Drum roll. . .
Baruch is back!! Yes, he has been out of commission these past few years. You may have been annoyed by his lack of any farewell, or any information as to what he was doing or why he had quit blogging. More likely you probably in fact don’t care, but I’m going to pretend that you do, OK?
So why DID he quit blogging? Was his true identity finally discovered by his Swiss gnome employer? Did he accept a secret mission from the Mossad that led him to disappear under deep cover for years? Was he in prison? Did he drop dead? Will he stop asking these pitiful rhetorical questions?
No, no, no, no, and yes: to be honest I got a bit messed up, and took a short break from the world of the markets. When I came back, despite the fact the markets hadn’t actually stopped, the urge to blog had dried up, the energy devoted to other desires, like watching Game of Thrones and most recently, playing World of Tanks. I also thought at the time, hang on, why am I telling all these barbarians* my amazing ideas and thoughts? I’m just showing off. Isn’t it better to keep them to myself? That’s what Spinoza would do. I’m mostly wrong anyway! It was strange, but oddly the most natural thing to do was just to stop this . . . hobby, I guess, which I had previously got lots of pleasure out of.
So then, why start again? Well that’s easy: I’m on the dole and haven’t got anything better to do. Baruch parted ways with his employer about a month and a bit ago in a difference of opinion about the appropriate period to measure performance. Admittedly that performance hadn’t been very good for a while, but there are good reasons for that, too, which I can go into later if you like. It’s OK, Baruch doesn’t consider himself the victim of a conspiracy.
The other thing is, I sort of feel I have something to say again. Over the past few years I’ve been thinking more and more about the long term role of technology in business, society and the economy, and what it means for investing. I’ve got some ideas about that. Yet another thing is, I can actually write substantially about these things, name names if you like, without fear of letting something slip I shouldn’t. I no longer have investors to inadvertently betray. I can’t get fired again, can I? And thirdly, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone will see these pearls of wisdom, Baruch’s Great Thoughts, and think, aye aye, there’s a clever chap, and give him a huge wodge of cash for him to do something or other with. Spend it on more cars, hopefully: in his absence from your screens, Baruch developed an unhealthy interest in unnecessarily powerful yet beautiful German sports cars. White ones. And they don’t pay for themselves.
So what’s been going on since I was “away”? Well things got better! And now seem to be getting worse. We’ve had arguably a bubble in bonds and may still be in it, Apple got boring, Amazon is now Skynet, China lost its mojo, crude is so cheap we could wash in it, and maybe above all the world has been swimming in free money for ages without any apparent increase in inflation, or growth, tiny dragons, or any of the things people actually predicted.
The Old Times Gang is still there though: Tadas plugging away at Abnormal Returns, Josh Brown still downtown but moving uptown, Felix ecoblogging after a fashion and no doubt recovering after another strenuous Davos. The Epicurean Dealmaker, Michael Jordan-like, keeps on retiring. And Tyler Durden, whoever he may be now, is as brilliantly batshit as ever. If anything HAS actually changed in the eco-blog firmament, Baruch will probably find out as his re-entry into blogging continues but feel free to point out what he’s missed in the comments. Hmmm. I wonder if there will BE any comments?
*That’s you, by the way. “Ultimi barbarorum” was uttered by Spinoza in the vocative tense.
