Jason Apollo Voss | Best of the Blog

An Overview of Alternatives to Credit Ratings

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 14, 2012 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Currently there is almost no “income” in fixed-income investing. In preceding decades interest rates took on the job of compensating investors for the credit risks they bear. But with no cash to compensate risks, analytical scrutiny of issuer creditworthiness has dramatically increased. Yet this scrutiny is happening in a kind of analytical vacuum as confidence in credit-rating agencies is near...
read more

Change in China Hidden by Subtle Policy Shifts

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 6, 2012 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Last week, the World Bank and the Development Research Center of the State Council, an official Chinese think tank, jointly released “China 2030,” a new paper calling for sweeping economic reforms aimed at preventing China’s growth from stalling. Perhaps most significantly, the report calls for China to dramatically reduce the role of the state in its economy. Many China watchers believe the...
read more

Losing Money to Preserve Capitalism: Can We Afford to Continue Bailouts? (Part 1)

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 9, 2012 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Modern capitalists take as gospel truth that capital losses serve as a signal to exit a market. Ideas or businesses that fail to compete in the market are abandoned in favor of those that can compete. In this way, not only is capital preserved, but also capitalism. This line of thinking is so familiar to market economics that it is easy to forget that it, like any idea, has to first be imagined,...
read more

Lie Detection: How Can Financial Analysts Improve Their Ability to Discern the Truth?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Dec 21, 2011 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments In the finance profession the ability to suss out the truth is of critical importance. From analysts needing to assess the veracity of statements by corporate management to private wealth managers needing to understand their clients’ actual financial motives, the ability to tell fact from fiction is highly prized. In “Why Do Lie-Catchers Fail: A Lens Model Meta-Analysis of Human Lie Judgments,”...
read more

Equity Risk Premium Drill Down Indicates Bizarre Investor Behavior

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 11, 2011 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 4 comments Earlier this week in my post entitled, “Adjusting the Scale of the Selloff to Demonstrate Its Absurdity,” I spent quite a lot of time talking about this thing called the “equity risk premium” and some of the interesting data I had calculated based on this measure. Today I wanted to drill down into that equity risk premium data because it indicates some bizarre...
read more

Who Is More Responsible for the U.S. Debt?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 28, 2011 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 2 comments For today’s post I wanted to review the evidence for that oft talked about issue: who is more responsible for the U.S. debt? If you ask a Republican it is “tax and spend” liberals that are responsible for the bulk of the U.S. government debt. But if you talk with Democrats they ardently disagree. So who is right? Well, like all things, it turns out that there are lots...
read more

Do Tax Increases Negatively Affect the Economy?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 27, 2011 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 2 comments Continuing on with an examination of the U.S. debt crisis, let’s look at another oft talked about issue: that raising taxes leads to a decrease in gross domestic product (GDP). As I said yesterday, feel free to download the What My Intuition Tells Me Now U.S. Budgetary Data spreadsheet to see my sources and calculations. Does Raising Taxes Stifle Economic Growth? I cannot emphasize...
read more