From the GMO quarterly newsletter, a dissenting voice on the Chinese miracle: No sooner do we finish wallowing in the idea of Soviet incompetence than we start to believe that Chinese central planners can wonderfully manage a complicated economy, growing unprecedentedly fast and transforming overnight from a rural society to a capital-intensive wonder using halfcontinue reading

Often Canadians like making it onto lists — best quality of life, most expensive cities, kindest and gentlest societies, that kind of thing. But then there are lists Canada is on but would prefer to be left off, like the Al-Qaeda target lists, or this one — super-bear economist Nouriel Roubini’s list of countries likelycontinue reading

I’ve just finished a very funny book on how Wall Street works, published in 1940 and written by someone who worked in the markets through the crash of 1929. Where Are The Customers’ Yachts was reissued as a paperback a few years ago, and almost every page is relevant to today — perhaps even morecontinue reading

Last summer I drew your attention to the CBOE Volatility (VIX) index, which at the time was, like the Baltic Dry Index, a relatively low-profile stock market metric that had started to look very odd. (My own familiarity with the VIX index is the legacy of two years of early morning meetings with a acontinue reading