Briefly Speaking

作者:Victor Niederhoffer
日期:2011/02/25

1. Who Wrote On Gains in Productivity

One has been asked to guess the author of a stirring article on the gains in productivity, of goods not moved by physical means, using computers and software. Here is my response.

One must remember that that the putative author, the fake doc, in almost everything he does was a master of dissimilitude. His PhD thesis was a fake, as Larry Ritter confided to me on his death bed. (It was a series of Townsend Greenspan essays.) And his work at the Townsend firm, relying heavily on blast furnace usage, and pig iron deliveries, freight loadings, and newsprint lineage, (apparently only believed by the Sage), left him with no customers when he took the job at the Fed. Thus, one would aver with 99% prob that the document that Doc Zussman proffered was written by a ghost. Content analysis, a la Mosteller and Wallace, could probably prove that.

2. Flexionism of the Day

One has also been asked to opine on whether the economy would have stopped running, and the markets would have gone into oblivion, with no one being paid if the interventions and bailouts had not occurred. Here is my take.

A respected member of the list has averred that we'd all be out of business if a former brokerage, now a bank, he was nicknamed at by the chief flexion hadn't been bailed out or aided by the government. He states that if these two banks "had met the same fate as L, a public broker many of us use too, by the way. So you'd be broke." I have another hypothesis. To me, the entire market decline in October 2008, the 20% thing, was an effort by flexions to vigilante the market down so they could get more capital from the bailouts, loans, purchase of non-performing assets, 16 trillion buffer from the Fed et al, thereby facilitating a transfer of resources from the general common man to their pockets, cronies, and friends. Such a transfer and vigilante selling a la the bond vigilantes, would not necessarily be a conspiracy, and one would be sure that the former brokerages now banks key executives and their cronies in the gov, sincerely felt that transferring the resources to them was in everybody's interests. I would tend to feel the same way if I had an opportunity to get more capital to increase my future wealth and cushion and increase my bonuses and reduce chances of distress for my family. Hopefully, I would not mount the high horse about how like Sancho Panza in Don Quixote: "I was only thinking of you."

3. Recent Markets

The all seeing eye would have a field day if it were to write a baedecker of what happened in the market the previous week. Moves in every commodity have been of the order of 5%, sometimes in a day. What an opportunity for the strong to take the chips of the weak in markets like stocks, bonds, oil, grains, copper et al. The connecting links with oil moving inversely to stocks, and the dollar, and commodities, and directly with bonds proves that there is a web of markets. The problem is that the web is always changing. Completely the opposite of how it connected a few years ago. One notes that stocks have still not set a 20 day low in 7 months and that they visited on us, the first 3 consecutive declines in a row in 6 months, rite before a violent overnight move back to the old levels. Round numbers were broken galore, and the European flexions were ahead of us as usual.