joes

The Intrinsic Value of Nothing, Part 1

It looks like you are picking the lie you like to me, reintroducing Hayek's work as a modern and developed theory for today's economic landscape can only make sense to a fool or an economist with some physics training.

Austrian economics had it's day, and is coming back out of the woods along with Ayn Randians, all well and good but it is like using using a tube TV, you can but there are so many advances by people like Kahnemann, Beinhocker, Talib and Soros that explain the differences between perception and reality, biases and contextual distortions and other elements of uncertainty. Still a hard thing to understand and the mistakes that will be made in the future will prove that.

The current mistake you made in comparing the math of quantum mechanics is deciding that people are like atoms, and particles that if we could develop more complex algorithms we could predict markets and value wealth.

This is exactly the lie that got us into this mess, and several of the most recent such as LTCM and even the melt down of 1987, I love that math as much as the next guy but to apply it to economics has proven impossible as people aren't simple autonomous agents like Quarks and Gluons. They are more complicated.

People that want to deconstruct value into discrete elements are foolish in thinking that they can return wealth to something tangible when that hasn't been the case ever. The situation in the first transaction was determined by a complex set of individual understanding and contextual forces, and as the creators of Billions and Billions of SKU's alone to say nothing of services, e.g. no SKU for prostitution as an example.

Everyone likes to think that the answer is in the past when it is always in the future, we will repeat history without trying so let's move ahead and stop pretending that dead philosophers will get out of this mess, which is more about what we don't understand that anything we forgot.

Is a New Cyclical Bull Market on Its Way?

While all predictions are doomed to the same binary fate in the long run, there is real danger in slipping into zero sum formulas based on historical perspectives. Just as most of the computer industry growth from 1940-2000 was not predicted, IBM saw the world wide market for computers at six and Bill Gates declared that no one would ever need more than 640K, we have no chance at valuing many of the technologies being developed.

There are new considerations, an example being Lithium used in batteries, 50% of the supply in Bolivia. Wealth is expanded over time for a number of well documented reasons and there is no reason to believe that it will stop now, other than the natural egocentric perspectives that always leads us to believe that we live in "special" times.

As far as the market, it will go up as this new wealth overcomes the pessimism, it always does, whether it will be 10 days, months or years is the only remaining question.