Tuesday, April 27, 2010

my mind on my money and my money on mind

so sayeth coolio back in the -- hey! -- day. just watched the nova program on the psychology of the financial markets mind over money where behaviour psychologists are questioning the long-held theory that markets are best self-governing because they are, put in the broadest term but first espoused by adam smith, rational and thus stable. but then how and why are bubbles created if the markets are ruled by passionless reason?

thank god they kept the jargon and the equations at a minimum. otherwise i'd have a hard time keeping up. the program was a very good investigative piece that did not try to answer the questions of rational versus irrational. it seems to my own limited personal view of the question that at the outset the markets are created by us and thus are an extension of us. and we are both rational and just plain fucking nuts at the same time. i recall in the midst of the housing bubble sitting in a local coffee house with anna where we overheard the conversation at the next table. two youngish men were talking about house prices that were ticking up by the minute and this upward swing appeared to have no end. one guy said, that's right, i'm gonna be rich!

perhaps he did become rich in the short-term. if he got out in time. otherwise he's drowning in his properties. bubbles are not new and tonight's program began with a brief history of the first modern bubble, the dutch tulip frenzy that burst in 1637 and devastated the dutch economy. as for our own bubble that burst in 2008 it would seem by most accounts that we got very close to utter ruin. the tragedies could've been wide and deep.

nova ended the program asking that maybe bubbles are woven into the fabric of our market economies. would that make them inevitable? i recall that the late polish poet zbigniew herbert published an essay on holland's tulip mania. herbert approached the subject as a forensic psychologist interested in the mechanisms of folly, greed and our singular striving for happiness. i'll let herbert have the last word.

Tulipmania -- the most extraordinary botanical folly we know -- was an episode inscribed on the margin of Great History. We have chosen it not without reason. It should be honestly confessed: we have a strange liking for presenting follies in the sanctuaries of reason, and we also like to study catastrophes against a gentle landscape. There are reasons more important than frivolous personal and aesthetic inclinations, however, For doesn't the affair we have described remind us of other, more dangerous follies of humanity that consist in the irrational attachment to a single idea, a single symbol, or a single formula for happiness?
This is why we cannot put a period after the date 1637 and consider the matter definitively closed. It is not reasonable to erase it from memory, or count it among the inconceivable fads of the past. If tulipmania was a kind of psychological epidemic, and this is what we believe, the probability exists -- bordering on certainty -- that one day it will afflict us again in this or another form.

['The Bitter Smell of Tulips' Still Life with a Bridle; ecco press, 1991. translated by john and bogdana carpenter]

5 Comments:

At 8:22 AM, Blogger John B-R said...

Good post. I'm gonna be marketing a fund which will be selling the "rational" side of humans. Between us, I'm going to short it, as they say, i.e. bet my own money against the fund making any money (bet on the "fucking nuts" side). But I won't tell my suckers, I mean my clients. Wanna join in? Like your guy in the coffee shop, We'll be rich!

 
At 2:18 PM, Blogger Jim K. said...

Psych. is a killer...cash
is not thought of rationally..

The opportunities for
stampeding people into losing
their pants through panic
make an already unstable system
ripe for rigging. That's the
investment side. On the ownership
side, there's that desperation to
pay off that leads to corruption
and lobbying. I think real
Capitalism doesn't get a chance to
complete the 'covenant' with
competition until anti-competitive
practices get more decent laws.

 
At 2:20 PM, Blogger Jim K. said...

I remember the silver craze
in 80-81. That was a real modern-day
tulip deal! Lately they've been
pushing gold, but there isn't
enough to matter in the big pic.
anymore.

 
At 10:34 PM, Blogger richard lopez said...

john: as the sage said, there's a sucker born every minute. now let's incoporate!

jim: agreed that there should be tighter regulation on the markets. what i've noticed about the gold market is only the commercials on tv to sell scrap gold to some outfits that will send you a check for old jewelry and the like. those ads i think capitalize on individuals who are looking for an instant wad of cash. the idea of gold, or any thing for that matter, having an instrinsic value is rather suspect in my mind since things are worth only what people are willing to pay. that gold will remain always valuable because it is, um, gold is not the basis for the most sound investments. gold loses value not because it becomes less shiny but because people don't want to pay certain prices for it, hence, no matter what its physical beauty might be, gold, and any other item or idea or whatever we might want to put in place of gold, just ain't worth that much. what gets me about economics is that it is often treated and portrayed as a science when really it is a system of theories held together by hope, wishful thinking, hubris and even well-meaning but propped by mathematical proofs that makes it seem market forces are inviolable and hence forces of nature to be reckoned with rather than realizing the markets are creations of our own collective minds.

 
At 8:33 PM, Blogger Jim K. said...

A real deflation hazard, maybe.
Nobody's got pocket money..
..gold is pretty useless then.
Super-inflation? Maybe gold then,
but maybe just another bubble
so you get burned..
It's dicey.

There's bubbles because there
isn't real money growing..sadly.
I watched the Moon landing, I watched "2001". Where is this
future? In the past, friends.

 

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