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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (91183)	6/9/2001 10:08:16 PM
From: George Acton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Bundy didn't actually pick any stocks. Nor did he try to time the market. He just had the Ford Foundation issue a study scolding the boards of all the university endowments for being stodgy. At exactly the time when stodginess and genius were indistinguishable. Bundy got all his positions on a general reputation for brilliance, without ever having a distinguished achievement in a position of responsibility. He was a math major at Yale, which allows for a smart person to make top grades with minimal time input. This allowed him to pursue goals like becoming editor of the Yalie Daily and getting into a senior society. He didn't bother with grad school, but somewhere along the way he needed a faculty appointment at Harvard, so he chose Political Science. It turned out that he'd never bothered to actually like um take a single course in Political Science. The President of the university, Conant, got dozens of calls and letters from Old Boston pushing Bundy. It is said that as Conant signed the appointment papers he sighed and muttered "this would never happen in chemistry". Perhaps it's only a coincidence that Bundy had this kind of career and took part in two famous disasters. If there's any pattern, it's that he had such tunnel vision when the situations called for going against conventional wisdom. For all his reputation for brilliance, the actual decisions were bonehead robotic. ObInvesting, I don't know if the same kind of criticism applies to analysts. The people who have traditionally run the US commercial banking system like to think of themselves as brilliant generalists, and every 5-10 years they sleepwalk into some quagmire like Latin American loans or DotCom venture capital.