Without words and totally without economic context.

"You better cut the pizza in four pieces, because I'm not hungry enough to eat six." by Yogi Berra

Always remember...

http://www.nber.org/papers/w15815

how true...

To wit: In the same way that you can’t “win” an argument with your overly emotional wife (or husband), nor can you “win” an argument with a persistently delusion-embracing market.

Berkshire Hathaway

Dear readers,

Enclosed you find a sequence of the recent annual newsletter of Berkshire Hathaway. Seldomly seen so much truth in so less words:

We tend to let our many subsidiaries operate on their own, without our supervising and monitoring them to any degree... We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly - or not at all - because of a stifling bureaucracy... We will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately-managed medium-sized and large businesses, most of whose decision-making occurs at the operating level.

More Than You Know by Michael J. Mauboussin

These days I have started reading a book which has a nearer focus on investments, than the books I usually read. I'll start with a quote of a quote out of it:

The only certainty is that there is no certainty. This principle is especially true for the investment industry, which deals largely with uncertainty. In contrast, the casino business deals largely with risk. With both uncertainty and risk, outcomes are unknown. But with uncertainty, the underlying distribution of outcomes is undefined, while with risk we know what that distribution looks like. Corporate undulation is uncertain; roulette is risky.

by Robert Rubin, former Tresury Secretary.

Fallstudie über Mitarbeitermotivation

Hallo zusammen

Einer der Gründe für meine Inaktivität waren schulische Aktivitäten. Viel Zeit benötigte dabei die Erstellung einer Fallstudie. Gerne möchte ich diese auf meinem Blog zum Download bereitstellen:

Download-Fallstudie

This Time Is Different

You haven't heard from me for quite a while. Due to scholar efforts and a project work my capazities for my blog was limited. From now on I would like to restart my efforts and move your attention to the following research paper:

www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/51_This_Time_Is_Different.pdf

Defaults of governments happen regularly. Even if the conventional wisdom is that it is an absolut improbable event. As the paper state it: The pervasive view that "this time is different" is precisely why it usually isn't different, and catastrophe eventually strikes again.