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Links

Bill Gates: Ebola, Beyond the Headlines (LINK)

FRMO Corporation Annual Meeting of Shareholders Transcript [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Peter Thiel Speech At Stanford (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Related book: Zero to One

Jason Zweig: Look Who’s ‘Trading’ Commodities (LINK)

In the government’s bid to crack down on risky trading, charities and other nonprofit organizations may become collateral damage. That is causing alarm in the nonprofit world and should be a concern for donors.

Black Wednesday - a documentary about the crash of the pound sterling in 1992 (video) [H/T Cook & Bynum] (LINK)

Barron's interviews Bill Gross (LINK)

Barry Ritholtz interviews Jack Schwager (LINK)

Related books, HERE

Marc Andreessen on the latest a16z podcast (LINK) [He also recommended 2 books on this podcast: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy which he called maybe the best book on the theory of venture capital; and Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East.]

PHILOSOPHICAL ECONOMICS: Free Banking on a Bitcoin Standard–The State Prepares its Death Blow (LINK)

Brian Arthur is coming out with a new book at the end of the month: Complexity and the Economy

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Dancing Without a Floor (LINK)

A final note: There is a danger in ignoring the concerns of value-conscious investors as a bubble proceeds. The danger is that the longer these concerns are “proven wrong” by further advances, the more severely they are likely to be proven correct by an even deeper loss over the completion of the cycle. Roger Babson offers a useful lesson in that regard. Babson, whose first rule of investing was to “keep speculation and investments separate,” is known not only for founding Babson College in Massachusetts, but also for a speech at the National Business Conference on September 5, 1929, at the peak of the market, saying “sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.”

The back-story, however, is that Babson’s presentation began as follows: “I’m about to repeat what I said at this time last year, and the year before…” The fact is that Babson had been “proven wrong” by an advance that had taken stocks relentlessly higher during the preceding years. Over the next 10 weeks, all of those market gains would be erased. From the low of the 1929 plunge, the stock market would then lose an additional 75% of its value by its eventual bottom in 1932 because of add-on policy errors that resulted in the Great Depression. As a side note, those policy errors were not that banks were allowed to fail, but that policy makers allowed them to fail in a disorganized way, forcing loans to be called in rather than taking banks into receivership and restructuring existing debt. It's a distinction our own policy makers still haven't learned, and simply obscured and papered over in the 2008-2009 crisis through distortionary monetary policy, bailouts, and FASB accounting changes. As a consequence, the debt overhang is still very much intact, as the Center for Economic Policy Research recently warned in its 16th annual Geneva Report. But that's now a problem for another day.

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Yuval Harari on EconTalk (LINK) Related book: Sapiens: A Brief History of HumankindWhy Americans Don’t Trust the Fed - by Roger Lowenstein (LINK) Related book (comes out tomorrow): America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal...

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Seth Klarman’s Presentation To Bruce Greenwald’s 2010 CBS Class (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK) Tren Griffin joins the a16z Podcast to talk about his book on Charlie Munger (LINK) Related link: A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Charlie Munger...

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Barry Ritholtz talks with Howard Marks (LINK) Related book: The Most Important ThingLet’s Be Honest About Gold: It’s a Pet Rock - by Jason Zweig (LINK) Bill Miller: NYSE Trading Halt Symptomatic of Broader Problem (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)...

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Justice, capitalism and progress: Paul Tudor Jones II at TED2015 [H/T Santangel's Review] (LINK) [The video of the speech isn't on TED yet, but appears to be posted HERE.] Soros Says Greece Now Lose-Lose Game After Being Mishandled (video)...

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Bill Gross' latest Investment Outlook: Goodnight Vietnam (LINK) Robert Shiller on CNBC (LINK) John Hempton on CNBC (LINK) Hempton also recently re-recommended the book Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate SuicideLosing...

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