Maggie's Farm

I liked the treatment given by Taleb...you have to be careful with the assumptions. Let's say you have a coin and flip it 100 times and it comes out heads 80 times and tails 20 times. A statistically educated person would say it is an outlier. Someone street smart ("Fat Tony" in Taleb's book) would say the coin is rigged. Which is right depends on whether you check your premises with respect to the coin and whether it is or is not fairly weighted. But most people never check the coin.

I could argue that huge amounts of our national economic distress is a function of people playing economic and investing games that are played with loaded dice, but only one side knows it is loaded. The fed with money printing while the BLS hides the inflation, Mortgage securitization, HFT trading equities, basically all of wall street, state and local gov't pensions and basically all gov't economics.

At this point, the fed itself. The US dollar was mostly stable for over a century, the fed was formed to 'stabilize the value of the dollar' and it subsequently lost 97% of its purchasing power.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson would have all been able to recognize pricing in each others time. Some things might have seemed a little high or low, but recognizable. Nothing like thinking back on 8 cent gallons of gas, penny candy or the five and dime store.

Heck the silver in a 1965 dime is worth $2.20. And that is less than half the time the fed has been going to work on 'stabilizing' the value of the dollar.