The declining quality of our supply of extremely rich people - a rant

[Ares Land]

I don't think this is the case. It's true that growth rates are smaller than in les Trentes glorieuses, but they're not zero.

That's true. Though of course this is as much of a problem if we get, say, 1% growth and investors insist on a 5% yield.

Here I have to object that there is no such thing as "actual real-world value." I know what you mean, but it's the phlogiston or ether of economics. All there is, is what people will pay for a thing. If humans all die off, nothing will have value any more.

I think what you're getting at is real, though: investment capital has gotten completely wacky.

Yeah, you got what I mean. I don't know the proper economics terminology for that phenomenon, though. "Irrational exuberance"?

Another thought on this: surely we can now look back and find similar examples in history? One that comes to mind, since I mentioned it the other day, is Sears. Sears was the top dog in retail for a century; but then they were kicked off the Dow Jones in 1999, and went bankrupt in 2018. Surely it was overvalued long before then? If you could go back in time, you could advise investors to dump Sears stock.

The question is when should you go? This gets very tricky. Suppose you pick January 2004. An investor sells all his Sears stock— then watches the stock price rise from $20 to $155 over the next three years, and he hops into a time machine to kill your grandfather.

That one is easy; invest in dotcoms in 1997 and sell everything by February 2000; invest in real estate, but be sure to sell the Spanish real estate by 2007.

I'm not sure what's happening right now is a bubble though.

[Raphael]

The question is when should you go? This gets very tricky. Suppose you pick January 2004. An investor sells all his Sears stock— then watches the stock price rise from $20 to $155 over the next three years, and he hops into a time machine to kill your grandfather.

I wouldn't worry, considering a general lack of (to our knowledge) assassinations by people using time machines. After all, if they could, they would've killed Hitler.

More like, if the guy who got that stock advice from Ares Land would, therefore, kill Ares Land's grandfather, then Ares Land, never having been born, wouldn't get to give the guy that stock advice, so the guy would have no reason to kill Ares Land's grandfather, so...

Stuff like this is why I find it so difficult to take time travel stories seriously.