A continuation of a LinkedIn post on career transition: 2/x In retrospect, I liken my career transition mostly to learning a new language. By language, I mean not high-school French, but language in the broader sense of a means of communication, an agreed-upon set of references, of metaphors and understandings. Music and mathematics are languages in that sense, and recognized as such. Computer coding languages are narrower but the same. Trained in history and having learned Russian, I was completely mute in regard to the language of business, finance, and investing. I don’t want to downplay the technical skills involved …
Author: Daniel Peris
Twitter Posts from February 7, 2022 to the present on the geo-political situation in SE Europe
One month in, got some right; got some wrong. Will continue to update, at east for a while. March 20, 2022 A forceful reminder of why, particularly now, we should be engaging Russian culture more, not less. Please read this. As Morson fans already know, Saul is incapable of dull or shallow thinking. https://quillette.com/2022/03/19/putins-russian-and-pushkins-russia/ March 20, 2022 Sadly, the death toll from WW I continues to rise, yes, the First World War. The decisions/treaties/boundaries (Sykes-Picot, Soviet “Union”, etc)/movements associated w/the “Great War” and the years immediately following (1918-1922) are still driving today’s geopolitical and military realities. The tragedies of WW …
Gabelli Fordham Centennial Speaker Series on “Getting Back to Business”
My conversation about Getting Back to Business/operating as a historian in the capital markets with Fordham-Gabelli School of Business Professors Jim Kelly & Sris Chatterjee has now posted. Thanks to the Gabelli staff as well as co-sponsors the Museum of Finance and the New York CFA Society. Link: Gabelli school conversation
The NBN interview with the editors of The Life Cycle of Russian Things.
This collection of articles, edited by Matthew Romaniello, Alison Smith, and Tricia Starks, takes up the history of material culture over the past several centuries of Russian history. Widely diverse objects such as maps, textiles, building materials, cigarette cases,fish guts (yes…), samovars, samizdat, and even the T-34 tank are viewed in light of their role in Russian society. Hence the collection’s striking and unusual title: The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, 1600 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). Tune in for my conversation with the authors: the NBN interview
A century of cultural genius: the NBN interview with Jeffrey Brooks.
Explore “a century of genius” with JHU’s Jeffrey Brooks as he delves into Russia’s period of greatest cultural intensity. The New Books Network interview about his The Firebird & the Fox (Cambridge, 2019). New Books Network | Jeffrey Brooks, “The Firebird and the Fox:…
A meditation on trust in finance. Yes, you read that correctly.
I have been wondering about the role of trust in modern finance. To judge by the academic literature and the dominant rules and formulas, it has no role whatsoever. I find that paradoxical, to say the least, because trust is inseparable from participating in modern society. Everyday we make judgments, including economic and financial ones, based primarily if not exclusively on trust, as opposed to a calculation of odds, risks and rewards, costs and benefits. Academics refer to these daily challenges as exercises in “decision making under conditions of uncertainty.” Modern finance tries (and has failed) to quantify that decision-making …
Leading from the middle: The NBN interview with John Roy Price
History is told, it is said, by the victors. And so it is in regard to Richard Nixon. We all know how his presidency ended. What too few of us recall or bother to learn is how it started. In his new The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider’s Perspective on Nixon’s Surprising Social Policy (UP of Kansas, 2021), John Roy Price details how in Nixon’s first few years in office, the President ardently tried to lead from the middle to eradicate the widespread poverty that had so characterized his own upbringing. It is a view of Nixon and a big-tent, policy-driven Republican Party that …
History matters: is our current bout of inflation transitory?
Post a global pandemic, labor is in short supply, inflation is everywhere. Is it transitory? What happens next? History matters. Very similar circumstances after the Black Death in Medieval Europe …. One of many analyses to ponder: https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/munro-04-04.html
If it sounds too good to be true….
If it sounds too good to be true, …. Big takedown of the Private Equity industry by former PE manager Jeff Hooke (now of JHU-Carey). His new The Myth of Private Equity (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2021) highlights the sky-high costs, poor returns, & very low visibility. And yet, the industry persists… Hooke’s expose is a latter day “Where are the Customers’ Yachts?” The New Books Network interview.
Seeing the right Navalny.
Everyone has heard of Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia’s opposition to Putin’s rule. But what do we really know of him? Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future? (Oxford, 2021) provides the first detailed political biography of Navalny. Most importantly, Ben Noble, Morvan Lallouet, and Jan Matti Dollbaum turn the one-dimensional, cartoon-like image of Navalny in the West into a nuanced portrait, properly situated in the context of modern Russian politics. The New Books Network interview is here.
How big is your platform? or “What color is your parachute?” 50 years later.
I recently got this very positive email mail through a professional social media platform: “:) .. your web site is treasure of great insights – I’m in my year two of my MBA journey and more and more I found myself checking historical and geopolitical “whereabouts” when reading the cases the profs. thrown on us .. I think it’s a/THE key to fully understand what is happening “behind the scenes” of all/most they want us to do (evaluate equities or M&A deals, making recommendations, etc. etc. ) unfortunately it’s mostly omitted…” I was touched. The thing is, nobody goes to …
It’s time to retire “Left” and “Right”.
George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” lamented how ideologues were wreaking havoc not only on their societies, but also on the language of politics itself. He condemned the “staleness of imagery” and the “lack of precision” in the political writing of his day. During the past 75 years, little has changed. The labels and personalities may be different, but the abuse on and by words is much the same. We can all agree that the United States has become politically polarized, especially so in the past half-dozen years. In better times, Yeat’s middle translated into a …
NBN Interview with Jon Lukomnik on his Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory
Jon Lukomnik thinks outside the box, specifically the Modern Portfolio Theory box. Rather than trying to pick up a few basis points here or there by operating within a flawed system, Lukomnik argues in favor of looking for factors which affect overall systemic risk and reward. That is, he looks at what factors will influence the health and levels of the overall capital markets. This is an important work for all market participants. Listen to the NBN interview here.
NBN Interview with Timothy Frye on his Weak Strongman
Vladimir Putin is not the unconstrained, all-powerful boogeyman he is made out to be in the popular Western media. So says Timothy Frye, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in his new book, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia (Princeton UP, 2021). Drawing on more than three decades of research, and reams of data from within Russia itself, Frye depicts a “personal autocrat”, but one subject to numerous constraints and trade offs. And the shows of force we have seen in recent years, from his treatment of opposition figures to the planning for the upcoming election, …
NBN interview with Andrei Tsygankov on his Russia & America
Putin & Biden are meeting in a few days. Get ready with an overview of the new geo-political chess board, as outlined by Andrei Tsygankov in his Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry. Listen to the NBN interivew here.
Equity duration: now is the “time.”
As a cashflow-oriented investor, I’ve been focused on equity duration for a while. Now others are beginning to catch on as well. Zero-Hedge may not be your cup of political tea, but it does have serious investing content, in this case a piece from data shop called VariantPerception. Their brief piece on equity duration can be seen here. My case for using equity duration begins at the 22 minute mark of the Keep Calm and Carry On episode that dropped yesterday.
The power of narrative economics….
A recent New Yorker article by Charles Duhigg ties together nicely several threads of emerging finance that are worthy of notice. The first is the power of narrative economics (and finance) championed by Robert Shiller. My review of his 2019 book by that name appeared on the New Books Network. Shiller’s argument stands in stark contrast to the orthodox model of classical economics. The second is that investment bubbles of the type we are now seeing with SPACs can and have in the past left behind substantial technological and financial innovation after the bubble has burst and much money lost. …
NBN Interview with William Nordhaus
Can classical economics help figure out climate change and support policies that slow global warming? Yale Sterling Professor of Economics William Nordhaus thinks so. In his new book, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World (Princeton UP, 2021), Nordhaus tackles the “externality” that is pollution and carbon emissions. By making several adjustments to how we treat this externality in economic terms, it can be brought back into the “system” whereby sensible regulation, market relations, and innovation can lead to markedly lower levels of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The most important of those adjustments is getting the price of …
NBN Interview with Louis Nelson
Louis Nelson’s Mosaic: War, Monument, Mystery weaves together a personal memoir, a history of the Korean War and its aftermath, and the tale of how the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC came to be. The result is a fascinating portrait of one of the late 20th century’s most important designers. Listen to the New Books Network interview here.
Equity duration, revisited for an even lower market yield.
Updating a post from late 2018 on equity duration. The yield of the market is now down to around 1.5% and inflation expectations are much higher than they were at that time. Hence it is worth revisiting the math of valuing cashflows in a rising rate environment, or at least one in which rates are not relentlessly declining. Updated table below. The conclusion has not changed. If you have a choice of distributable cashflow options, get paid up front. Those distant cashflows take a real beating in any reasonable discounting exercise. In that regard the S&P 500 Index is an …
A thoughtful and optimistic rebuttal to my post on Russian political culture.
A friend responded to my post of April 22….. “One thing I was concerned about with your essay is that some readers might walk away with the impression that Russia hasn’t really changed and won’t change. I’m not even sure that’s what you intended to say. There are clearly many Russians who would like things to change—and a number who are quite content with how they are. There is also a certain type of non-Russian client I’ve had before who like to take they view that Russia is fundamentally different and incapable of being more liberal—and then use this as …
Using the great 19th century realist novels to bridge what divides us….
Two very thoughtful oddfellows–a labor economist and a Russian literature scholar–take on the world’s problems in their newest collaboration, Minds Wide Shut How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us (Princeton University Press, 2021). Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro bring to bear the remarkably powerful tool of great 19th century Realist literature (and other parts of the Western canon) to define and counter the all-or-nothing fundamentalisms that have come to divide us in recent years. They touch upon politics, religion and economics, as well as great literature itself, and advocate bridging the divides with assertion and dialogue rather than the crude dismissal of opponents based upon absolute, unyielding …
Russia & the West, again…..
Making the same mistake repeatedly and expecting a different outcome is a popular definition of insanity. Can the condition apply to an entire professional group? In the most recent issue of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasion History, I highlight how many prominent US thinkers about Russia have maintained a naivete in regard to Russia’s ultimate political development for much of the past 70 years. Even during the height of the Cold War, leading members of the US establishment assumed that Russia would ultimately adopt classical liberalism and join the Western community of nations as a fully paid-up member. It …
Investing in the market as a historian…
On investing as a historian, & making the transition from academia to investment manager. Thank you Ashutosh Garg for having me on his The Brand Called You podcast.
If it looks like a bubble, walks like a bubble, & talks like a bubble, is it a bubble?
History matters, no less so for your retirement account. Are we in a normal investing environment or is something “not quite right”? The asset bubble doctors are in and will see you now. Join me for a conversation with Will Quinn, co-author along with John Turner, of the new and highly acclaimed, Boom & Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles (2020). The NBN podcast can be accessed here.
Uninvestable, due to government overreach…
I was alarmed yesterday to see a sitting US senator assume that the Fed Chairman would naturally prohibit banks from paying dividends (or buybacks) under the new administration. The Fed Chair wisely deflected the question and the assertion behind it. For folks unaware of how the stock market works, and specifically bank accounting, let me say that that was a “doozy” moment. Yes, it is true that the vast majority of quantitative easing and Federal Reserve activity over the past 13 years (since the GFC) has gone into the financial markets rather than the real economy. That is not because …
Do books and articles about financial bubbles mean we are in a bubble?
I’m reading an excellent new academic account of bubbles in the financial markets by two Irish academics, William Quinn and John Turner, Boom and Bust. Their taxonomy of bubbles involves formally identifying them after the fact, though they believe their explanatory model would help forecast as them as well. Still it raises the question, which we all felt in 1999 and some of us feel in 2021, how one identifies a bubble whilst you are in the midst of it. While I was pondering that notion, the latest from the WSJ‘s Streetwise columnist, James Mackintosh, hit my device, “If it …
Nav@1ny is a master of modern media, but does it matter?
February 2, 2021 update: It’s not the crime, but the cover up… That’s what they said about Richard Nixon’s downfall. Other similar episodes abound. Given events in Russia over the past two weeks, one might assert a new corollary: It’s not the corruption, but the crackdown. A new allegation of corruption, even one on an unprecedented scale, was unlikely to move Russia. But the government’s excessive response and its treatment of the man behind the video has led to a popular reaction that the video itself did not. When is a show of government force actually a sign of great …
It’s time for a new Centrist party in the spirit and practice of classical liberalism.
The good news is that the Grifter has left the White House. His closest aides and high-profile abettors are scurrying away to avoid the infamy that they so richly deserve. The newly installed President is clearly a moderate fellow, empathetic and conciliatory. And, ironically, he is so old that he can have no other agenda than to fix the current situation. His Vice President is the embodiment of the American dream. While the country remains in severe national security peril during this period of transition, one of the worst political crises in our nation’s history appears to be behind us. …
Price discovery, Soviet Russia, and artistry
The elevator pitch to a book editor and movie producer that never happened: “the early 1960s Soviet experiment of loosening price controls would make for a great work of historical fiction and a high-end movie drama.” No one in their right mind, right? And yet, it did. Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty came out in 2010. It is simply the best Western work of historical fiction about the post-war Soviet period. Spufford is not a trained Soviet specialist, but every professional historian of the Soviet Union secretly (and not so secretly) wants to have written that book. I know of what …