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By Tyler Durden

Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” – Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to see a live one hour interview with Michael Lewis at the Annenberg Center about his new book The Undoing Project. Everyone attending the lecture received a complimentary copy of the book. Being a huge fan of Lewis after reading Liar’s Poker, Boomerang, The Big Short, Flash Boys, and Moneyball, I was interested to hear about his new project. This was a completely new direction from his financial crisis books. I wasn’t sure whether it would keep my interest, but the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their research into the psychology of judgement and decision making, creating a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases, was an eye opener.

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. These rules work well under most circumstances, but they can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability or rational choice theory. The resulting errors are called “cognitive biases” and many different types have been documented.

Heuristics usually govern automatic, intuitive judgments but can also be used as deliberate mental strategies when working from limited information. Kahneman and Tversky created the heuristics and biases research program, which studies how people make real-world judgments and the conditions under which those judgments are unreliable. Their research challenged the idea that human beings are rational actors, but provided a theory of information processing to explain how people make estimates or choices. Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work in behavioral economics.

To put their research into terms the common person can understand, human decision making is extremely flawed due to our biases, feelings, irrational thought processes and beliefs in falsehoods. It’s over-confidence in our decision making ability that causes us the most problems. For the average person this can result in financial hardship, frustration or a premature death.

When high level government officials, bankers or corporate executives make flawed decisions due to their biases, it can mean war, financial disasters, depressions, or disastrous legislation like Obamacare. Hubris, egotism and faulty reasoning, as noted by Mark Twain one hundred and fifty years ago, can kill you and in some cases lead to war and unthinkable levels of death and destruction.

“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” – Mark Twain

In the seven weeks since the election of Donald Trump as our next president, I’ve witnessed the largest case of hindsight bias in world history. Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along effect or creeping determinism, is the inclination, after an event …read more

Source: A Biased 2017 Forecast, Part 1

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By Tyler Durden

Submitted by Daniel Greenfield via FrontPageMag.com,

It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states. That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.

In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.

What happened to the big donkey? Among other things, the Democrats decided to sell their base and their soul to a very bad billionaire and they got a very bad deal for both.

It was 2004. The poncho was the hottest fashion trend, there were 5 million new cases of AIDS and a former Nazi collaborator had bought the Democrat Party using the spare change in his sofa cushions.

And gone to war against the will of the people. This was what he modestly called his own “Soros Doctrine”.

“It is the central focus of my life,” George Soros declared. It was “a matter of life and death.” He vowed that he would become poor if it meant defeating the President of the United States.

Instead of going to the poorhouse, he threw in at least $15 million, all the spare change in the billionaire’s sofa cushions, dedicated to beating President Bush.

In his best lisping James Bond villain accent, Soros strode into the National Press Club and declared that he had “an important message to deliver to the American Public before the election” that was contained in a pamphlet and a book that he waved in front of the camera. Despite his “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond” voice, the international villain’s delivery was underwhelming. He couldn’t have sold brownies to potheads at four in the morning. He couldn’t even sell Bush-bashing to a roomful of left-wing reporters.

But he could certainly fund those who would. And that’s exactly what he did.

Money poured into the fringe organizations of the left like MoveOn, which had moved on from a petition site to a PAC. In 2004, Soros was its biggest donor. He didn’t manage to bring down Bush, but he helped buy the Democratic Party as a toy for his yowling dorm room of left-wing activists to play with.

Soros hasn’t had a great track record at buying presidential elections. The official $25 million he poured into this one bought him his worst defeat since 2004. But his money did transform the Democrat Party.

And killed it.

Next year the Democracy Alliance was born. A muddy river of cash from Soros and his pals flowed into the organizations of the left. Soros had helped turn Howard Dean, a Vermont politician once as obscure as this cycle’s radical Vermont Socialist, into a contender and a national figure. Dean didn’t get the nomination, but he did get to remake the DNC. Podesta’s Center for American Progress swung …read more

Source: How George Soros Destroyed The Democratic Party

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By Tyler Durden

If you thought 2016 was full of market maelstroms and geopolitical gotchas, 2017's 'known unknowns' suggest a year of more mayhem awaits…

Here's a selection of key events in the year ahead (and links to Bloomberg's quick-takes on each).

January

Donald Trump will be sworn in as U.S. president on Jan. 20.
QuickTakes: Immigration Reform, Free Trade and Its Foes, Supreme Court, Oil Sands, Confronting Coal, Climate Change, Budget Deficit

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 17-20.
QuickTake: Sustainable Investing

Finland begins a test of a universal basic income by offering 2,000 unemployed adults 560 euros a month.
QuickTake: Universal Basic Income

U.S. companies will be required to disclose pay ratios comparing the compensation of their CEO to the median pay of employees, in the year starting Jan. 1.
QuickTake: Executive pay

Cigarette plain-packaging law comes into effect in France.
QuickTake: War on Smoking

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision aims to complete an overhaul of capital standards by Jan. 8.
QuickTake Q&A: What Global Bank Regulators Are Fighting About

France is gathering dozens of foreign ministers in Paris Jan. 15 to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
QuickTake: Israeli Settlements

February

Judges may rule as early as February in a U.S. patent dispute determining who invented the gene-editing technique known as Crispr-Cas9.
QuickTake: Gene Editing

U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen gives the first of her twice-yearly reports to Congress.
QuickTake: The Fed Lifts Off, Barely

Intercontinental Exchange Inc., which runs the daily London gold auction, will start trading a futures contract for the metal in the U.S., part of a battle for control of the world gold market.
QuickTake: Gold's Ups and Downs

The number of influenza cases typically peaks this month in the U.S.
QuickTake: The Flu

March

ChemChina aims to complete its $43 billion purchase of Syngenta, a record acquisition by a Chinese company, by the end of the first quarter.
QuickTake: China Inc.'s Spending Spree

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May plans to trigger the legal process for Britain’s exit from the European Union, starting a two-year countdown for Brexit.
QuickTake: Brexit

Hong Kong’s Election Committee chooses the city's next chief executive.
QuickTake: Hong Kong’s Autonomy

SpaceX plans to launch the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V moon rocket program ended in 1973.
QuickTake: Elon Musk

A general election in the Netherlands will be held March 15.

Samsung is expected to unveil its Galaxy S8 smartphone.
QuickTake: Samsung

India Post is expected to start operations of its postal banking system.
QuickTake: Postal Banking

April

The European Central Bank is scheduled to begin scaling back its quantitative easing program, reducing monthly bond …read more

Source: Money, Markets, & Mayhem – What To Expect In The Year Ahead

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By Tyler Durden

El Monte, California is a city of roughly 100,000 residents in East Los Angeles, many of whom struggle to make ends meet with a median household income of ~$39,000 and nearly 25% of people living below the poverty line. But while most of the people of El Monte struggle to meet monthly expenses, the city’s public employees are living the high life courtesy of one of the most egregious taxpayer funded pension plans in the country. Just ask the retired City Manager, James Mussenden, who told the LA Times that he gets paid $216,000 per year in retirement to tour the world on extravagant golf trips.

The retired city manager of El Monte collects more than $216,000 a year, plus cost-of-living increases and fully paid health insurance.

“It’s giving me an opportunity to do a number of things I didn’t get to do when I was younger, like travel to Europe, take some things off my bucket list,” Mussenden, 66, said recently. He even flew to Scotland to play the famed Old Course at St. Andrews, a mecca for golf enthusiasts.

Mussenden recognizes that few Americans have pensions anymore — least of all the El Monte taxpayers who are funding his retirement. So while he enjoys his monthly retirement check, he’s discreet about it.

“The guys I play golf with, they get very angry about my pension because they don’t have anything like it,” he said.

El Monte’s total retirement costs for public employees in 2016 totaled $16.5 million, or a staggering 28% of the city’s total budget.

But taxpayer funded pension payouts weren’t always so generous in El Monte. A fact that changed in 1999 when a decade-long bull market tripled the value of California’s massive public pension fund, CalPERS. Of course, the CalPERS board of directors, dominated by public employee union leaders and their political allies, voted to spend the surplus lowering retirement ages and raising pensions for public employees all across the state.

Unfortunately, the CalPERS board was blinded by endless wall street reports suggesting that “pets.com” was worth at least $1 trillion and forgot that markets actually cycle. Alas, shortly after granting 200,000 civil servants sweet new retirement packages, at the absolute peak of the market, the tech bubble burst and CalPERs found itself in a crisis that still plagues the state to this day.

California Highway Patrol officers got an especially sweet deal. Their pensions had been 2% of their highest salaries, multiplied by the number of years they worked. The percentage of peak salary was raised to 3%.

That meant officers with 30 years of service could collect up to 90% of their highest pay for life. And they would be eligible to retire at 50.

El Monte adopted the new pension formula (known as “3% at 50”) in 2000, and the effect was dramatic. Officers who retired before 2000 with more than 25 years of service collect $82,000 a year on average, according to CalPERS data.

Those who retired after …read more

Source: "It’s Corruption On Steroids" – A Look Inside The El Monte, California Public Employee Pension

    

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