American Consequences

Author - Erica Wood

April 2018

Wall Street on the Big Screen

Finance is the great neglected subject of American art. Among the enduring American writers, only Theodore Dreiser took up the serious study of the “Lord of Finance” as a central figure in the national story. His extraordinary novels The Financier...

April 2018

Greed and Fear

Smile When You Say That, Partner By P.J. O’Rourke Markets are ruled by greed and fear. Or so they say. For example, Warren Buffett famously declared, “Two super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment...

April 2018

Ups & Downs of Volatility

In financial markets, the connotation of the word “volatility” changes depending on where you’re hanging out. If you’re at a midtown Manhattan happy hour on a Thursday firing back a third scotch on the rocks – volatility sounds like a great thing...

April 2018

What Will Trigger the Next Crash

If you’re an investor, the kind of move that should worry you isn’t a correction like we saw in February. The S&P 500 Index’s 10% pullback was the fastest such correction ever, according to Ryan Detrick of LPL Financial Research. And the Dow Jones...

April 2018

Random Walk

There are lots of theories about stock market prices. My favorite is the “random walk hypothesis.” The idea behind random walk is that the stock market is efficient. The price of a stock reflects everything that’s known about the stock. Thus, at any...