Aug

8

In a visit to The War Rooms and a reading of every one of the 1000 pages in Manchester's The Last Lion, I was not impressed by the heroism of the French, and with deference to Jovanovich, the chances of the French not turning their navy over to the Reich after the armistice would seem to have been close to the proverbial parts in a salvage dump spontaneously assembling themselves into a jet. It led me to think of all the times all my opponents in squash defeated in earlier rounds would stay around to the finals hoping I would lose. This led me to think of whether when one market has a terrible fall, whether it predicts with inordinate frequency that a related market will suffer a similar fate. The latter must be tested.

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

About Dunkirk there is no question that the French stood and fought–bravely and well.

The Vichy French did not turn their Navy over to the Germans; they refused to turn it over to the British. Not quite the same thing. The result was Operation Catapult.

Churchill is not to be trusted about almost everything he wrote and said regarding the strategies of the war; in almost all cases he was a blowhard and a buffoon. But, he had luck. He had one subordinate commander brilliant enough to ignore his orders and preserve the RAF (in spite of Churchill's sending two months' of fighter production to Singapore so they could be captured by the Japanese weeks after being off-loaded in their crates on the docks). Hugh Dowding and the pilots won the Battle of Britain; and then the Germans lost the war by choosing to invade Russia instead of completing their conquest of North Africa and the Middle East and Iraq and Persia's oil reserves.

Andrew Goodwin writes: 

Greenspan cares about the bond bubble. If his commentary has influence perhaps he will move to remarks about other markets that don't share the same ecosystem. That 1000 page Manchester book was excellent and the brain makes the link finally in the naming.

anonymous writes: 

Sad but true: before WW I both Churchill and Roosevelt thought that the greatest threat to Anglo-American Empire would come from the Russians in Europe and the Japanese Navy in the northern Pacific. The Germans were not going to be any problem at all, no matter what the stupid French kept saying.

Jay Thompson writes: 

Accepting the above as true then major kudos to Churchill and Teddy as they possessed more foresight than the vast majority of foreign policy experts–to say nothing of US Presidents–in the past 100 years. Russia was/is a threat to the civilized west if for no other reason than it has been such a tempest - incredibly unstable and nearly ungovernable The near totality of Russian leadership was Germanic (like most of Europe that mattered) yet the people are Slavs. This exacerbated the already tense relationship between the peasants and the aristocracy or, if you wane Marxist, the bourgeois and the proletariat. The Japanese had a long lead time in their accumulation of navy power and the associated increase in their sphere of influence.

Patton, and Churchill, were right. We should have continued on and/or let the Third Reich destroy the Soviets. If for no other reason it would have taken away the "Cold War" as an excuse to waste trillions of dollars and the lives lost in the hot wars of Korea and Vietnam. 

Victor Niederhoffer writes: 

Anyone who believes that the Vichy prezs, petain and lebrun would not have turned over their entire navy to the Germans as smoothly and easily as they killed all the jews in Southern France, and who also believes that without Churchills courage and refusal to surrender that England would not have signed an armistice with Germany in 1939 or 1940 is very biased against the man who saved the world from German rule. With French armaments their would have been no hope left for the British and Churchill would have been booted out of office by the many collaborationists he brought into his cabinet.


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  1. Ed on August 8, 2017 9:30 pm

    with all the portfolio systems that use volatile as a factor in position size, it seems there is a strong mechanism for it Vol pops and you must reduce all positions - multi market stop gunning

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