The economics of Santa Claus’s Christmas operation is perhaps the most ambitious logistics problem ever conceived. Each December, a vast global enterprise mobilises to deliver gifts to hundreds of millions of children, perfectly timed for the night of the 24th and the morning of the 25th. Behind the folklore lies an implicit economic system of remarkable efficiency, balancing production, inventory, transport, and distribution in a single night. If one treats Santa’s workshop not as magic but as a model economy, it becomes a fascinating exercise in applied economics—an improbable, but internally consistent, operation that obeys the logic of scale, incentives, and coordination.
Read MoreIt’s been quite a year. I am inclined to say that next year can’t be worse, but that would probably jinx it. Also, for owners of financial assets, 2020 has been a great year, even if the economy, and event the fabrics of society, have been stretched to a breaking point. The main question for 2021 is whether this imbalance can continue? I’ll continue to investigate that question on the blog in the new year. I also hope to be able to do some more videos and podcasts.
Apart from that, all that is left for me is to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I am very grateful for the attention you afford this little corner of the internet. I know time is a scarce resource, and the content I share is guided by that consideration. I also wish a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to my fellow narrative-warriors and collaborators on Twitter.
Read MoreAnother year almost gone, and in this case a decade too. 2019 has been a great run for anyone with even random exposure to financial assets, and in my next few posts I’ll try to map out what I think will be the main themes for 2020. I will also update the portfolio page, and discuss what went right and what went wrong on that front in 2019. It’s been a good year overall—how couldn’t it have been?—with a few costly mistakes, as per usual. I have also recently updated my writer’s page, effectively internalising that part of my work fully on this site. Go have a look! In time, I will incorporate some of my non-fiction work on this platform too. I have plenty of ideas and projects rattling around in my head, though precious little time to finish them, which is just about as good as you get it as a writer, I guess. The Podcast and Video platforms will continue too, but I am yet figure out exactly how to leverage these in a way that makes sense.
Apart from that, all that is left for me is to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. They say that blogs are dying, but I don’t buy it. In any case, I’ll keep writing, and listening, because that is what I do. On that note, I also wish a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to my fellow narrative-warriors and collaborators on Twitter. The quality of conversation on that platform ranges from being counterproductive, stupid, and vicious to being indispensable for my work and thinking. Luckily, the latter characteristic still dominates, for now.
See you in 2020.
Read MoreIf you just want my views on the increasingly unruly price action in the equity market, scroll down to the bottom of this post, and you will find the link to the PDF. Now that I have your attention, though, allow me to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thanks for reading, and for the comments you throw my way on email, on Twitter or over at Seeking Alpha. I am very grateful for this interaction. This has been a good year for me in terms of keeping a steady output here, a tempo I hope to keep up next year. That said, I am, as ever, struggling with too many ideas and too little time. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I managed to finish one short story in 2018—it will be published soon—which took much longer than it ought to. The main issue is that I have also been working on a novel, which I am now determined to finish before starting any new fiction-projects. I also hope to do more podcasts next year, about other topics than economics and finance, though I must confess that the state of debate about the issues that I want to discuss is in such a dire state that I don’t know where to begin. People don’t seem to be having proper conversations about important issues anymore, though some are if you care to go beyond the beaten track. Instead, they seem to be engaged in a race to the bottom of mutually assured destruction. In any case, this is a discussion for another day.
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