Greece's stock exchange closed Monday with a record drop of 16.23 percent on reopening after a five-week shutdown caused by capital controls.... The banking index on Monday lost nearly 30 percent, with the top four Greek lenders shedding the same amount, the maximum daily loss allowed.5 Things Learned from Jeff Bezos on Business and Investing (LINK)
Third Point's Q2 Letter (LINK)
Hussman Weekly Market Comment: A Bad Equilibrium & How Speculative Distortion Ends (LINK)
From our perspective, the fundamental reason for economic stagnation and growing income disparity is straightforward: Our current set of economic policies supports and encourages a low level equilibrium by encouraging debt-financed consumption and discouraging saving and productive investment. We permit an insular group of professors and bankers to fling trillions of dollars about like Frisbees in the simplistic, misguided, and repeatedly destructive attempt to buy prosperity by maximally distorting the financial markets. We offer cheap capital and safety nets to too-big-to-fail banks by allowing them to speculate with the same balance sheets that we protect with deposit insurance. We pursue easy monetary fixes aimed at making people “feel” wealthier on paper, far beyond the fundamental value that has historically backed up that wealth. We view saving as dangerous and consumption as desirable, failing to recognize a basic accounting identity: there can only be a "savings glut" in countries that fail to stimulate investment. We leave central bankers in charge of our economic future because we're too timid to directly initiate or encourage productive investment through fiscal policy. When zero interest rates don't do the trick, we begin to imagine that maybe negative interest rates and penalties on saving might coerce people to spend now. Look around the world, and that same basic policy set is the hallmark of economic failure on every continent.You'll have to go through the Agora marketing machine and cancel a newsletter subscription if you don't want to keep it, but Chris Mayer, inspired by Thomas Phelps' 100 to 1 in the Stock Market, has updated some of Phelps' work and data (Phelps wrote the book in the early 1970s) with his own book on 100-baggers (LINK)
Book of the day (released tomorrow): Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Quote of the day, via Shane at Farnam Street:
"Whatever is good for us should be discussed often and frequently brought to mind, so that it may be not Just familiar to us, but also ready for use. Remember also that in this way what is clear often, becomes clearer." -SenecaThat quote summarizes my reasons for continuing on the Memortation path.