Piketty argued in Capital that the best economy for the majority of the population is a capitalist market economy governed by socialists. I realized this week that all these salty capitalists bitching about central banks? They always hurl "socialist" around like an epithet.

I further realized that Burton Malkiel argued not to fall sway to the gyrations and enticements of "Mr. Market", that crazy anthropomorphism of stock investing whereby all the numbers and flashing lights entice you to do stupid shit with your money. Malkiel's argument was that investing should be as boring as humanly possible because it's in the excitement that we do stupid shit (in fact, women generally make better investors than men because they're less prone to think they can outthink everyone else with an ETrade account).

This is a boring fucking market. TDAmeritrade is trying to get me to learn about "adding vega to Iron Condors" which, believe it or not, isn't a Skyrim mod but apparently involves modifying balanced options trades with volatility measures (which is still a foreign language but basically means "trying to make money when the stock market is boring"). The fact that it's a boring fucking market is bad news for everyone who plays the ponies with other people's money... but the fact that they're salty may not, in fact, presage the end of the world.

My favorite headline of the week: "Passive investing worse for society than Marxism"

I've come 'round. I've begin to think that maybe the fact that all these money people are pissed off is maybe not a bad thing.