The study of crowds has always fascinated people in finance. It’s not hard to understand why. Markets can go to crazy extremes, extremes no one can make sense of. So, one favorite way to explain it away is to say that crowds do dumb things that individuals, upon cooler reflection, would never do. In a …
The 20th century was an age of big business. And investors did well backing the giant blue chips on their march to glory. But those days are over. In its simplest terms, my thesis is to bet with the small guys. I think of them as cottage industrials. A cottage industry brings up images of …
So the jobs report came out last week and rattled the market a bit. But there is a different perspective to this whole thing that I think is far more important. It also fingers a much more sinister trend afoot. First, the conventional view: The unemployment rate fell to a new four-year low of 7.6%. …
There is one reason why you should oppose the proposed $5.3 billion Keystone XL Pipeline. And it has nothing to do with “green religionists,” as The Wall Street Journal calls the opposition in today’s paper. Instead, it has everything to do with a foreign oil company using U.S. government power to force Americans off their …
It’s Istanbul, not Constantinople, as the song goes. In this history is an omen for any powerful state (read: the U.S.). A somewhat obscure essayist knew all about it back in 1959. His little book deserves wider circulation. Below, we’ll take a look. Constantinople was once the seat of a vast, rich empire. The successor …
In 1881, Dakota Territory had never sold a bushel of wheat to anybody outside of Dakota. Six years later, it sold 62 million bushels. What happened? I recently read Garet Garrett’s The American Story, which came out in 1955. It is a well-written history of America, unusual because of its emphasis on the powerful economics …
FRANKLIN Delano Roosevelt famously used the term “forgotten man” in a 1932 speech to describe those at the bottom of the economic pyramid whom, he felt, government should aid. But the originator of the phrase “forgotten man” — William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) — had a whole different meaning in mind. Sumner aimed to expose the …