate, Gary, 79 accountability, in education reform, 134–36 accountants, 36–37 Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, 1–2, 5, 35 after-school programs, 142 agriculture, 36–37, 102–3 aircraft design, 31–33 anti-theft car alarm, 71–72 assembly line, 15, 20–21 assessment: as component of educational standards, 135–36; in computer skills training, 123 AT&T, 99–100 ATM machines, 21 attorneys, 90–92 Autor, David, 47, 52 auto repair, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 71–72, 103–4 banking, 21, 52–53, 72–75 Basic Blue (IBM), 110–20, 128–30 behavior, modifying, in management training, 117 Behrens, John, 123, 125 Being Fluent with Information Technology (National Research Council), 107 Belous, Alex, 121, 124 Blois, Marsden, 61 body language, 29, 86–88, 91 Boeing, 31–34 bond trading, 13–14, 24 Boston, standards-based education reform in, 136–38 Boston Plan for Excellence, 137, 147 “bridge to sales,” 100–101 Brown, John Seely, 60, 94 Buckner, Tom and Rozann, 65–66 Burtless, Gary, 152 Bush, George, 134 “Cabot Bank,” 52–53, 72–75 call centers, 3, 100–102, 151 case-based reasoning, and creative thinking, 23, 59, 166n.1 Casey, Jonna, 142 CATIA computer assisted design software, 32–33 change: pace of, 101–3; three-step process of, 33–34 170 chess playing, 7, 22, 58–59 circuit boards, 78–81 Cisco Academy Training Centers, 124 Cisco Certified Networking Associate, 127–28 Cisco Learning Institute, 124 Cisco Networking Academies, 120–30 Cisco Systems, 120–30 class issue, 154–55 classroom time, 122–25, 130 Clinton, Bill, 134 coaching, for teachers, 137 cognitive tutors, computer-based, 82 Collaborative Coaching and Learning, 137 collaborative learning, 113 college graduates, wages of, 6, 44–47, 134, 154, 162n.15 combine harvester, 36 “Common Core of Learning,” 135 comparative advantage, principle of, 35–36, 47, 159n.5 compensation, for lower income families, 155 competitive advantage, 34 competitive strategies, 32–33, 43, 101 complementarity, with human labor, 14, 29–30, 34, 68, 94–95, 105 complex communication, 5–6, 9, 28–29, 47–49, 54, 76–81, 92–95, 104, 107–8, 150–51; teaching of, 109–20, 128–30, 132–33, 147–48, 156–57 computer-assisted design and manufacturing, 31–33, 79 Computerized Circuit Design (CCD), 78–81 computer prices, 105–6 computer skills, 105–8, 120–28 content, as component of educational standards, 134 context, 25, 85 conversation, and complex communication, 79–82 Cooper, Andy, 66–68 “The Corporation: Will It Be Managed by Machines?”


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A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Margin-driven speculation got frequent blame as a cause of the 1929 crash, so between 1945 and 1974, the Fed adjusted margin every few years, from as low as 40 percent in early 1945 to as high as 100 percent in 1946.28 Since 1974, margin requirements have been left unadjusted, at 50 percent.29 During the bubble of the 1990s, the economist Robert Shiller argued the Fed should revive margin tools. A “senior economist and adviser” from the Fed’s Boston bank disagreed, stating that “the capacity to borrow against securities has also risen as a result of rising stock prices. It is not clear this exposes the financial system to more risk.”30 Such was a Fed economist’s view as of September 2000, as the stock market was collapsing.


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The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Jason Zweig and Gary Belsky taught me how an understanding of neuroeconomics helps avoid money mistakes. John Burr Williams, Alfred Rappaport, Bharat Shah, and Utpal Sheth taught me the fundamental principles of value creation. Charles Mackay, Charles Kindleberger, John Galbraith, John Brooks, Edward Chancellor, Robert Shiller, and Maggie Mahar educated me on the history of market cycles, speculative manias, and the subsequent busts. Peter Senge and Donella Meadows educated me on systems thinking and a more interconnected view of the world. George Soros, Benoit Mandelbrot, and Richard Bookstaber made me aware of the intricate and highly dynamic feedback loops present in markets and social systems.


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Buffett by Roger Lowenstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cashless society, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, Jeffrey Epstein, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-coupon bond

How could prices have been rational both before and after? No new information had surfaced to account for such a drop. There had been no sudden change in expected future profits. Indeed, for the people who sold stocks on October 19, corporate profits were not a remote consideration. According to Robert J. Shiller, a Yale economist who surveyed nearly one thousand investors soon after Black Monday, the only news that investors had been aware of that day was news of the crash itself. In place of the cold, “unromantic” investor of Brealey and Myers, Shiller’s respondents reported sweaty palms, rapid pulse rates, and hypertension.

Malkiel, “Why Markets Are Working Better,” Wall Street Journal, August 22, 1986. 38. Buffett, “How to Tame the Casino Society.” 39. Burton G. Malkiel, “But Markets Only Seem More Volatile,” New York Times, September 27, 1987. 40. Brady report, vi. 41. Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 1987 Annual Report, 17. 42. Robert J. Shiller, “Investor Behavior in the October 1987 Stock Market Crash: Survey Evidence,” Working Paper 2446 (New Haven: Cowles Foundation, November 1987), pp. 11–12. 43. Eric N. Berg, “A Study Shakes Confidence in the Volatile-Stock Theory,” New York Times, February 18, 1992. 44. “Beating the Market: Yes It Can Be Done,” Economist, December 5, 1992. 45.


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Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

This would be a strongly progressive change for those in the lower parts of the income distribution. Over time, the proposal indexes the amount of income subject to the tax benefit (the $14,000) to GDP increases. This ensures that economic growth automatically increases the tax benefit, sharing the benefits of growth more widely.2 ________________________ 1.  Leonard E. Burman, Robert J. Shiller, Gregory Leiserson, and Jeffery Rohaly, “The Rising Tide Tax System: Indexing the Tax System for Changes in Inequality,” Tax Policy Center, 2006. 2.  Leonard E. Burman, “A Tax Credit to Give Middle-Class Workers a Raise,” Tax Policy Center, August 2, 2017. Here I suggest a simple tax reform that would tax all income of top taxpayers at the same rate, regardless of source.


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The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Fannie Mae voluntarily submitted 10-K statements since 2002, while Freddie Mac voluntarily submitted their first 10-Q statement in August of 2008, right before they imploded. Freddie did produce annual reports for shareholders throughout the period. 31. The 10-city composite index is the Case-Shiller housing index, published monthly by Standard & Poor’s. It uses the Karl Case and Robert Shiller method to compute a house price index using a modified version of the weighted-repeat sales methodology. This method can adjust for the quality of homes sold, unlike simple average-based indices. The CSXR is a three-month moving average, as are the indices that compose it. The cities included in the 10-city index are Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington DC. 32.


pages: 269 words: 83,307

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

All over the Ivy League, the Wall Street recruiting process, which had once been as anodyne and accepted a part of the academic calendar as midterms and finals, had taken on the tenor of a student-on-student battle. “I teach financial markets, and it’s a little like teaching ROTC during the Vietnam War,” Robert J. Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale, told me that fall. “You have this sense that something’s amiss.” There have been industry-centric and company-specific protests on college campuses before. In 1967, students at Harvard and other schools protested the recruiting efforts of Dow Chemical, the company that made much of the napalm that was being used in the Vietnam War.


pages: 348 words: 99,383

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

Prior to 2007 and after 1896 (when data are first available), U.S. home prices had declined in only 20 years, or just 18 percent of the time, but the last yearly price decline had occurred in 1991, and the one before that in 1941. Thus, present-day Americans did not expect house-price declines, and certainly not for five straight years (2007–2011). For the history, see Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005; New York: Broadway Books, 2006), Figure 2.1. For house price data (1896–2006), see http://www.irrationalexuberance.com/Fig2.1 Shiller.xls. 2. The median house price peaked at $230,900 in June 2006, before falling 32 percent to a low of $156,900 in February 2011.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

the rising value of their farms: see Rothenberg, “Emergence of a Capital Market” for rural investment in industrial, financial, and other nonfarm activities. the American System: described in “National Planning of Internal Improvements” by Carter Goodrich. Political Science Quarterly 63, no. 1 (March 1948): 16–44. “Who ever heard of a man”: The Cultivator 1836, quoted in “Housing Bubbles Are Few and Far Between” by Robert J. Shiller. New York Times, Feb. 6, 2011. Horace White: for his account of the settlement’s foundation, see Beloit College archives published online at http://www.beloit.edu/~libhome/Archives/papers/beloitbegin.html. “The titles in Kentucky”: See “Speculators and Settler Capitalists: unthinking the mythology about Appalachian landholdings 1790–1860” by Wilma A.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

., Knot Yet, 8, Figures IIA–IIC. the average life expectancy: Raj Chetty et al., “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014,” Journal of the American Medical Association 315, no. 16 (2016): 1750–66, 1753. the average annual . . . return for the S&P 500: See “Online Data Robert Shiller,” Yale University Department of Economics, http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. the average annual real rate of return for the entire U.S. stock market: Personal communication from Eric Haas, who derived the rates using index data from Dimensional Fund Advisors. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ INDEX The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

See Peter L. Bernstein, Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (Wiley, 1992), for a history. 14. A classic statement of this theory is Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (W.W. Norton & Company, 10th ed., 2012). 15. Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 3d ed., 2015). 16. As of 2010, institutional investors held common stock worth $11.5 trillion. In the same year, index funds held about $1.4 trillion. Marshall E. Blume & Donald B. Keim, Institutional Investors and Stock Market Liquidity: Trends and Relationships, 5 (working paper, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2012), http://finance.wharton.upenn.edu/~keim/research/ChangingInstitutionPreferences_21Aug2012.pdf. 17.


pages: 349 words: 102,827

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

It didn’t matter that only a tiny sliver of trading was being done by people who were actually using these coins for their original use case (peer-to-peer cash in the case of bitcoin, fuel for a world computer in the case of ether). It also didn’t matter that digital coins with no live platform on which to be used—essentially, just lines of code—were now worth more than actual companies with earnings and assets. This behavior is actually “largely rational and intelligent,” economist and Nobel Prize winner Robert J. Shiller wrote in his book Irrational Exuberance. “Experiments demonstrate that people are ready to believe the majority view or to believe authorities even when they plainly contradict matter-of-fact judgment,” Shiller wrote. But that conduct can easily turn irrational when the only reason why people are crowding in the same direction is that they see more people have done the same and, in the case of markets, there’s a failure to disseminate information about the fundamental value of an asset.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Alissa Pelatan and Roberto Randazzo, “The First European Benefit Corporation,” Esela—The Legal Network for Social Impact, https://www.bwbllp.com/file/benefit-corporation-article-june-16-pdf, and “B Corp Movement in BeNeLux,” B Lab Europe, 2019, https://bcorporation.eu/about-b-lab/country-partner/benelux. 8. Keith Collins, “A Patent that Helped Amazon Take Over Online Commerce Is about to Expire,” Quartz, Aug. 19, 2017, https://qz.com/1057490/a-patent-that-helped-amazon-take-over-online-commerce-is-about-to-expire/. 9. George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). CHAPTER 5: TOWARD A FINANCIAL SYSTEM THAT SERVES SOCIETY 1. Tori and Onaran (2017) use panel data on the balance sheets of publicly listed nonfinancial companies (from Worldscope) for the period 1995–2015.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

This powerful “wealth effect” The wealth effect is a psychological phenomenon that causes people to spend more as the value of their assets rises. The premise is that when consumers’ homes or investment portfolios increase in value, they feel more financially secure, so they increase their spending. See, for example, Karl E. Case, John M. Quigley, and Robert J. Shiller, “Comparing Wealth Effects: The Stock Market Versus the Housing Market,” Advances in Macroeconomics 5, no. 1 (2005), http://dx.doi.org/​doi:10.2202/​1534-6013.1235. America’s at-will employment doctrine Employees can be fired for any or no reason as long as the decision to fire them is not unlawful according to a specific law, such as the National Labor Relations Act or federal, state, or local antidiscrimination statutes and ordinances.



pages: 330 words: 77,729

pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Rather, they can focus on exploiting biased consumers who are very likely to purchase from them regardless of price and quality.” Steffen Huck, Jidong Zhou, and Charlotte Duke, Consumer Behavioural Biases in Competition: A Survey (London, Office of Fair Trading, May 2011), ¶ 6.2, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1944446. 6.George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), xii. 7.Huck et al., “Consumer Behavioural Biases in Competition,” ¶¶ 3.31, 3.37, 3.43; Matthew Bennett et al., “What Does Behavioral Economics Mean for Competition Policy?,” Competition Policy International 6, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 111, 118, https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/what-does-behavioral-economics-mean-for-competition-policy/; Eliana Garcés, “The Impact of Behavioral Economics on Consumer and Competition Policies,” Competition Policy International 6, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 145, 150, https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/the-impact-of-behavioral-economics-on-consumer-and-competition-policies/; Max Huffman, “Marrying Neo-Chicago with Behavioral Antitrust,” Antitrust Law Journal 78, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 105, 134, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2079329 (“consciously parallel behavioral exploitation is the nearly industry-wide policy of unbundling charges for checked bags in airline travel”). 8.Anthony Giorgianni, “Earn More on Your Savings Account at an Online Bank,” Consumer Reports, February 16, 2018, https://www.consumerreports.org/banking/earn-more-on-savings-account-at-online-bank/ (noting how online banks in 2018, for example, were in an “arms race” to get us to save more). 9.


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game


pages: 892 words: 91,000

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tim Koller, McKinsey, Company Inc., Marc Goedhart, David Wessels, Barbara Schwimmer, Franziska Manoury

accelerated depreciation, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, ASML, barriers to entry, Basel III, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, discounted cash flows, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, energy security, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, p-value, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two and twenty, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

5 The Stock Market Is Smarter Than You Think The stock market’s volatility and the erratic pricing of some companies’ shares have raised questions about whether stock prices are actually linked to economic fundamentals. Some experts even assert that stock markets lead lives of their own. Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller writes, “Fundamentally, stock markets are driven by popular narratives, which don’t need basis in solid facts.”1 Bill Gross, cofounder and former chief investment officer of PIMCO, one of the world’s largest fixed-income investment managers, claims that the last 100 years of U.S. stock returns “belied a commonsensical flaw much like that of a chain letter or yes—a Ponzi scheme.”2 Does it make sense to view the stock market as an arena where emotions rule supreme?


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Santos, “Prospect Theory and Asset Prices,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116 (February 2001), pp. 1–53. 22See D. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011). 23The term “irrational exuberance” was coined by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to describe the dot.com boom. It was also the title of a book by Robert Shiller that examined the boom. See R. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (New York: Broadway Books, 2001). 24Investment and brokerage firms identify shares eligible for lending and arrange to make them available to short-sellers. The supply of shares that can be borrowed is limited. You are charged a fee for borrowing the stock, and you are required to put up collateral to protect the lender in case the share price rises and the short-seller is unable to repurchase and return the shares.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Morris’s The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, James Grant’s Mr Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond, Charles Gasparino’s The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System, Barry Rithholtz’s Bailout Nation: How GREED and EASY MONEY Corrupted Wall Street And Shook the World Economy, and Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina vanden Heuvel and the Editors of the Nation. Some of the books are by academics. One of the first was Richard Posner’s The Failure of Capitalism. Robert J. Shiller produced The Subprime Solution and George A. Akerlof together with Shiller wrote Animal Spirits; some of the chapters in this book focus on the crisis. Simon Johnson and James Kwak authored 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. Raghuram G. Rajan wrote Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, Joseph Stiglitz produced Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy and Nassim Nicholas Taleb brought out The Theory of Black Swan Events, a critique of the prevailing consensus in academic finance about market efficiency.


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The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile


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Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

As a result of the banks owning various slices of these newfangled financial instruments, every firm was now dependent on the others—and many didn’t even know it. If one fell, it could become a series of falling dominoes. There were, of course, Cassandras in both business and academia who warned that all this financial engineering would end badly. While Professors Nouriel Roubini and Robert J. Shiller have become this generation’s much-heralded doomsayers, even as others made prescient predictions as early as 1994 that went unheeded. “The sudden failure or abrupt withdrawal from trading of any of these large U.S. dealers could cause liquidity problems in the markets and could also pose risks to others, including federally insured banks and the financial system as a whole,” Charles A.


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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War