Bad for global growth, good for world peace — When your own house is on fire, you’re less likely to try to set someone else’s house on fire. The logic being that you’re too busy taking care of your own to have time to worry about external things. This of course doesn’t always apply. Russia’s economy was already looking…

The rest of the world should not take the bait — You know when you’re at a bar and some rowdy drunk starts going out of his way to bump everyone because he’s insecure and has something to prove? The drunk fool is just hoping that someone, anyone will get angry and push or hit him first giving him all the…

How great companies sustain their excellence — One under-appreciated type of competitive edge is the process moat. A process moat doesn’t derive from just a single or a few factors like economies of scale and network effects do. Rather, it derives from a company chasing excellence and innovation in almost every single component of its business so…

Take it or leave it — Much ink has already been spilled in the pursuit of giving Medium’s new CEO, Tony Stubblebine, unsolicited advice. But here’s some more lol. Hopefully he thinks long and hard about what’s great about Medium as well as what’s crappy. When a big transition like this takes place, there’s always the…

It will make you wiser — Many people snoozed through their history classes growing up, and that’s a shame. The more I study it, the more I realize that history is not something boring but rather it’s profound, insightful, and incredibly useful. Here are a few reasons why you should pick up a history book or…

Yes in the short run, no in the long run — One thing that you will notice after working in markets for a while, especially over the past two decades or so, is that interest rates (a.k.a. Fed policy) seem like the only game in town. When rates are rising or are expected to rise, markets go down. When rates are…

A roundup of insightful stories from Alpha Beta Blog that flew under the radar — Here’s a roundup of interesting, insightful, and recent stories from Alpha Beta Blog that you might have missed during your busy week. Infinite Growth Can Be Sustainable by Andrew Plummer Really enjoyed this one. The question that Andrew ponders is whether cutting economic growth can slow down carbon emissions and global warming. …

All risk and no reward — One unfortunate thing about economic life that never changes is that the poor are hit harder by recessions and that normal people are always the ones that bear the brunt of policy changes meant to slow the economy and fight inflation. For example, look at right now. After decades of…

Keep an open mind to the data in the coming months — (Not intended to be investment advice. Opinions are my own.) I was pretty sure that a recession was coming. It’s still my base case. But with the way commodity prices have been behaving lately (they’ve been going down), we need to at least entertain the fact that inflation may come…