Back from Vacation

After a rather delightful sojourn to see friends and family in London, and then on to a couple of Greek Islands (including the one of Chios, where we got to enjoy a friend’s traditional Greek wedding), OM and Mrs. OM are back from their summer vacation. 

It goes without saying that we arrived back (on Friday 27th August) just in time to see the portfolio’s worst daily performance since inception (-1.35%) as a combination of a good GDP downgrade (!) and a Bernanke speech helped buoy the markets and setback the grinding lower of Treasury yields.  While not a vast amount happened in terms of price action while we were away (equities were mildly lower and even with Friday’s widening, Treasury yields had compressed marginally) it does seem that the incremental macro data points that have been coming out are slightly more negative.  With the month having just ended, I’ll save more information on performance until the monthly review.

However, since I’ve spent much of the last few days catching up on reading (via my Google Reader) here are some of the interesting stories that caught my attention:

- Japan and the Ancient Art of Shrugging: Some thoughts on Japan’s lost decade(s) impact on the younger generations (Norihiro Kato, NY Times)

- Bernanke’s Blind Spot: My favourite economist’s critique of the Fed Chairman’s Friday statement (Steve Keen, Business Spectator)

- Friedrich Hayek’s Nobel Prize Lecture in 1974: it shows a prescient understanding of his profession’s failings. (Friedrich August von Hayek, Nobel Prize Website)

- The Magic of Procrastination: A Behavioural Finance Professor’s way of solving the behavioural biases/issues regarding when students’ do the work they have to turn in.  (Dan Ariely, his blog!)

- Roads Gone Wild: About Hans Monderman, who’s leading the charge to turning 80-years of traffic engineering on its head and taking advantage of behavioural biases in doing so (Tom McNnichol, Wired)

- On the Shoulders of Giants: Could Spain, if it embraces structural reform, be the next Germany? (Edward Hugh, Credit Writedowns)