In this light, first up, John Nadler at Kitco, the scrap gold recycler. Nadler’s bandwidth to content ratio might be seen as amongst the highest on the net. A typical comment might run: “Gold could trade lower today where it may find some physical interest. But if something happens, it may trade higher.” Extreme vigilance is undertaken to distance himself from the “radical goldbugs” (who happen to constitute a large swath of his customer base) and whom he, presumably, fears may one day be right. He is well covered by wires on the gold beat.
His year-end wrap-up reads in part as follows:
The "You Couldn't Have Been More Wrong, But You're Forgiven" award goes to … those … who awarded the "Moron of the Year" award to our 12/31/07 projections for 2008 gold prices ("from $640 (off by $80) to $940 (off by $93) and a chart pattern which might see the highs being made well ahead of the lows" it was March to October).Not quite right. Here is, in fact, what you said a year ago:
Our price projections indicate a likely channel of from $640 to $940 and a pattern which might see the highs being made well ahead of the lows. The average price for bullion in the coming year is still seen as rising, possibly to $730 per ounce…[Emph added.]Nadler omitted, if you missed it, magnanimity re the award giving and all that perhaps getting the better of him, his key projection for the year. As we can see from the original clip (yet omitted in his re-cap), he called for $730/oz gold, on average. In fact, the average price for 2008 was about $872/oz (London AM fix), or about 18% higher than Nadler’s prediction. Indeed, Nadler’s average price call for 2008 was only $20 higher than the lows of the year, and a whopping $300 lower than the highs of the year. Put differently, gold traded higher than his predicted average price 97% of the time.
This oversight may be understandable in light of his busy schedule, as per:
My own, "Infinite Gratitude" award goes to all those who clicked on my humble musings 4,580,745 times (up to this day) during this past year and gave their time to read what I had to relay on a given day. With special mention to all of my friends in the media, who had their hands extremely full this year. [Emphasis in the original.]Isn’t the media supposed to be thanking you, Jon? For all your cogent thoughts throughout the year? What am I missing?
Next we have Nouriel Roubini, who takes time out from interviews to do some economics now and then (and, apparently, much else.) More ink in the FT over the week-end, this time a fawning profile.
In the buzzy, scruffy warren of offices in New York from which Nouriel Roubini runs his economics aggregration and commentary website, one of the young cyber-serfs has taped a New York Post story about the boss to the chalky wall. “NYU Playboy Warns: Econ Party’s Over”, the sub-heading declares, next to a photograph of a smiling, open-shirted Mr Roubini, sandwiched between two attractive young women.Self-deprecating?! Consider what Nick Denton at Gawker.com actually turned up. Here is an email sent by Roubini to a female “facebook friend”, which was in turn passed on to the gossip site:
Not so long ago, the phrase “playboy economist” would have been a joky oxymoron, likely to feature in satirical lists alongside “selfless hedge fund manager” and (at least before the US surge in Iraq) “military intelligence”. But, in a sign that practitioners of the dismal science are among the few beneficiaries of the global economic meltdown, this crisis has transformed the 50-year-old New York University professor from a respected academic economist into a minor celebrity.
Mr Roubini, who offered one of the first and most nuanced predictions of the financial and economic crash, is ambivalent about the personal scrutiny his fame has attracted. After Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker website, first pointed to the contrast between the economist’s “Dr Doom” public persona and his party-going private life, Mr Roubini sent Mr Denton a Facebook message in which he declared: “I work very, very hard and I also enjoy life . . . To paraphrase Seinfeld: anything wrong with that?”
But sitting at his modest desk in the corner of an open-plan office, Mr Roubini tells me the “playboy” tag was “a gross mischaracterisation”. He said he was sometimes recognised on the street, but mostly by “geeks and wonks”. “There are not paparazzi yet,” Mr Roubini, wearing jeans, a black jacket and a deep tan that belies the miserable New York weather, says with a self-deprecating chuckle. “No one has said, ‘You have a brilliant mind’, and asked me out.”
Ciao bella. How are you fashionista glitterata glamorata?Self-deprecating? In the least, it is clear Roubini reads his own press. Lol.
I am in decadent St Trop now vacationing with Arab Sheiks, Russian oligarchs and assorted aristocratic Euro trash. More silicon here than in Silicon Valley...lol
I had to escape NYC as my Barron's interview (http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/253240/) on $2 trillion of losses made the markets swoon last week and angry mobs of investors were chasing me.
So life is a beach here and am studying Beach Economics and the IELs (International Elites of Leisure) with a grant from the Institute for Advanced Vacations; hard job but somebody gotta do it.
This coming Sunday August 17th the New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html) will publish a long profile article (4 pages and 3000 words) about me. So beware of markets shivering the next day.
Want to come visit here in St Trop? I would be too lucky.
I will be back this weekend to NYC but off then to Brazil, UK and Sweden. But I will have parties over the coming weekends.
I hope to see you in nyc if not in St Trop. A drink some time too?
xoxo
Nouriel [Emph added.]
The spat was apparently sparked by Denton’s “calling out” of the economist as per:
It's time to call bullshit. The image of Dr. Doom may satisfy the needs of the media and partygoers this Halloween—but Roubini is anything but dour. The 50-year-old Iranian-Jewish economist is a promiscuous Facebook friend who draws a cosmopolitan crowd to the frequent parties at his Tribeca loft—an apartment with walls indented with plaster vulvas, incidentally. As this party photograph shows (right), the professor's gloomy public image is entirely at odds with his playboy lifestyle.This did not go down well and Roubini went nutso (or, in Denton’s words, Roubini suffered a “personal meltdown – as dramatic as the economic disintegration he’s so long predicted”) on Denton’s facebook wall:
“You [Denton] are a loser and an intellectual dwarf who cannot engage me on my widely respected views on the economy and financial markets; too bad I was the first one that early on predicted in minute and precise details this most severe financial crisis. So which financial institution – that cannot stand my intellectually independent and correct views – paid you for this hatchet job? And how much have you been paid for it you little loser anti-Semitic jerk?”Umm, Roubini was the first to sound alarms about the dangers of near infinite credit expansion? Really? This will come as a shock to many.
At any rate, it certainly appears we are reaching some sort of high water mark, in Roubini’s mind, if nowhere else.
When "radical gold bugs", tin foil hats and all, start to bask in this sort of fawning media attention, someone please sound the alarm, for a secular change will clearly be at hand.
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