Labor + Capital + Raw Materials = Finished Goods [Note to Readers: This year, approximately 500,000 high school seniors applied to the Ivy League and highly selective schools like Stanford (my alma mater), MIT, and the University of Chicago. Around 475,000 of them (95%) — including my hard-working, ridiculously talented 18 year-old son — were...Read More
Labor + Capital + Raw Materials = Finished Goods I spent four years learning economics at Stanford. I’ve spent (going on) the last forty years unlearning it. It’s not that Stanford failed me. It turns out that the entire field of modern economics was built upon not one but two outmoded ideas, if not conceptual...Read More
Finding Out Who the Naked Swimmers Are “You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tides goes out.” —Warren Buffett. When stocks abruptly turn south, there are two kinds of Sellers: those who want to sell, and those who need to sell. What would make a stock market speculator investor have to sell? I can...Read More
Multi-Billon Dollar “Bug Bounty” “You know what a “bug bounty’ is? Someone says, “If you hack my system, I’ll give you a million dollars.’ So Bitcoin is now a nine-year-old multibillion-dollar bug bounty, and no one’s hacked it. It feels like pretty good proof.” –Chris Dixon, general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; “Beyond...Read More
Bitcoin vs. Abstracts of Title, or, “High Tech Wine in Old Bottles” Mystified by Bitcoin and the technology it’s based on — something called “blockchain computing?” It’s just a digital version of the millennia-old, “analog” system used to track real property ownership rights. Called an abstract of title, it’s a cumulative list of all the...Read More
Balance Sheet vs. Income Statement Effects “It’s too soon to tell.” –Chinese premier Mao Zedong in the late 1940’s, when he was asked what he thought about The French Revolution. I know what Mao Zedong would have said about the gargantuan, $1.3 trillion tax reform bill just passed by the Republicans (zero Democrats voted in...Read More
