Gregory Curtis is the founder and Chairman of Greycourt & Co., Inc., a wealth management firm. He is the author of three investment books, including his most recent, Family Capital. He can be reached at gcurtis@greycourt.com. Please note that this post is intended to provide interested persons with an insight on the capital markets and is not intended to promote any manager or firm, nor does it intend to advertise their performance. All opinions expressed are those of Gregory Curtis and do not necessarily represent the views of Greycourt & Co., Inc., the wealth management firm with which he is associated. The information in this report is not intended to address the needs of any particular investor.
It was a Good Idea in Theory…
Back in 1986 I launched a wealth management firm I conceitedly called “Greycourt”—it’s an anagram for my name. The firm met with modest success and in 1988 I incorporated it. I was probably the most hopeless, bumbling entrepreneur in the history of private enterprise, but somehow I’ve been with Greycourt for 31 years. For the …
Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part XI
As far as reigning in annoying experts is concerned, Congress and the judiciary are a bust, albeit with a few tiny bright spots on the distant horizon, twinkling away like dying lighthouses on a storm-tossed sea. But what about the Presidency? As noted earlier in this series, Donald Trump was the candidate of people who …
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When Experts Judge the Experts
In my last post we examined the (pathetic) attempts of Congress to control the tyranny of the experts. Fortunately, Congress isn’t the only weapon in the battle against expert oppression, even at the Federal level. Let’s take a look at the judiciary. But before we do, let’s pause to savor the delicious irony of what …
Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part IX
“The complexity of modern life has steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and comprehendingly perform for himself…When he sits down to breakfast and looks at his morning paper, he reads about a whole range of vital and intricate issues and acknowledges…that he has not acquired the competence to judge most of …
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Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part VIII
Freedom is better, even when it’s worse. We might think about experts the way we think about stop signs (bear with me on this…) To understand the expert-stop sign analogy let’s begin with Arthur C. Brooks, who has written (in “Foreign Affairs” and elsewhere) about what he calls “the dignity deficit,” which he believes cost Mrs. Clinton …
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Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part VII
Viewed through the lens of “the tyranny of the experts,” it’s easy to see that in the last election Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the experts, while Donald Trump was the candidate of people who were tired of being tyrannized by them. Clinton is an expert herself—she’s a lawyer who practiced with The Rose …
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Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part VI
Populism is an unsettling phenomenon in part because we don’t know where it will end. And we don’t know where it will end because populism isn’t itself a governing idea—it’s a response to the perceived failure of other governing ideas. On the other hand, looking back through history we can notice—as a matter of observation, …
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Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part V
If we wanted to—well, we do want to—we could go back 2,500 years and identify the exact point when human civilization went off the rails on the subject of experts. It’s 399 B.C. and a fellow named Socrates is languishing in an Athenian prison, awaiting execution. He’s been convicted (albeit by a narrow vote of the citizens …
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Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part IV
Not that long ago—say, when my parents were starting out in married life—building a sound investment portfolio was a piece of cake. You bought some Blue Chip stocks and some Triple A bonds and you were done. And even having to worry about building a portfolio was a very rare experience. The vast majority of …
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Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part III
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. (Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, identifying the first step in building a better society) When I was growing up, my family not only never consulted a lawyer, I never laid eyes on one. Lawyers were completely irrelevant to the lives of almost everyone. Then, suddenly, I was …
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Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts, Part II
I launched this series of posts by taking a brief tour of a regrettable society called Acirema, in which a race of experts called Masters, though a tiny minority, lorded it over a sub-race of non-experts called Slaves. We’re back, now, in America and wondering if Acerima society might offer a moral for us. Not …
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Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts
Is it better never to put your ideas in writing and thus be thought a vacuous fool, or is it better to launch your own blog and remove all doubt? To launch this series of posts with such a mouthful of a title—Democracy, Populism, and the Tyranny of the Experts (hereinafter DP&TE)—we’re going to engage in one …
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Cash is King
Since the end of the Financial Crisis eight long years ago, a notion has settled across the land that “cash is trash.” This is the bunkmate of the “TINA” principle: There Is No Alternative to owning equities. It’s easy to understand how these ideas took root. Since the Bear Market ended in early 2009 stocks …
Explaining Donald Trump, the Conclusion
I have met the enemy, and he is me. (What Trump, channeling Pogo, should be saying to himself every morning.) Can Trump turn it around? No one knows, of course, but if my only slightly tongue-in-cheek analysis is correct, the best hope for Trump is that his dismal experience to date will prove to be a …
Explaining Donald Trump, Part V
Donald Trump has been such a disruptive agent during his first few months as President that it’s easy to dismiss him as hopelessly incompetent. That would be a mistake: one common way MEPs (mega-entrepreneurial personalities) prevail is because other people write them off as unhinged lunatics. I’ll get to the lunatic aspect of our MEP …
Explaining Donald Trump, Part IV
There is so much emotionalism about Donald Trump—both pro and con—that I’m trying to explain his behavior by looking at issues outside the man himself. I’m looking at how people behave who have very similar personality types (i. e., mega entrepreneurial personalities, or MEPs) and at how people are likely to fare in the Presidency …
Explaining Donald Trump, Part III
I’m claiming to be able to explain Donald Trump—and predict his actions as President—by reference to only two of his characteristics. The first is that he’s what I’ve called a Mega Entrepreneurial Personality, a trait he shares with an infinitesimally small group of Americans. The second trait is something Trump shares with almost all of …
Explaining Donald Trump, Part II
I’m determined to explain Donald Trump by referring to merely two of his traits, the first of which I’ve dubbed the Mega Entrepreneurial Personality, or MEP. Here are a few more examples of MEP characteristics we’ll need to consider as we try to understand the 45th President of the United States: MEPs are utterly fearless, not …
Explaining Donald Trump
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then explaining about Trump is like sneezing about hermeneutics. I believe it to be the general opinion across the land that anyone who thinks he can explain Donald Trump has probably just escaped from an Institution for the Criminally Insane. From where I sit it appears …
Capital Preservation Paul, Part VII
Well, the best-laid plans…I’d intended to interview the contestants in our little investment contest to get their take on the markets and on how well or badly they, personally, had navigated the various challenges those markets had offered. I was especially interested in what, if anything, the contestants had learned. But I was mainly thwarted. …
Capital Preservation Paul, Part VI
Bull Markets and Bear Markets are such momentous events that they tend to fixate investor attention to the exclusion of more important matters. Most people, for example, would define a “market cycle” with reference to Bulls and Bears. Typically, investors might view a market cycle as extending from the peak of a Bull to the …
Capital Preservation Paul, Part V
So far in our increasingly exciting investment contest, it’s been a positive experience all around. For the first three years the capital markets rose relentlessly: a modestly positive first year followed by two terrific Bull Market years. But things are about to change. Now, in Year 4 of our contest, the good times seem like …