Financial Quotes

That’s the title of a nice book written by my favourite politician (oxymoron?) Ron Paul . The book is one of the first books written by Rep. Paul and it is a strong defense of the gold standard. It was written 30 years ago , in 1982, and at the time it seemed more obvious than ever that the replacement of gold backed money with paper money was a terrible decision. In just ten years’ time the US economy (the book is very US-centric since it is a politically motivated report) had almost collapsed (falling stock prices, high inflation, high unemployment etc.). Only gold (Au) thrived. I like the book and I suggest anyone interested in the concept of money to read it. I find at least two reasons for doing that: 1) The book is sometimes a bit detailed and perhaps overly political (you won me over many years ago, Ron.....) but if you skip those passages there are some very nice bits where the history of commodity-based monies and 19th and 20th century monetary economics is discussed. I use th...

For those of you who want to learn more about the Norwegian oil fund, formally named Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, perhaps the paper “ The Norway Model ” by Dimson et. al. (2011) could be of interest. The paper discusses the oil fund and compares its investment mandates, dubbed the Norway model , with that of Swensen’s Yale model . While the Yale model focuses on alternative investments such as private equity, infrastructure and real estate the Norway model instead focuses on a widely diversified portfolio of traded fixed income and public equity. If you like, the Norway model tries to harvest beta while the Yale model tries to generate alpha. The Norwegian oil fund is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world with more than $600billion in assets. As a rule of thumb the fund owns roughly 1% in each publicly traded firm in the world. The fund is supposed to spread the oil-fortunes accumulated over a million years across several generations and it makes every Norweg...