A Subversive Guide to Finance

We as a society have gone insane. This insanity expresses itself in little ways, like in the importation of fruit from China for American consumption, and in not so little ways like in the prosecution of multiple voluntary wars on the other side of the planet. But our normatively rational minds are repelled by straightforward descriptions of such obvious insanity on our part, so intellectuals have devised rationalized frameworks for the self-destructive tendencies that we consistently engage in. Two of these imagination-based frameworks are known as economics and finance.

In this column I'll not be concerned with giving you stock tips—and in fact anyone who tells you to buy a certain stock or industry because she knows what the future will bring is a liar. Instead I'll direct your attention towards bigger issues in finance and economics that move beneath the surface of events so that you'll have a better handle on how to make your own investment decisions. It's not complicated. And the more you learn, and learn to disregard, the more you'll realize just how uncomplicated it really is.

Some groundwork that you probably haven't been exposed hitherto if your only source of information has been the corporate media:

1. Economics (or more precisely neoclassical economics) is empirically and provably a pseudoscience. The word of economists should always be taken with a large rock of salt as economists are generally only slightly less clueless than the average turkey.

2. Energy is the fundamental driver of human society and its growing complexity. Without energy our fancy technologies would be useless and we would all be back to living in caves in short order. Energy is the stumbling block that imposes crude reality on the beautiful, if vapid, theories of economists and on the mechanistic risk reduction strategies of modern finance.

3. Finance is the method whereby humans have imposed mathematical rigor on the process of collecting and distributing resources, and in the last few decades (supposedly) of curtailing risk. It's a semiotic procedure, a matter of manipulating signs and symbols, and it may or may not bear any actual relationship whatsoever to the physical world.

With these premises in mind I will endeavor to provide you with a different way of looking at markets, as well as the world around you. I will show that there is more to finance than just crossing your fingers and hoping your broker or CNBC is right about that hot stock tip you just got. I will do my best to make complex concepts easily digestible, and to direct your reading towards people who have something valuable to say that contributes to a greater understanding of finance—and life.

This Week in Finance:

Greece will default soon and I'm finding the hopium peddled by the corporate media regarding the “uncertainty” of this eventuality to be utterly depressing. It will dwarf Lehman, and MF Global is an informative precursor as to how individuals will be treated in the aftermath. Hat tip to Reggie Middle of Boombustblog fame for calling the bankruptcy of Greece two years ago. He's welcome to his inflated ego.

Trading volume is (still) thin. The only ones left in the markets are the interminable suckers and the HFTs—probably because everyone else who used to trade lost her high-paying job pushing papers across a desk and could only replace it with a part time minimum wage gig waving signs out front the latest “We Buy Gold” storefront. Look for volume to pick up just prior to the next crash when every HFT rushes the exit at once. Tyler Durden of Zerohedge always has something interesting to say on this topic. Plus he's got good charts.

I finally got around to listening to the c-realm podcast episode 293, Infinite Rehypothecation, with interviewee Nicole Foss. Highly recommended for anyone who cares to understand why financial fraud and outright theft is now the fastest growing state-supported enterprise in America. God help you if you do business with any of these crooks.