Christine Lagarde: eurozone can avoid recession (2022)

We are not in a panic mode. 

~ ECB President Christine Lagarde, interview from Davos, May 24, 2022

Tacitus on laws and corruption

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. 

~ Tacitus, historian

Bruce Kasman: "We don't see a near-term recession" (2022)

We don't see a near-term recession.  We see a global economy which actually does okay in the second half of the year with the U.S. slowing and the rest of the world dong somewhat better.

~ Bruce Kasman, JPMorgan's chief economist and head of global economic research, Bloomberg TV, June 6, 2022

Tren Griffin on Charlie Munger's multi-model approach

In Munger's view, it is better to be worldly wise than to spend time working with a single model that is precisely wrong.   A multiple-model approach that is only approximately right will produce a far better outcome in anything that involves people or a social system.

~ Tren Griffin, senior director of strategy at Microsoft

Peter Atwater on the parallel peak in stock and bond prices

What I think is underway, though, is a real reversal in sentiment that didn't begin this year, but began almost 18 months ago when you saw Gamestop and SPAC mania accompanied by record volumes of negative yielding interest rate bonds.  So you had this parallel peak in stock prices and in bond prices.  And that is an unprecedented moment in the markets.  We 've never seen this kind of coincidence before.  And so what I don't think investors quite appreciate is we're having an unwinding in both fixed income and equities simultaneous here and there's not going to be any place to hide in that.

~ Peter Atwater, interview with Stephanie Pomboy, Wealthion, 10:50 mark

Nicolas Carr on information overload

We're surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.

~ Nicolas G. Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Michael Rectenwald on the Davos confab

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos is perhaps the world’s most unpopular conference, and the WEF’s founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, one of the world’s most despised figures. Often compared to “Dr. Evil,” the character Mike Meyers played in the Austin Powers series, and routinely likened to a James Bond supervillain on the internet, Schwab is seen as a messianic megalomaniac leading a nefarious cabal of world leaders and corporate heads into a future dominated by a globalist elite. 

A Twitter poll by TruthBoost asks, “Does the World Economic Forum make the world a better place?” As of this writing, 98.4 percent of respondents said no.

What is it about this confab and its leaders that makes the WEF and its meetings so despised? After all, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world,” or so says its slogan. As it turns out, most people don’t like having a group of unelected, self-appointed dictators issuing top-down decrees and recommending policies that restrict their freedom and infringe their rights.

~ Michael Rectenwald, "Davos Man Is at It Again: The 2022 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum," Mises.org, May 31, 2022