This is my annual post on the top Financial stories of the year now ending. As usual, I do not try to rank them, merely listing one Big Story for each of the twelve months of the year. Each story is accompanied by a ( bold ) acknowledgement of the theme it may illustrate. But my emphasis is on the story, not the theme. Something happened with a particular who-what-when-where structure in each of these twelve instances. Despite all the storm-and-stress over the election campaign in the US, and the obvious financial significance of the result both within the US and without, you will not find much of that campaign in this post. It isn't even featured in the November entry. Yet four of our grafs are US-focused. They focus not on the racehorse of the campaign, but on the stakes. If there is a theme here, though, it is the significance of financial/economic sanctions in wartime. Most of the "western world" has sanctioned Russia for its assault upon the sovereignty of U...
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A recent book by David von Leib (a pseudonym for Barclay von Leib), discusses Von Leib's long career as a derivatives trader. Along the way, the author has much to say about Martin Armstrong, a market guru prominent in the 1990s, when he chaired "Princeton Economics International" and wrote a widely-followed newsletter. For no good reason (though he appears to believe the practice gives him some legal immunity) von Leib gives to many of the figures in his memoir slightly fictionalized names. Accordingly, he refers to Martin Armstrong as Marty Amwell. At any rate, here is a numerological process that, in von Leib's telling, led Armstrong/Amwell to some of his business-cycle hypotheses. Marty thought that there were too many coincidences here not to view the pyramid of Giza as a mathematical treasure chest from history of some sort -- a gift from the heavens perhaps -- something left over from some ancient -- potentially alien -- civilization. Marty also co...