Loaded Dice Will Blow Up in Our Faces
“Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’” – Auric Goldfinger … Last October about 3.5% or $2.4 trillion was wiped off of the U.S. stock market’s value in one afternoon. As is often the case, bitcoin was no safe haven—it fell more…
Exploding TVs, Exploded Chicken
The year I graduated from high school, before I took my first class in the dismal science, I got a memorable economics lesson. That winter I visited Communist Hungary, where my parents grew up. Unlike my previous trips, I was old enough to explore on my own and I spent hours walking around Budapest. I…
I Picked the Wrong Month To Stop Sniffing Glue
Back when I was in elementary school in the late 1970s, what my friends and I wanted to be when we grew up came up often. The number one answer by far was “photographer for Playboy,” followed by drummer for KISS. A few degenerates wanted to be lawyers. Now that I’m middle-aged, I understand that…
Balaton Memories
Growing up in the U.S., your idea of a beach vacation may have been sunny Florida or something more modest like The Jersey Shore. In communist Hungary, the nicest place to go was “Balaton.” It’s a lake, but no ordinary one as far as Hungarians, or the hundreds of thousands of East Germans who also…
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About Me
I write Markets A.M., the Wall Street Journal’s investing newsletter. Before that I was Global Editor of the WSJ’s Heard on the Street column. I’ve written two books and I used to run an emerging markets stock research team at a big investment bank.
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Spencer Jakab 