Thursday, September 20, 2007

Making Money by Being Smart

"You know that really hard test, the SAT?"

"I took it"
paraphrase of Joey Tribbiani on Friends

The WSJ's MarketBeat blog has a smart post on the interconnectedness of markets and vehicles:
Turning Petrodollars Into Real Assets
Which has this quote:

“It’s not far-fetched to compare China’s shift from U.S. financial assets to hard assets to that of what the Gulf countries are doing, which is reconsidering their obligations with U.S. dollars into buying hotels and real estate,” says Ashraf Laidi, chief currency analyst at CMC Markets. “You could have a better return on real assets from the inflow that comes from hotels and real estate, rather than just in a currency which is falling.”


On a similar (and earlier) note, the Energy Roundup pointed us to the same story from a slightly different angle:
What $80 Oil Buys You

The "Connections" thing is probably the most important lesson you can learn from the scientific (as opposed to the hippy-dippy) study of ecology. Or finance. As David Lloyd-Jones put it in a comment at Brad DeLong's blog last month:
(My one-time lover, Elizabeth Rubin -- yes, the very one who factors five digit numbers by looking at them, and rarely scores under 350 in four-handed Scrabble, you saw her breast-feeding on stage in the Met's Ring Cycle -- once explained shtetl economics to me. "Ya just gotta know how the price of apples relates to the price of rutabagas when the price of cattle drops against pigs.")


A point we've made but without the breast-feeding.