Grant Williams's Blog

Investors desperately want to believe the words of the likes of Schaeuble, Geithner, Merkel, Bernanke, Obama, Hollande, and the rest of the gang, while they in turn are desperate to convey a sense of invincibility in the hope that nobody will see the real sickness that lies beneath the thin veneer of confidence.

Part of Information Theory is something called the Shannon-Hartley Theorem, which Shannon developed with the help of Ralph Hartley, a colleague at Bell Labs. This theorem tells the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise. It has become known popularly as the Signal-to-Noise Ratio.

As a kid, my Saturday nights used to echo to the cry of "Come On Dowwwwn!" squawked by Britain's answer to Bob Barker—an ageing former child star named Leslie Crowther—to eager Brits crammed into fold-down seats in a sparkly TV studio near the banks of the River Thames in a place called Teddington, which was just far enough west of London to not be considered "West London."

The list of human phobias is comprehensive to say the least. Over the centuries the human race has managed to find a way to be afraid of just about everything around it.

For over a century, the modern Olympic Games has captivated the world as the finest athletes on the planet come together to compete against one another an attempt to prove which of them was the superior competitor and to give their countrymen and women, sat at home, a burst of nationalistic pride that could transcend whatever the economic conditions were at the time.

This week saw statements released by both the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee and the ECB and, as is the norm when these pronouncements are made, every word is scrutinized for the tiniest clue as to future action.

Historically, GPIF has been one of the largest buyers of Japanese government debt and has done more than its fair share to confound those who have predicted Japan’s day of reckoning; including Kyle Bass who has been waiting an awfully long time for his view on Japan to play out as he expected.

For whatever reason, there are not very many famous ‘Cliffs’ in the pages of history. It just appears, by pure happenstance, to be one of those names bestowed upon people destined for lives of quiet dignity as opposed to great fanfare.

Fans of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books will be vaguely familiar with the name Nicolas Flamel, though, unlike the book’s eponymous hero, his wizardly sidekicks and characters such as Professor Dumbledore, Hagrid and, of course,

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn but in the financial world we seem to repeatedly go beyond ‘dark’ into pitch blackness when the periodic stumbles that are part and parcel of an ever-growing world come along.