Inflation: not this ship, sister. Accrued Interest.
Fact checking Bernanke on real estate. Calculated Risk.
Wages contract in US, UK, Japan. Michael Shedlock.
Staying the course... toward 1990s Japan? Mark Thoma, The Hearing, WaPo.
Of fingers and dikes. Contrary Investor.
The federal budget, rescaled. Terence Tao.
Comfortable with uncertainty. John Hussman.
an excerpt of Hussman's comments on uncertainty:
In his book On Being Certain, neurologist Robert A. Burton quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald – “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron calls it “being comfortable with uncertainty” – being willing to take every aspect of reality as the starting point, without wasting energy wishing things were different, without denying reality as it is (even if your next step is to work toward changing things), and without needing to know what will happen in the future. “The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to be open to an unknown future.”
Burton offers the same advice. Tolerating the unpleasantness of uncertainty, he writes, “is the only practical alternative to cognitive dissonance, where one set of values overrides otherwise convincing contrary evidence. Each position has its own risks and rewards; both need to be considered and balanced within the overarching mandate: Above all, do no harm. Science has given us the language and tools of probabilities. We have methods for analyzing and ranking opinion according to their likelihood of correctness. That is enough. We do not need and cannot afford the catastrophes born out of a belief in certainty.”
Make it seven! Jim Balsillie.
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