The link below presents my talk at the UCLA Anderson Forecast discussing the outlook for the financial markets in 2025. The link opens with my talk, but you can scroll to the beginning to view the entire forecast program.
https://www.youtube.com/live/rbpRv5pt5OE?feature=shared&t=3075
When to Hold’em, When to Fold’em*
Maria Konnikova arrived in the United States in 1988 at age four, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. She succeeds academically graduating from Harvard and earns a Ph.D. in social psychology from Columbia. However, academic life was not for her, and she worked as a TV producer and a writer.
Along the way she encountered John von Neumann’s and Oscar Morgenstern’s classic “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.” John McDonald’s later popularized that book with his “Strategy in Poker, Business & War.” Immediately she became hooked by poker where she can apply her background in social psychology at the game table. She enlisted poker star Erik Seidel to be her mentor in 2016 with the goal of becoming a professional poker player within a year. For a complete novice at the game, this is an act of extreme chutzpah.
Poker involves luck, strategy, probability theory, skill, and the ability to deceive and read other players while maintaining, as they say a “poker face.” It means having the ability to pick up psychological clues about the behavior of competing players.
Her game is No Limit, Texas Hold’em. She leaves her Brooklyn apartment most weekdays to play online in Hoboken, New Jersey where online gambling is legal. As the saying goes. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? The answer is “practice, practice, practice.” Instead of Carnegie Hall her goal is to get to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. That she does and she goes on to Monte Carlo and Macau.
She succeeds and within two years she became a very successful poker player. It was not easy, especially for a woman, where 97% of the players are men. She puts up with all kinds of harassment on her way to reaching her goal. She also learned how applicable the skill set needed for playing poker has all kinds of applications in her daily life. For example, when and how to ask for a raise.
Maria Konnikova is a remarkable woman, and I highly recommend her book. Nevertheless, I would have liked to know who staked her for the necessary entry fees and antes, and the travel expenses associated with attending the events. It also would have been helpful to have illustrations of the poker hands she discusses in the book. These are mere quibbles.
*-Apologies to Kenny Rogers
The First America First
With Donald Trump’s victory America First as foreign policy is yet again being thrust into the limelight. Thus, it is important to understand its origins making University of Texas historian H.W. Brands new history of the first America First movement is especially timely. Brands views America First through the lens of the shadow war between Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh with the latter being the most prominent proponent of America First.
There is not much new in the Roosevelt side of the equation, but Brands, at least for me plows new ground on Lindbergh by carefully researching his diaries and speeches from the late 1930’s to America’s entry into the war in December 1941. What I learned was that Lindbergh was a foreign policy realist in understanding the decadence of 1930’s Britain and the weakness of France. In his view Germany was the rising power in Europe, so much so that it would overwhelm both Britain and France.
He believed that with adequate military preparedness the United States would be able to fend off any cross Atlantic attack from a Europe under the auspices of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt, on the other hand was far more clear-eyed in understanding what a Nazi dominated Europe would mean for the security of the United States. From 1939 his globalist vision pushed the United States for war with Germany. Indeed. within the space of a few weeks between late December 1940 and early January 1941 Roosevelt called on America to become the arsenal of democracy and then articulated his Four Freedoms.
Although losing the public relations battle Lindbergh plowed ahead in attacking Roosevelt and his interventionist policies. He reached a dead-end with his infamous Des Moines speech in September 1941 when he, echoing Nazi propaganda, called out the Roosevelt, the British and the Jews for leading America into war. There was near universal condemnation of his speech and for both Lindbergh and America First it was downhill from there.
Beneath his realpolitik there was his underlying racism against Jews and the non-white races. He viewed the war as dividing the white world, when instead it should have been focusing on the dangers coming from the non-white world, no matter that Germany was allied with Japan.
Unfortunately, there are too many similarities to the world of Trump and the world of Lindbergh. America can’t stand aside today in a very dangerous world, but as Brands noted in 1941 the U.S. was the dominant economic power in the world; this is no longer the case. This makes the case that the most important task before us is to strengthen our economy.
I have a theory that the coming holiday shopping season will be strong. The recent consumer confidence surveys highlighted the fact that Republicans, with Trump's victory, feel much better about the economy and conversely the Democrats have become more pessimistic. My sense is that the Republicans will shop till they drop out of joy and the Democrats will be engaged in the time tested cure of retail therapy. Net. Net. We have the makings for a strong shopping season.
After lying to its viewers about inflation, the border and the mental acuity of President Biden and going gaga for Kamala Harris it now faces a collapse in viewership, and more importantly a significant change in its corporate structure. Today MSNBC's parent Comcast announced that it will spin off most of its cable networks into a new entity. Significantly that new entity will exclude NBC and its news division which means that MSNBC will no longer have access to NBC's worldwide network of reporters.
Thus the new MSNBC will consist of commentators and news readers that won't have the imprimatur of NBC news. Thus it won't be able to cover breaking news about weather events, wars, campaign events and domestic disturbances. Simply put the network does not have the reportorial staff, unlike its sister company CNBC which has reporters covering business verticals and an international presence.
Indeed, without NBC News, MSNBC, won't hold a candle to Fox News, CNN and Bloomberg News, all of whom are global news organizations. Thus in order to be competitive it will have to staff up at huge cost. Some of that cost will be borne by the overpaid on-the-air talent, something that is long overdue.
For my previous commentary on MSNBC see: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-letter-to-comcast-ceo-brian-roberts.html and https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-comcast-whores-of-msnbc.html
Biden’s Wars
Washington Post writer Bob Woodward has chronicled every president since Bill Clinton. In this book he focuses on Biden’s three wars, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Unfortunately, he fails to discuss the most electorally significant war that was a result of Biden’s open border policy. Although not characterized as a war, the invasion/arrival of 10 million illegal/undocumented immigrants at our southern border seemed like a war to those Americans living in the Southwest and later to those living in the cities where they were bussed to.
Woodward glances over the debacle in Afghanistan where Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from that country permanently reduced his poll standing. I have yet to see who was fired for allowing this to happen.
Biden initially does much better with Ukraine. Here we witness the actions of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin seamlessly performing as a team. Of course, it is my guess that those three were Woodward’s sources for what happened. Benefitting from excellent intelligence the team warns Putin and notifies Ukrainian President Zelensky that Russia was about to invade. The public release of the intelligence was unprecedented, and it helped prepare Ukraine and the American people for what was to lie ahead.
Contrary to expectations in the West, Ukraine survived the initial Russian assault and then began a counter offensive aided by U.S. weaponry. It is here where the Biden team fails. Instead of going all-in with all kinds of offensive weapons, the team dilly-dallies preventing Ukraine from pressing its advantage. As a result, the stalemate we have now ensues. The Biden rationale for going slowly was the fear that Russia might introduce nuclear weapons into the conflict. Although plausible, we don’t have any Russian sources to back this conjecture up.
After the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, Biden goes all-in in support of Israel, and he visits the country a few weeks after. However, after the casualties start rising in Gaza the administration starts going soft. This is highlighted in the July 1924 meeting between Vice President Kamala Harris, now a presidential candidate, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While being supportive and diplomatic with Netanyahu in private, she stuns the Israelis with a very strong public statement critical about how Israel is fighting the war and the casualties in Gaza it is causing. That along with a slowdown in certain arms deliveries to Israel, highlighted the growing breach between the Biden White House and Netanyahu.
In all three cases it seems to me that Biden’s strategy was to “end wars” not to win them. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2024/05/joe-no-win-biden.html) This strategy ended in disaster in Afghanistan, and it is certainly not helping in Ukraine and Gaza.
There were two widely reported scoops coming out of Woodward’s book. The first being that Trump supplied Putin with Covid testing kits when they were scarce in the U.S. and second Army Chief of Staff Milley calling Trump a fascist. There was third one, not so widely reported where Biden demonstrated significant mental decline at a Silicon Valley fundraiser in June 2023, a year before his disastrous debate performance. The country would have been saved a lot of anguish if this were reported earlier.
Woodward’s book is a helpful guide to understanding the Biden years, but it is far from definitive. We learn more as his staffers write their own memoirs in the years to come.
Mole Hunters
Retired CIA officer David McCloskey has written another pager turner. In this novel he captures the bureaucratic back-stabbing culture of the CIA as only an insider can do. His protagonist is the gutsy curly headed five foot tall, Artemis Aphrodite Proctor. She is a veteran of tours in Afghanistan and Syria and was the architect of a botched operation in Singapore where CIA officer John Joseph is kidnapped by the Russians and his Russian asset is killed. This failure forces her out of the CIA.
Simultaneously two other operations go awry with a key CIA asset in Russia assassinated. She rightly believes that there is a mole in the house and when Joseph is released in a spy swap, they join forces to hunt down the mole. Joseph is also exiled from the CIA, so they are acting as private citizens, albeit highly skilled citizens in the dark arts of the CIA. I learned that the official mole hunters in the CIA are known as the dermatology department.
On the other side we see an aging SVR officer, Rem Zomov, working as hard as he can to protect is asset operating at the highest levels of the CIA. The title refers to the executive floor at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Zomov orders a hit on Proctor and Joseph using an illegal couple on Dallas to do the dirty work. In shades of the hit TV series “The Americans” we find them to be a mild-mannered suburban couple blending into the north Dallas milieu.
McCloskey takes his adventure from northern Virginia, to Orlando, where Proctor is now improbably working at her cousin’s alligator park, to Las Vegas and ultimately on to France. There is much more to the story, but I ended up troubled by the bureaucratic infighting and petty jealousies that plague an organization dedicated to protecting us.
