Month: October 2014

Another Interesting Austin Scene…

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Spotted yesterday, when we were taking our book stuff back to the public parking structure down the street from the Capitol Building … A 2nd Amendment Dog Walk. They had their dogs and their weapons, and flags, and seemed to be a very jolly and cheerful crew, seeing that that they were in the epicenter of liberal-slanting Austin; that little patch of blue in a sea of red. They were there to support a 2nd Amendment-backing candidate for office.

 

And yes, the t-shirt that the young man at the right does say f*ck ISIS in letters supposed to look like Arabic script, which is very clever of someone.

Fall Colors at Their Apex

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Last weekend we were in southern Wisconsin. Periodically we attempt to drive up and look at the fall colors but often we get there just a bit too early or a bit too late. This time we drove down a winding road and the colors were at their absolute apex – big golden leaves falling down right on the car.

Cross posted at LITGM

How To Read This Blog

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Chicago Boyz has been around since 2001 (2003 in its current form) and has thousands of archived posts on all kinds of topics from an unusually diverse and thoughtful group of contributors. Many of these archived posts are still worth reading.

The problem is that the blog format is poorly suited for organizing information. Once it’s off the front page it tends to disappear. Information may want to be free but first you need to be able to find it.

What to do? Manually creating, updating and occasionally reorganizing a table of contents is more work than I want, and I don’t think there’s a good way to automate it. Some of our contributors occasionally re-post outstanding examples of their own older posts, for which many thanks (and please keep doing it). Categorization of posts helps a bit. There’s a Google search box that works pretty well as an index if you know what you are looking for. I maintain a list of links on the blog’s right sidebar to a very few of our most interesting discussions. There’s also this new post that I have permalinked on the upper right sidebar where I hope readers will see it.

Maybe there are additional things that we can do to make the gold in archived Chicago Boyz posts more accessible. Please feel free to chime in in the comments if you have any thoughts.

Buy Ebola, Sell the Fed

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The stock market began to recover from its recent selloff as initial ebola fears abated. Meanwhile bond markets remained strong.

Conclusions? The fed-fueled bubble bull market in stocks isn’t over. Ebola won’t kill us all. Future Ebola outbreaks will have to be much more severe to generate market reactions of similar magnitude. (Corollary: The next Ebola-inspired market selloff will be a buying opportunity, and thus may not happen.)

Caveats. Watch for a govt bond selloff, perhaps as a result of unexpected events. The entire financial world has been watching for this for the past several years. It could happen in two weeks or two years, but it will happen eventually.

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. You would be crazy to listen to me and probably shouldn’t even be reading this, as I have predicted twenty of the last 2 bear markets in bonds.