Skjellifetti

Is the U.S. Dollar Headed for a Mighty Crash? Part I

Hey Pete:

Surveys only reveal the prejudices of the surveyed.

My family is from Detroit and includes both UAW workers (my parents gen, long ago retired) and engineers (my gen, now being forced into retirement). I've heard the horror stories from both points of view my whole life. GM and Chrysler are two incredibly mismanaged companies. And having heard both sides for years, I know that there is plenty of blame to be shared by all of the parties involved.

Oh, BTW, while we are talking about old folks, maybe you should ask people who are in their 80s and 90s why there are unions in the first place.


On May 23 11:15 AM PeteK wrote:

> Skjellifetti;
> A group did a survey months ago asking people 60-years old or older
>
> concerning the fall of the automakers. The result was that over
> 80% blamed the unions ( sorry for uions, old age, you know) and the
> rest
> blamed the management/gov. etc etc. The reason to ask older folks
> because young people may not heard of all the "STRIKES" carried out
> by the workers against the employers all the time until they got
> what they wanted. In fact, the workers are the BOSS .
> A business can only give so much.
> Try to ask some older folks yourself, and see how they response.
>

Is the U.S. Dollar Headed for a Mighty Crash? Part I

It wasn't the Uions (whatever they are) that designed the cars at GM that no one wanted. It wasn't the Uions that stymied health care reform at every turn and which led Toyota to build its latest factory in Canada rather than the U.S. It wasn't the Uions that 30 or 40 years ago prevented the U.S. from doing something about its dependence on foreign oil until it was too late because the American public wanted cheap oil to drive Hummers and GM could make more profit on gas guzzling SUVs than on subcompacts. It wasn't the Uions that caused the huge gains in productivity which in turn led to fewer workers required to build each car and left GM with an aging workforce and fewer workers to support the pensions of that older workforce (Toyota and Honda factories in the U.S. will face this problem in 30 years).

Yes, union work rules are notoriously inefficient in UAW plants and were a contributing cause just like the others listed above. But there are so many, many factors that led to the demise of the Big Three that it is silly to try and claim that it was the Uions that killed the American auto industry.

BTW, FACT: the U.S. actually manufactures more goods today (measured in real dollar value of manufactured goods produced) than we did 30 years ago.

On May 22 03:21 AM PeteK wrote:

> Gold Barron;
> You are right in a way.
> Did you ever try to find out why there are less and less "Made in
> USA"
> products at many stores ?
> Just like GM, the Uions killed most of the Big American industries.
>
> They are slowly killing Boeing now, can you see that ?
> 20 years from now Boeing maybe history. And you will have to fly
> in a jet made in China or France. Too bad, isn't it ?

Checking In on the All-ETF Portfolio

From your Feb article [my substitution]:

If we have [$BLACK_SWAN], the short-term losses to any portfolio are likely to be far greater than Quantext Portfolio Planner or any other portfolio model can estimate. This kind of massive disruptive event is not what these models are capable of estimating.

...

Ultimately, portfolio models are perhaps most useful because they give investors objective tools to:

1. examine diversification benefits in their portfolios
2. estimate total portfolio risk (albeit not very well for market crashes, wars, epidemics, etc.)
3. estimate total portfolio returns in light of assumptions

It is point number two that I was trying to highlight. MPT is all about creating portfolios with the best return for a given amount of risk. But if we are doing a poor job of estimating risk, then it is not at all clear that we are, in fact, maximizing expected returns per unit of risk. Tools such as QPP may thus be giving us a false sense of security when they recommend, say, a concentrated position in Malaysia over a larger more diversified basket of emerging market stocks.

Checking In on the All-ETF Portfolio

This may also show the limits of using MPT for divining the best risk-adjusted allocations. You have 5% devoted to Malaysia. But in 1998, during the Asian crisis, Malaysia, IIRC, put strict limits on the repatriation of international investments. That would have meant that 5% of your portfolio was suddenly unavailable. How does a tool like QPP account for this kind of risk (or is this uncertainty)?

I'm not a big fan of Nassim Taleb. He is a terrible writer who is guilty of some egregious rhetorical fallacies. But his main point, that MPT has a terrible time coping with the unknown and that it is this kind of uncertainty that is the biggest source of investment losses, is spot on. That QPP would include Malaysia in a hypothetical best risk-adjusted portfolio is a good example of Taleb's point.

Global 'Oil Shock' Rattles World Stock Markets

It was James Carville who wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market, not Robert Rubin. It is a notoriously well known quote. When an author can't be bothered to fact check the attribution of simple quotes, it throws all the rest of the analysis into doubt.