August 26th, 2022: Poetry and financial commentators

Foreword

This is a quick note, which tends to be just off the cuff thoughts/ideas that look at current market situations, and to try to encourage some discussions.

So Powell spoke to the world today from Jackson Hole, Wyoming…

As usual, a reminder that I am not a financial professional by training — I am a software engineer by training, and by trade. The following is based on my personal understanding, which is gained through self-study and working in finance for a few years.

If you find anything that you feel is incorrect, please feel free to leave a comment, and discuss your thoughts.

English Literature

I used to take English Literature in middle school.  I was horrible at it — I don’t believe I’ve ever passed a single English Literature test or exam other than by being bell-curved(1).

So take this with a grain of salt.

It is my firm belief that poets intentionally write in obtuse manners, so that they can seem to be smarter than they really are.  For example, if you write “I’ll snap that legal aid’s fountain pen”, it’ll seem kind of odd, violent and petty, but if you write “I’ll mar the young clerk’s pen”, suddenly it seems like you are being all metaphorical and smart.

Finance

In that sense, poets and financial commentators are the same.  “Good” financial commentators are rarely clear and concise, because then you can be “wrong”, and “wrong” is very much the antithesis of “good”.

But if you say a bit of mumble jumble, and talk about how “we’ll continue until the job is done”, but “at some point, it’ll be time to pause/stop”, then you can’t really be “wrong”.

Poetry.

Footnotes

1. In my school, there is the notion that exams can be set too hard or too easy, thus unfairly biasing the scores of the current batch of students. So once all the scores from every student is computed, a statistical model is applied to everyone’s scores so that the overall distribution of adjusted scores sort of resembles a normal curve, and pass/fail is then defined as some percentile into that new adjusted score.