Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news.  Here are the twelve stores that especially caught my attention and that in retrospect I recommend to yours. I'll make no effort to rank their importance against one another, so I will order them simply by month. January: Brick and mortar retail.  A bankruptcy court judge offered Lambert, the man behind the chief institutional owner of Sears, another chance at avoiding the liquidation of that august institution. (Update -- Lambert would get that chance, but wouldn't make it stick. By end of year liquidation was well advanced.)  February : Space exploration for profit. The Dutch organization, Mars One, entered bankruptcy. Why do I elevate that fact to the unutterable prestige suggested by putting it on this list? Because it suggests the narrowness of the line that now separates reasonable business plans from fantasy/fraud. Mars One had planned to cr...

A few days ago the US Supreme Court refused to take an appeal from a 9th Circuit case that took a constitutional stand for homeless people. The 9th Circuit sad that it is cruel and unusual punishment for the city of Boise, pursuant to authority from the State of Idaho, to criminalize sleeping in outdoor public places such as parks and sidewalks.  SCOTUS refused to take that up. What are we to make of this? I offer the following thought.  This is yet another piece of evidence that the deliberations of SCOTUS are not what the ideologues always make them out to be. Ideologues of left and right count heads -- five appointed by Presidents of Party left, 4 appointed by members of Party right. Ah, the decisions will naturally be leftward, as ideologues understand it. Or, if the count comes out the other way, so will the results.  Even most ideologues will sometimes admit that there are lots of issues before the court that don't offer themselves neatly as left-versus-...

So, how is 2020 going to play out? In terms of the business/financial health of the developed world, my guess would be that the year willbe a mixed bag, with a plateauing of the major indexes but no sharp downturn. Central banks, after all, will continue to keep interests law and likely will get innovative with "non-conventional" measure to keep credit flow and equity valuable.  Governments will continue to go into debt. Everybody is taking a "we owe it to ourselves" attitude. Since we, the human race, hold all the debt that we, the human race, have incurred, the gross amounts involved can't really matter, can they? That is facile and stupid. Accordingly, one will continue to hear it. The bullish case depends on that. The bearish case for 2020 looks to geopolitical risk. First, there is a financial crisis underway in Italy. The Italian government is doing everything it can to ensure that this crisis is not only its problem -- that it is the problem ...

Someone asked on Quora if anyone could sum up each of the decades of the 20th century in 10 words or less. I took up the challenge. My apologies for the America-centered taste of the result. But have another glass of eggnog and enjoy it.  1. A canal in Panama shows off Yankee power to awe. 2. The Great War smashes sunny Edwardian optimism. 3. Stock prices can go up forever, can they not?  4. Trade barriers destroy the industrial base, introduce years of depression. 5. Another war, even worse than the last, splits the atom. 6. Two superpowers face off: no one presses the button. 7. Mao reasserts himself in China: Americans go to the moon. 8. The demise of gold and currency fixes: all values float.  9. Amid the demise of Lenin's experiment, German re-unites.  10.  You say "internet" a lot: what does it mean? 

Let me preface the verse with a bit of Ivyberry. Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape And Ivyberry, choose; and still depart From death to death through life and life, and find Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought Not matter, nor the finite-infinite, But this main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world. Tennyson

In the Ian Fleming novel Goldfinger (let's forget about the Hollywood treatment for now), there is a remarkable moment involving M, James Bond's boss. This novel was published, let's remember, in 1959, during the heyday of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary affairs. There were strict rules in the UK, pursuant to the Bretton Woods agreement, about when gold could be taken out of Britain. Saying, "But I own this gold! I should be able to taken it on the cross-channel ferry with me if I want and sell it to the first Frenchman I met on the other side!" was not  a defense, it was a confession. The Kingdom had a claim to that gold too, and if you as a subject of Her Majesty owned any gold you owned it, as a private person, only subject to that claim. The passage I want to quote today is in an early expository bit of the novel. Bond and M are both recipients of a lecture from an official of the Bank of England, who explains to them what nasty stuff...

So, Mayor Buttigieg, candidate for President, has discovered (1) that his campaign had surged into the top rank and that (2) he will be taking a lot flack from others who until then had happily ignored him and his disclosures. Those others discovered that he spent three years as an employee of the infamous business consultancy McKinsey.  McKinsey is a partnership founded in the 1920s by James O. McKinsey, who had the idea of applying cutting-edge accounting ideas to businesses. Why is it infamous? Chiefly I think because its alums keep showing up in scandals, and eventually in federal penitentiaries. Jeffrey Skilling, for example, was a partner at McKinsey in the 1980s. Ken Lay then hired him to work at Enron, where he became associated with that energy derivatives' company's meteoric rise and fall.  Rajat Gupta, even more dramatically, was the managing director of McKinsey from 1994 to 2003, and was later convicted of insider trading.  After hemming and hawing ...