Chaos outside Kabul Airport as crowds of people try to leave Afghanistan
POLITICO
I'm skimming the news this morning and all I am seeing is the cluster-fuck in Afghanistan and the usual hash about COVID. The mess in Afghanistan makes me wonder if anyone had considered what would happen when the US pulled out, or whether whoever was in charge thought it was obvious what would happen and that anyone with a brain would have packed their bags and gotten out a long time ago. I mean WTF? Anyway, stupidity as usual, nothing of much interest.
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| Major Russian Gas Pipelines to Europe Novy Urengoy is the dot in the upper right hand corner. |
There was a story about how the flow of natural gas from Russia to Germany has dropped by half. This is through the existing pipeline that goes through the Ukraine, not the new Nord Stream pipeline that goes under the Baltic. I'm not sure that one is operational yet. The story was some kind of attempt to cast it as a political move.
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| Firefighters spead water on a fire at a Gazprom gas condensate plant near the city of Novy Urengoy in Western Siberia, Russia, Aug. 6, 2021. (Photo by Russian Emergency Ministry via AFP) |
However, there was a big fire at a processing plant in Russia recently. You don't suppose that could have anything to do with it, do you? Freaking morons dragging politics into the real world. Leave politics in the imaginary world where it belongs.
Anyway, I did find this bit. It reiterates things we already know, but it's nice to hear a voice of reason amidst all the flak.
Failing Conventionally by Michael Every of Rabobank
85 years ago, the economist Keynes noted cynically in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money that:
“It is the long-term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for most criticism, wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks. For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”
In other words, it’s better not to deviate from the market consensus or benchmark, even if that consensus or benchmark is wrong, because even if everything then goes wrong, at least you can say that *you* were not to blame individually - “the market” was.
85 years later, with advances in technology, society, and political geography few would have believed possible, what has changed in that investment mentality? In an age that champions diversity, do we have any greater freedom to take strong off-benchmark/consensus views, or do we still herd towards them regardless of knowing that a series of exculpatory individual “Whocouldanooed?”s after a crash does not compensate for the damage done by everyone being collectively wrong?
He goes on at some length after this, but it's all about current events affecting the markets, and I just don't want to know.
3 comments:
That map makes it pretty obvious why putin will fight tooth and nail for Ukraine.
"Leave politics in the imaginary world where it belongs."
If you haven't noticed politics is the real world now. No agency public or private does anything without considering the politics of it. Who it helps, who it hurts, where retaliation may come from, will blowback be costly, who's in power at the moment, would it be better to wait till that changes.
Imagine if Carnegie had to consider all that before donating public libraries. It ain't the way it used to was.
Money talks, bullshit walks, and politics is all bullshit. Yes, I know, nothing gets done without it, but I don't want to hear about it. Bunch of gas bags belching big clouds of noxious fumes. I don't want to hear from them, unless, of course, they are telling me what I want to hear. Not too many of them these days.
If they're telling you what you want to hear be afraid, be very afraid. It's when they say what you don't want to hear it's a pretty good chance they aren't lying.
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