Eight Minutes

"What politicians fail to realise is that rising inflation expectations inevitably result in higher..."

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:33:00 -0400

“What politicians fail to realise is that rising inflation expectations inevitably result in higher borrowing costs. If short-term rates are not raised, then long-dated rates will rise instead, proving far more painful and for a much longer period.”

- Ciaran O’Hagan, “Europe needs a sharp rise in interest rates,” Financial Times

"One morning in 2001, Gregg Monsees received a call from a Mr. Byron Bottoms in Waco, Texas, who told..."

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:19:14 -0400

“

One morning in 2001, Gregg Monsees received a call from a Mr. Byron Bottoms in Waco, Texas, who told him that President and Laura Bush wanted to buy a ladder for the library at their Crawford ranch and would he please ship out some samples posthaste.

“Well, we don’t ship samples,” said Gregg Monsees. “And we made a very rare exception. But we did require a deposit.” The Bushes settled on an unfinished black walnut with powder-coated black steel fixtures, and Mrs. Bush sent a thank-you note addressed to “Messrs. Monsees.” When Morley Safer of CBS came in to inquire about a ladder for his Upper East Side home, Gregg Monsees recalled, he made a wry comment, upon hearing that the president had recently bought a ladder, as to the number of books Mr. Bush could possibly own.

“It was something like, ‘What, for his one book?’ ” Gregg Monsees said. “And then he asked me what I thought was a particularly astute question. He asked, ‘How many feet of track did he buy?’ Because the track can be an indicator of how many books a person owns.

“Well, it seemed the president had more track than Morley Safer. I guess he forgot Laura Bush used to be a librarian.”

”

- The Library Ladder - When You Can’t Reach the Top Shelf - NYTimes.com

"In its unexampled directness the photograph has enjoyed, until recently, an unrivaled artlessness of..."

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:58:57 -0400

“In its unexampled directness the photograph has enjoyed, until recently, an unrivaled artlessness of communication. But now that it has undergone a rise in status, and is an object of value and speculation, the attention it receives is increasingly verbal. Words now affirm the photographic image, as photographs once confirmed reality. This seems to be the fate of all enterprises that are open to scrutiny and discussion. To the extent the photograph is a ponderable object, it will have to be pondered with words.”

- Wright Morris

"I had recently read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and heard that Carson McCullers had lived in..."

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:03:09 -0400

“I had recently read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and heard that Carson McCullers had lived in Columbus. I could believe that. The basking Southern heat, the soft golden light, the way structures and people appeared to be saturated with the scent of a past as dense as leaf smoke, smoldering and drug-like in which everybody was a compliant victim. Walking the dusty streets I envied writers fortunate enough to come from such places, still sticky with the pollen that clung to them. It seemed to me they need only close their eyes, open their pores and inhale deeply to possess their subjects. The sorghum-like richness of Southern life was both on the surface and fermenting beneath it.”

- Wright Morris, Photographs & Words

September 1, 1939

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:45:04 -0400

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

— W.H. Auden

"Most people have the idea of finding a needle in a haystack; they miss the objective of going for..."

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:15:03 -0400

“Most people have the idea of finding a needle in a haystack; they miss the objective of going for the haystack. I buy the haystack.”

- Fayez Sarofim, Houston-based art collector and legendary investor.

"Wright Morris’s inspiration in the 1940s to combine words and photographs resulted in several..."

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:55:57 -0400

“Wright Morris’s inspiration in the 1940s to combine words and photographs resulted in several unique works of fiction, “photo-texts,” he called them, in which image and text stand to each other in quite unexpected ways. In The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), and God’s Country and My People, (1968) picture and word cohabitate in a manner of mutual and complex exchange. At a casual glance these works might seem similar to the juxtaposi tions of word and image in documentary texts popular at the end of the 1930s,but a more careful look and reading makes clear that in spite of some superficial resemblance in depictions of rural scenes they have little in common with works like Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) or Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor’s American Exodus (1939). They belong more properly under the heading of experimental fiction, formal experiments in the telling of stories, the construction of narratives. Moreover, each of Morris’s books ventures a different way of setting image in relation to word, either disposing them throughout an actual novel (as in The Home Place) or linking them with texts which stand as discrete memories, not stories as such but story-fragments…”

- Alan Trachtenberg - Wright Morris’s “Photo-Texts” - The Yale Journal of Criticism 9: The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) 109-119 Wright Morris’s “Photo-texts” Alan Trachtenberg

"Our artists have to find poetry in train stations the way their fathers found poetry in forests and..."

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:18:30 -0400

“Our artists have to find poetry in train stations the way their fathers found poetry in forests and rivers.”

- Emile Zola

"To be sure, a crash in the oil market is not imminent. The danger currently comes from the other..."

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:17:39 -0400

“To be sure, a crash in the oil market is not imminent. The danger currently comes from the other direction. The rise in oil prices aggravates the prospects for a recession. Only when a recession is well and truly in place is a decline in consumption in the developed world likely to outweigh other factors.”

- George Soros

"We have these big stories that we live in – nation, that’s a story. Religion, that’s a..."

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:35:37 -0400

“We have these big stories that we live in – nation, that’s a story. Religion, that’s a story … the truth is that in any kind of dynamic society, those stories are always changing … To an extent these stories are always being retold, and it seems to be that one of the tests of an open society is that you can do that … It’s one of the ways in which a society progresses, to continually have that conversation about the narratives inside which it lives.”

- Salman Rushdie, “A Writer: Not a Martyr,” “The Weekend Interview by Emily Parker, The Wall Street Journal

"Yet replicating the first green revolution will be difficult. Each of the three pillars on which it..."

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:28:30 -0400

“

Yet replicating the first green revolution will be difficult. Each of the three pillars on which it was built - seed technology, irrigation and the ample use of fertilisers and pesticides - now look rather less sturdy. Again, that largely reflects the legacy of how the problem was tackled the first time round. […]

The result is a global agricultural system that today is highly intensive and is predicated on the availability of cheap, readily available energy, for use in every part of the production chain: both directly as fuel and indirectly to manufacture fertilisers and pesticides. But with oil prices rising, the cost of certain fertilisers has surged to more than $1,000 (€643, £505) a tonne from about $300 a tonne two years ago. On top of that, the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides faces public opposition.

The original green revolution also required vast amounts of water for irrigation - a resource that is becoming scarcer because of climate change and the rapid growth of cities and industrial operations, particularly in the developing world.

”

- Javier Blas, “The End of Abundance,” The Financial Times, June 2, 2008, p. 9.

British Soul (WSJ)

Fri, 09 May 2008 19:13:00 -0400

John Jorgensen, writing in the Wall Street Journal: “Princess of Wails.”

Duffy is part of a trend in pop music: the retooling of classic American soul by young British women. In that category the unrivaled champion is Amy Winehouse, whose multiplatinum album, “Back to Black,” spawned five Grammys and was critically hailed for its hip, horn-stabbed sound. But even as Ms. Winehouse has been showered with awards for her work, her career has been sullied by personal and legal troubles. In her wake a series of successors have stormed England, each with their own retro stylistic twists.

Duffy, ‘Rockferry’ (Mercury, May 13)

Estelle, whose album “Shine” got a U.S. release last week, switches easily from girl-group croon to Cockney patter on tracks that feature a hip-hop flair — and cameos by John Legend and Kanye West. The singer Adele weaves smoky vocals through modern beats, and her hit album, “19,” is slated for a U.S. release in June. And Leona Lewis, a pop singer who won a United Kingdom variant of “American Idol,” recently hit No. 1 on the U.S. album and singles charts.

"Very early on a poet is struck by the cruelty and lack of democracy in the arts — so few get it all,..."

Mon, 05 May 2008 06:35:47 -0400

“Very early on a poet is struck by the cruelty and lack of democracy in the arts — so few get it all, and the hordes receive nothing but the pleasure and pain of an overdeveloped consciousness.”

- Jim Harrison, “Don’t Feed the Poets,” The New York Times.

"Artifacts mystically quickened with sentiment and emotion await their reappearance in the..."

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:18:28 -0400

“Artifacts mystically quickened with sentiment and emotion await their reappearance in the imagination, a reenactment and a confirmation. Each time these tokens are handled they give off light.”

- Wright Morris, “Origins: Reflections on Emotion, Memory and Imagination,” Conversations with Wright Morris.

"The reader says, ‘What a memory you have!’ but it is what escapes the memory that stirs..."

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:55:16 -0400

“The reader says, ‘What a memory you have!’ but it is what escapes the memory that stirs the imagination.”

- Wright Morris

"People think that because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the..."

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:04:03 -0400

“People think that because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it’s true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist lays it down. His decision is binding.”

- Anthony Powell

"…because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,..."

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:42:18 -0500

“…because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!””

- On the Road by Jack Kerouac

A link from the Magnum Photos blog to my blog.

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:45:49 -0500

A link from the Magnum Photos blog to my blog.

"Here are some of the things we learned about building successful quantitative models in finance...."

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:21:00 -0500

“Here are some of the things we learned about building successful quantitative models in finance. Unlike blackjack and gambling games, you only have one history from which to use data (call this the Heraclitus principle: you can never invest in the same market twice). This leads to estimates rather than precise conclusions. Like gambling games, the magnitude of your bets should increase with expectation and decrease with risk. Further, one needs reserves
to protect against extreme moves. For the long-term compounder, the Kelly criterion handles the problem of allocating capital to favorable situations. It shows that consistent overbetting eventually leads to ruin. Such overbetting may have contributed to the misfortunes of Victor Niederhoffer and of LTCM.”

- Ed Thorp, A Perspective on Quantitative Finance: Models for Beating
the Market, Quantitative Finance Review 2003

"After having invested many years in learning one specialty, we are now being asked to teach..."

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:02:20 -0500

“After having invested many years in learning one specialty, we are now being asked to teach ourselves others. We are told not to be bound by the narrow confines of the discipline we were trained in, but to leap over the intellectual fences and look at what’s on the other side. For investors, the rewards for making the effort are enormous. When you allow yourself to look beyond the immediate fences, you are able to observe similarities in other fields and recognize patterns of ideas. Then, as one concept is reinforced by another and another and then another, you know you are on the right track. The key is finding the linkages that connect one idea to another.”

- Robert Hagstrom, Investing: The Last Liberal Art, p. 24