Juggling Dynamite

Sleep is a free spa treatment, one of the most valuable investments of all.

Sleep is your life-support system and Mother Nature’s best effort yet at immortality, says sleep scientist Matt Walker. In this deep dive into the science of slumber, Walker shares the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep — and the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don’t, for both your brain and body. Learn more about sleep’s impact on your learning, memory, immune system and even your genetic code — as well as some helpful tips for getting some shut-eye. Here is a direct video link.

Danielle was a guest with Jim Goddard on Talk Digital Network talking about recent developments in the economy and markets.  You can listen to an audio clip of the segment  here.

This chart, courtesy of ISABELNET.com, offers some perspective on the unprecedented capital flows that came into the global equity markets in 2021.  Freakish.

I have likened truth-telling in finance to being sober in a house of addicts; when noting irrational, destructive behaviours, you are often dismissed as the problem–too dumb, critical or boring to join the party.

Adoring naked emperors is a common theme.  Most now know the story of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi, and yet, compared with many of today’s financial schemes, Madoff was a small-time operator.  Many will be filled with regret when participants eventually hit bottom, but any recourse available is much less clear.  When taking recommendations from the sell side, the profits are theirs and the losses are all yours.

The Financial Times offers some smelling salts in Why bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme.  Here’s a snort:

“…an economic analysis of bitcoin must recognise its uniqueness in the history of manias. As an object of speculation, bitcoin is unprecedented in the degree to which there is no there there. This post-modern mania features big prices for entries on nobody’s spreadsheet. A zero-coupon perpetual has arrived not as a joke but as a trillion-dollar asset. Unlike a Ponzi scheme, bitcoin cannot end in a run. In a crash, the holders of bitcoin will collectively have lost what they have paid the miners for their bitcoin. This sum may be not far from the sum originally invested with Madoff, after accounting for inflation. But bitcoin holders will have no one to pursue to recover this sum: it will simply have gone up in smoke, a social loss. The holders of bitcoin would then only wish it had been a Ponzi scheme.”