Back in 2010, at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, a shareholder challenged Warren Buffett. Noting that shares of motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson had nearly tripled over the prior year, he asked Buffett why he had chosen to buy the company’s bonds rather than its stock. Buffett’s reply was a [...]
Productive bubbles
In an interview a little while back, the technology investor Peter Thiel drew an uncomfortable comparison. Today’s frenzy around artificial intelligence, he said, parallels the tech stock bubble of the 1990s. To illustrate his point, Thiel pointed to Amazon. By any measure, it’s been an [...]
Lessons from Lehman
Before its collapse in 2008, Lehman Brothers had been one of the most prominent investment firms in the United States. But after 158 years in business, what caused it to fail so suddenly? In a word: complexity. Lehman had been involved in the securitization of mortgages, a process that resulted in [...]
The value of the VIX
Listen to the financial news, and you’ll often hear reference to “the VIX.” But what exactly is the VIX, and how important is it? The VIX index is intended to be a measure of investor sentiment. For that reason, it’s often referred to as the market’s “fear gauge.” How can investor sentiment be [...]
Art Heist
One spring day in 2022, an elderly woman entered Paris’s Picasso Museum to see a new exhibit. Among the items on display was a decorative blue jacket, which was positioned on a wall next to a portrait of Picasso. The woman liked the look of the jacket so she took it down from its hook, put it in [...]
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