Europe is a Continent, Not a Body Politic

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 24, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments News over the last week coupled with European handling of its debt crisis last year has highlighted that Europe is merely a continent, and not a body politic.  The EU was created by the French in the 1960s to be a countervailing weight to the heft of the United States.  It rested on the assumption that all of the nations of Europe would rally around the same existential need that the French...
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Investors Should Use Analogies With Caution

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 23, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments One of the common ways that investors make sense of events charged with chaos, such as the 2011 Middle Eastern crisis and Japanese crisis, is through analogy.  We compare a current event to a past event where we feel that we have a good grasp of the facts that served as causes for that past event. The problem with this kind of thinking is that we will only understand current chaotic events to...
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Initial Estimate of Japanese Quake Toll

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 23, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments This morning the Japanese government announced its initial estimate of the toll of the earthquake that struck almost two weeks ago.  At this point the maximum damage estimate is put at $309 billion (¥25 trillion).   Analysis: Per person in Japan the above estimate is $2,422, using their population of 127,560,000 in 2009 (source: www.google.com/publicdata). Japan had total gross domestic...
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Evidence of Social Strain in China

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 23, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments Yesterday the Chinese government in Beijing banned outdoor advertising (like billboards) that promotes, “hedonism, lavishness and the worship of foreign things.”  The ban also prevents ads that are considered vulgar and that encourage an aristocratic lifestyle. While on the surface this law appears to be about the wealthy, it is not.  Instead this law is about the widening gap...
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Two Year Anniversary of Market Low Call

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 22, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments Two years ago on March 12, 2009 I publicly called the March 9, 2009 U.S. financial market low.  I have wanted to update the performance of the financial markets over that two year period.  However, with the crises of the Middle East and Japan running rampant it seemed crass to publish such a post.   In that post, entitled “Bottomed Out?,” I said:   “So does this rally...
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Yemen is Nearing Civil War

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 21, 2011 in Blog | 2 comments Yemen’s conflict  has largely fallen along the Muslim sectarian divide between Sunni and Shiite.  The forces, mostly armed police, loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh have clashed with the citizenry of Yemen all while the forces of the army looked on.  However, in the last day as Brigadier General Ali Moshen Al- Ahmar of the Yemeni army announced that he has joined the revolution on the...
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An Important Anecdotal Sign of Crises Ends

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 20, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments As an investor, how do you know when a crisis is nearing an end?  When the trajectory of news stories switches from reporting and reacting to every new piece of information into reflection and review of the beginnings and causes of the crisis.   Take for example the Japanese nuclear crisis that has been the central focus of the First World’s attention for the past week.  Yesterday...
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