Author: M.Rivera

Value investor. Prodigious reader. Works and studies in the trenches of finance. Looking for and listening to fellow observers. Thanks for dropping by and reading, please contribute to the conversation so we all develop positively and efficiently.
Commentary, General

Still Rock and Roll to me

I’ve already mentioned in my prior post “The Greatest Recession” the importance of Richard Koo’s work on the balance sheet recession. Indeed, we are lucky to have this guide as we recognize the consequence, significance, and inevitable results of putting our fiscal laxity into hyperdrive. This post is not intended to harbinger gloom and pessimism, the world will continue regardless, but these are obvious vulnerabilities that did not have to metastasize – and they ought […]

Reviews

Too Soon?

“What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?” – Mikhail Bulgakov Comedic relief, applied to history, can be the blending of the absolutely horrific with the first hand accounts of survivors. It is “One day we’ll look back on this and laugh.”, fleshed-out. In the case of Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin it is, “One day others will look back on this […]

Reviews

Network of Care

As a reader I tend to stick with nonfiction, history, periodicals and well, Twitter. However, I’m not one to turn down the offer of a book club, even if the material is exclusively of the self-help/professional development variety. And so, ever so slightly outside of my reading comfort zone is how I ran into “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazi. The book purports to instruct the reader in exactly what the title implies, to be […]

Commentary, General

That’s Just The Way It Is

“If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.” – Julius Caesar. Fellow Americans, global citizens, rent seekers, and producers, I’m sorry to report we’ve crossed the Rubicon. In the 2,069 years since the apocryphal crossing (significant for Occidental readers), the only difference in the seizure of power are the increasingly sheepish ways with which it is done. The original occasion was as terrifying as it was […]

Commentary, General

What Dreams Central Planners Dream

Consider the following. ‘The medium exchange, for the whole history of human commercial relationships, is defined and valued based on the scarcity of the item exchanged and the ensuing negotiation on trading ownership for some other item of scarcity. We are living in a bubble, where our commercial relationships are defined by a medium of exchange that is detached from a store of value. In our times, a tenuous attachment to value is made, when […]

Commentary, General

On Workism

The introduction to Ben Carlson’s article “Why Are People Miserable At Work” is the perfect illustration in our times for how and why work is examined with religious devotion. Even the language that generally accompanies the inquiry, “What do you do for work?”, is optimistically suggestive, “what’s your passion”, “your drive”, “accomplishments”, “what do you earn“. There is so much we assume about vocations and the efforts we engage them with, our language seems to […]

Stock Analysis

In Defense of Cameras

The Underdog Keeps Barking If you were to search news on $Snap roughly six months after it’s IPO, you would see headlines like the one I got at the top of my results today: Snapchat is in the middle of an Identity Crisis. Snapchat is beleaguered in an arena of misapplied comparisons. Alongside the article above, you’ll find a headline advising that Snap cannot keep up with its brothers, Facebook (Instagram) and Twitter. These narratives: […]

General

The Greatest Recession

The greatest recession, according to many of the smartest guys in the room, could also be the most boring. Words like collapse, crash, flashing signals, are the usual adjectives we use to describe the abnormal. However, the decline of the credit cycle has a new look, and like most trends in the techno-age, it emerged in Japan first. The private sector began paying down debt after the debt-financed asset bubble collapsed, leaving only debt in […]