The Part-Time Investor

The Russians are about to start buying Australian Dollars. According to Russia's most senior central bankers, Alexie Ulyukayev. He said everything was ready, accounts are open, agreements are signed and the buying could begin at the start of February.

Rajat Gupta was orphaned at 18, a native of Kolkata, received an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology. He later earned a scholarship to Harvard Business School and secured a position at the consulting firm, McKinsey & Co.

A suspected rogue trader working for the UBS, a Swiss banking giant, incurs huge losses of $2 billion. Prior to his arrest, kewku Adoboli, 31, updated his Facebook page with, "I need a miracle".

According to Greg Satell, the three crucial challenges shaping the future of business are:

1. Chaos, Turbulence and the End of Business Statistics
2. The Emerging Science of Networks
3. The Semantic Web and The Web of Things

To cope, we need to:

1. Believe in Luck
2. Search Weak Links
3. Admit You Don’t Know and Give Up The Illusion of Control
4. Build Extended Competencies

ECONOMICS is a science that employs some of the world's most intelligent people and most powerful computers to prove the bleeding obvious. An excited academic once told me to look into behavioural economics, which he described as the most ''exciting and radical'' of all the fields of economic research. Its most edgy, controversial finding? That people occasionally behave irrationally, driven by emotion rather than reason. Well, duh. (Source)

I like this comment of Conway:

"The ratings agencies, which ought to have had the hardest fall from grace after famously deeming worthless ''toxic'' assets to be among the highest-grade investments, are still able to provoke panic by merely hinting that they are planning to downgrade a country's debt. We continue to hang on the words of Nobel laureates and professors who entirely failed to see the crisis coming."

I find this amusing but I think it is a little unfair to pick on economists though. When crisis like this happens, you can almost pick on any industry, institution or endeavour as being useless. What about the regulators and the politicians and all who purport to know anything about the financial industry really. In factthe socialist just prefer to blame the whole thing on capitalism.

However, I think the problem is not knowledge or expertise. There were people who saw a disaster was looming. The question is why did they not speak up louder, if at all? Was it going to be detrimental for them to do so politically, legally, financially or otherwise? Or was it because people did not listen and dismissed contrarian voices. ? It is all of these.

"If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."

- Sir Ken Robinson (TED, 2006)

Marquez, author of The Part-Time Currency Trader, introduces you to forex trading.