Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

By "alpha seekers" for the purposes of this list I mean the managers of funds that invest actively in a range of markets, and that work to do better than average (by various benchmarks). This is a list of big stories of the year ending from their point of view, and it differs from a more general list of financial/economic top stories, which I will present tomorrow. This, 2016, has been an eventful year for seekers of alpha, their counterparties, and their service providers. For example, the Federal Trade Commission cut a deal with Herbalife this year, disappointing those seekers of alpha who had hoped the FTC would crack down on it as a pyramid scheme. A short side analyst for Macquarie was rather dramatically excluded from a Pax Global earnings briefing, laying bare some of the tensions in the financial community in Hong Kong. And "reverse carry" seemed to rise to prominence in the world of foreign exchange. But in my quite arbitrary and selective count, none...

I generally ask myself at this time of year what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news.  Of course, I choose the ones I do largely because they illustrate an important theme, and in the list below I'll spell out and boldface the theme. Yet the theme itself isn't the story. In terms of regional mix, with this line-up I've one whole-Pacific-basin story (March). One story is Australian (December), two European (January and June), one Chinese (May) and one Middle Eastern (July), The remaining six are US based (February, April, August, September, October, November). A nice thematic point: I both begin and end with issues over different currencies both traditional and innovative. January: Currency wars I: Switzerland abandons a peg of the franc to the euro (at 1:1.20) that has lasted for more than three years. The suddenness of the abandonment takes many market participants by surprise. February: Economics of crude oil ...

A couple of quotes from the book Greekonomics by Vicky Pryce. Speaking of the countries other than Germany that agreed to the initial deal creating the exchange rate mechanism and later the single currency, she writes, ""[T]his was a political project sold as an economic one to the electorates across Europe. In the rush to bind Germany into a union covering most of the countries in Europe, very little thought was given to whether the result might bear any resemblance to an optimal currency area." A little later, speaking specifically of Greece and why it joined,  she writes: "Interestingly, when the Greek nation expressed a real desire to join the EEC and then the euro, they were in reality secretly hoping that the Brussels bureaucrats would take over and free them from the control of their politicians, who they regarded as corrupt. Educated Greeks longed for a 'technocratic' government that would move them away from a rather Soviet-style economy su...