2/ "During the Great Inflation era (1965-1982), inflation annualized at 6.5%. While comparisons to our current situation are tempting, the structure of the global economy and monetary, fiscal, energy, and labor policies are dramatically different."
3/ "Inflation is a ‘tax’ on revenues, not profits.
"High taxes in high-inflation regimes can push the effective tax rate above 100%, leading corporations to rack up expenses to reduce pre-tax profits.
"Current corporate tax rates should not exacerbate inflationary forces."
4/ "Although money supply has grown at a similar rate as in the ‘Great Inflation’, velocity has remained sluggish, mitigating the risk of an inflationary spike.
"The system is awash with unused liquidity.
"The U.S. is now a net exporter of energy & more protected from shocks."
5/ "As inflation climbs, equity returns fall. This often stems from multiple compression. During the Great Inflation, the S&P 500 P/E ratio shrank from 20x in 1965 to 10x in 1982 as investors required greater returns for the risk of allocating to equities when inflation raged."
6/ "In the highest-inflation decile, the equity market generally delivered negative real returns. Factors may serve as a hedge within equity portfolios in those runaway inflation environments."
1/ A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind (Killingsworth, Gilbert)
"A human mind is a wandering mind; a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not presently happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost." wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/KILLINGSW…
2/ " “Stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode and allows people to learn, reason, and plan.
"Unfortunately, collecting real-time reports as people go about their daily lives is cumbersome and expensive.
3/ "Such experience sampling has rarely been used to investigate the relationship between mind wandering and happiness and has always been limited to very small samples.
"We solved this problem by developing aWeb application for the iPhone that contacts people at random moments.
1/ Modern Endowment Story: A Ubiquitous United States Equity Factor (Ennis)
"Endowments' overwhelming exposure to the U.S. equity market over the most recent 5–7 years raises important questions regarding risk tolerance and diversification."
2/ Over the most recent six years, the NACUBO equal-weighted composite of large endowments has had a beta to the benchmark of 1.0 and R² of .998. This is a dazzlingly tight fit, considering that the independent variables are restricted to fully investable, broad market indexes."
3/ "The U.S. equity market risk premium is embedded in the principal asset classes that endowments employ. (I make no attempt to adjust for the return smoothing characteristic of private markets. The correlations and betas would no doubt be greater if I had done so.)"
1/ Putting a price tag on friends, relatives, and neighbours (Powdthavee)
"Using the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase in the level of social involvements is worth up to an extra £85,000 a year in terms of life satisfaction."
2/ "While there is substantial evidence that people with strong social ties tend to report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction, this article will be one of the first to compare this impact to the impacts other occurrences in our lives."
3/ "Think of a person who derives satisfaction from spending time with friends and also enjoys money. In principle, it is be possible to calculate exactly how the time spent with friends is worth in terms of income: a valuation for social relationships."
2/ "Aerosol transmission has been demonstrated or is considered likely for SARS-CoV, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), H1N1, & respiratory syncytial virus. A growing body of laboratory, animal, & clinical evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 is also spread via this mechanism."
3/ "Most studies evaluating as-worn efficacy compare the number of particles collected inside/outside a mannequin head’s mask. Under these conditions, cloth masks have highly variable filtration qualities.
"Surgical masks outperform cloth masks but still have variable results."
2/ "He often bet that a spread—say, between a futures contract and the underlying bond, or between two bonds—would converge.
"Occasionally, other investors might get scared and withdraw, causing spreads to widen further and causing Meriwether to lose money, at least temporarily.
3/ "But if he had the capital to stay the course, he’d be rewarded in the long run, or so his experience seemed to prove. Eventually, spreads always came in; that was the lesson he had learned from the Eckstein affair, and it was a lesson he would count on, years later, at LTCM.
1/ COVID-19 Vaccination in Children and University Students (Ioannidis)
"Given the extremely low rates of COVID-19 fatalities and of vaccine fatalities in children and adults under the age of 29, nonfatal outcomes matter a lot in decision-making."
2/ "773 U.S. college campuses as of August 24, 2021 have issued vaccination requirements for at least some students or employees, but details, target groups and stringency of rules vary remarkably.
"European universities generally encourage vaccination without mandating it."
3/ "Young people can be major drivers of active epidemic waves (in terms of their share in numbers of documented cases). However, opposite arguments also exist, e.g. that vaccinating the youngest age strata may shift infection to higher ages with higher case fatality."