C'mon guys, let's not overdo it. BP brings up some valid points about problems in the market. Bond bearishness WILL weigh on the market. QCOM will not be immune. It is always important to have a gadfly, or Devil's advocate, even if you don't agree with him. I don't think BP's latest post was ad hominem against Voltaire; the only incendiary phrase I see is "your bs about the 'houses'", but that is an argument about an issue--not everyone believes that houses control the market, or that their manipulation extends beyond a rather limited scope. I think everyone's purported goal in the market is to make money, and certainly objectivity is a crucial means to that end. Objectivity requires dialectic, which requires a willingness to listen to opinions other than one's own. Perhaps that is naive though, in the same way that Marx's conceptualization of a communist world is naive--in other words, you can have a nice idealization about how something should be, but it doesn't work out so well in the real world. As with Marxism, so with "level-headed debating". So it goes.
The nice thing about the market, in my mind, is that the end-goal is so simple: To make money. Other than bad luck and good luck, the main determinant is adherence to objectivity, IMO. However, while objectivity is in our self interest, its successful realization is anything but assured. We spend our lives deluding ourselves on a personal level...why should we think we would not do the same in groups? Socrates, the original dialectician, was also the original gadfly. People did not want to listen to his shyte, so they eventually forced him to drink hemlock and be gone. But did this really help the people? Probably not. |
