Nutty librul scandinavians and their fruity ideas...

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I believe the point was that Liberalism and Socialism are not synonymous.

[scandal 951]

The bookmaker's favourite for the prize was Eugene Fama, the University of Chicago professor who is known as the father of the "efficient market hypothesis". This theory, which essentially states that the price of a traded asset, such as a share, fully reflects its true value, has been discredited by the market turmoil of the last two years.

Hogwash. EM Hypothesis has hardly been " discredited by the market turmoil of the last two years". Anyone who would write such a thing hasn't got the slightest idea what the EM Hypothesis actually means. It doesn't mean that markets won't be volatile and have turmoil. It doesn't mean you can't or won't lose money in the markets. It doesn't mean the markets are steady and orderly are predictable. It doesn't mean any of those things. All it states is that the price of an asset includes all publicly known information relevant to its value, so that there is no informational edge to be gained by traders, and it's impossible to outperform the market (or a portfolio of securities) over a sufficiently long period of time.

EMH is controversial, it has been since it was proposed. The portfolio management side of Wall St. is pretty much built on the idea that you CAN derive alpha through active management -- hence of course they'll contest any theory that claims mathematically this to be impossible. It's rather like the sellers of perpetual motion machines arguing against the second law of thermodynamics -- it's just not in their own economic self interest. The criticisms of EMH go back to the 1987 crash and earlier - there is no new critique in this past year that hasn't been heard before.

Regardless of whether one believes in EMH or not, Fama certainly was among the most influential economic figures of the 20th century and deserves his place in history, Nobel Prize or not.

[_Simpson_ 250]

I believe the point was that Liberalism and Socialism are not synonymous.

and my point was its time to step into the light and come over to the right.