Bill Bonner: "investment markets reward virtue and punish sin"

We are, frankly, in far too much awe of the world, and too deeply entertained by it, to think that we can understand it today or foretell tomorrow.  Life's most attractive components - love and money - are far too complex for reliable soothsaying.  Still, we can't resist taking a guess.

We may not know how the world works, but we are immodest enough to think we can know how it does not work.  The stock market is not, for example, a simple mechanism like an ATM machine, where you merely tap in the right numbers to get cash out when you need it.  Instead, the investment markets - like life itself - are always complicated, often perverse, and occasionally absurd.  But that does not mean that they are completely random; though unexpected, life's surprises may not always be undeserved.  Delusions have consequences.  And, sooner or later, the reckoning day comes and the bills must be paid.

In this sense, the investment markets are not mechanistic at all, but judgmental.  As we will see, they reward virtue and punish sin.

~ Bill Bonner, Financial Reckoning Day (2006), p. 2