I'm not sure what to make of Didier Sornette. As I said in "UPDATED--Commodities and High Frequency Trading: Prices Being Driven By Price Moves Rather Than Fundamentals":A paper from Didier Sornette and Peter Cauwels via arXive.org:
He can be a bit of a flake but I'm guessing he's smarter than I....More after the jump....
Abstract
Download from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (27 page PDF)We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy continuing since 2007 are rooted in the delusionary belief in policies based on a "perpetual money machine" type of thinking. We document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has been increasingly funded by smaller savings, booming financial profits, wealth extracted from house price appreciation and explosive debt. This is in stark contrast with the productivity-fueled growth that was seen in the 1950s and 1960s. This transition, starting in the early 1980s, was further supported by a climate of deregulation and a massive growth in financial derivatives designed to spread and diversify the risks globally. The result has been a succession of bubbles and crashes, including the worldwide stock market bubble and great crash of October 1987, the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s, the burst in 1991 of the enormous Japanese real estate and stock market bubbles, the emerging markets bubbles and crashes in 1994 and 1997, the LTCM crisis of 1998, the dotcom bubble bursting in 2000, the recent house price bubbles, the financialization bubble via special investment vehicles, the stock market bubble, the commodity and oil bubbles and the debt bubbles, all developing jointly and feeding on each other. Rather than still hoping that real wealth will come out of money creation, we need fundamentally new ways of thinking. In uncertain times, it is essential, more than ever, to think in scenarios: what can happen in the future, and, what would be the effect on your wealth and capital? How can you protect against adverse scenarios? We thus end by examining the question "what can we do?" from the macro level, discussing the fundamental issue of incentives and of constructing and predicting scenarios as well as developing investment insights.
HT: John Mauldin writing at The Big Picture:
We Can’t Take the Chance
What would it have been like to be in the decision-maker’s seat at a central bank in the midst of the crisis in 2008-09? You’d know that you won’t have the luxury of going back and making better decisions five years later. Instead, you have to act on the torrent of information that’s coming at you from every quarter, and none of it is good. Major banks are literally collapsing, the interbank market is almost nonexistent, and there is panic in the air. Perhaps you feel that panic in the pit of your stomach. This week we’ll perform a little thought experiment to see if we can extrapolate what is likely to happen in when the next crisis kicks in.
This week’s letter was triggered by a semiformal debate in Maine last week. David Kotok assembled about 50 economists, financial analysts, money managers, and media personalities to share a few days of fabulous food, what turned out to be great fishing, and awesome conversation. There were more Federal Reserve economists this year than in the past, as well as more attendees with the title “Chief Economist” on their business cards, many from large institutional names you would recognize. This was my seventh year to attend “Camp Kotok.” David really did a marvelous job of bringing a diverse group of thinkers together, and I think everyone agreed this was the best conference ever. I learned a lot.
Before we get into the letter, a little side note. Luciana Lopez from Reuters attended for the first time this year and wanted to do interviews. David asked me if I would take her out on the lake in our boat, since most of the other attendees went out in small canoes. Trey and I were glad to share our space. While we were out fishing, she asked if she could interview me. I said “Sure” and waited for her to bring out her recorder. She pulled out an iPhone 5 and started asking questions. Not the usual studio setting I am used to. I had serious trepidations about how this was going to look on-screen.
She sent a link to her edited interviews last Monday, and I have to admit I was impressed at what she could do with a simple iPhone 5. I am supposed to be on top of a changing world, but sometimes these things still take me by surprise. I make no representations about the quality of the content of the interviews, at least my portion of them, but the phone is another matter. And in a few years this will be a $100 consumer item.
In her interviews, Luciana asked two questions: “When will the Fed start to taper?” and “Who will be the next Fed chair?” You can see some of our answers at reut.rs/13if7Er and reut.rs/13gegE8.
We Can’t Take the Chance
On Saturday night David scheduled a formal debate between bond maven Jim Bianco and former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member David Blanchflower (everyone at the camp called him Danny). Jim Bianco needs little introduction to longtime readers, but for newbies, he is one of the top bond and interest-rate gurus in the world. His research is some of the best you can get – if you can get your hands on it.
Blanchflower needs a little setup. He is currently a professor at Dartmouth and has one of the more impressive resumés you will find. He is not afraid to be a contrarian and voted in the minority in 18 out of 36 meetings in which he participated as an external member of the Bank of England‘s interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) from June 2006 to June 2009. (The MPC is the British equivalent of the US Federal Open Market Committee.) Blanchflower’s The Wage Curve, drawing on 8 years of data from 4 million people in 16 countries, argued that the wage curve, which plots wages against unemployment, is negatively sloping, reversing the conclusion from generations of macroeconomic theory. “The Phillips Curve is wrong, it’s as fundamental as that,” Blanchflower has stated. Blanchflower is also known as the “happiness guru” for his work on the economics of happiness. He quantified the relationship between age and happiness and between marriage, sex, and happiness. Who knew that people who have more sex are happier? Well, we all did, but now we have economic proof....MUCH MORE
