Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss psychiatrist who spent most of her career in the US, especially at the University of Chicago. In her signature work, On Death and Dying (1969), she famously postulated the five stages of grief experienced by the terminally ill: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.(1) Kübler-Ross may or may not have been right in her theories (research seems to be inconclusive), but if you really want to see these stages of grief in action you need only observe equity investors grieving for their dying Bull Market. read more »

If we’d been around in the 15^th and 16^th centuries we could have watched in amazement as the world slowly came to grips with the fact that the earth wasn’t flat after all. We would have noticed that there is a big difference between the sudden realization that the old, flat-earth idea was clearly wrong, and the much slower process of internalizing all the implications of this new truth. The thirty years between Columbus and Magellan would alter human history profoundly, but humans only gradually glommed on to how important it was. read more »

We’ve concluded that Machiavelli’s The Prince would have approved of the “Machiavellian” tactics of our central bankers: assuming that the end justifies the means, doing “whatever it takes” no matter who gets hurt, believing that they are not merely omnipotent, but omniscient. read more »

We’re pondering the Machiavellian tactics of our central bankers over the past seven years. In that regard, let’s listen in on the following conversation, which took place in early 2014: read more »