CFA Society Chicago Blog

Don’t confuse familiarity with understanding. That’s perhaps the biggest takeaway from Diane Coyle’s short and highly readable GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. The official guidance for calculating GDP, the System of National Accounts (SNA), published by the...

Silicon Valley and venture capital (VC) in the technology sector always offended this Midwesterner’s conservative sensibilities.  Having come of age during the dotcom boom, I’m skeptical every time a technological shiny thing catches the public’s attention, which...

We’ve all had jobs that at times felt unnecessary, redundant, or even harmful.  David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018) provides numerous examples of such jobs such as “flunkies” who exist only to make others feel important and whose examples include some receptionists...

Path dependence is the phenomenon often used to explain why people sometimes persist with practices that are no longer optimal or economically rational. Statistics is another area where path dependence has struck. The statistical techniques that students learn in...

Overlooking or underestimating obvious dangers is a timeless tradition. A man is terrified of planes but gets in his car every day and drives with no seat belt. A woman pays the fire insurance premium on her home religiously but doesn’t floss her teeth. People play...

Geography is destiny.  Demography is second.  Everything else is a distant third.  That’s the takeaway from Peter Zeihan’s The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, which was the book of the month for the...

Extraordinary central bank interventions during economic crises aren’t new.  In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lords of Finance, Liaquat Ahamed mentions Emperor Tiberius injecting one million gold pieces into the Roman economy to keep it from collapsing in 33 AD. ...

Most of us have a well-formed macro perspective on China. It’s the world’s second largest economy and a key U.S. trading partner with growing influence in Asia and globally. In Age of Ambition Evan Osnos takes us beyond the statistics, building a complex portrait of...

One of the benefits of being a part of the book club is learning about industries, markets, or products that are outside one’s normal course of life.  I know little of the oil and gas industry, having spent most of my life researching and working in the financial...

The specter of unfunded pension liabilities haunts many of our major cities and a large number of public companies. This is especially true in the city of Chicago as public unions continue to threaten to strike over benefits and unfunded pension liabilities. We...

If you have a history in this business or seeking to pursue it, have read any of the popular finance books, or simply sat back and enjoyed some of the classic Wall Street movies, you will certainly appreciate this well-crafted and first hand perspective of the finance...

Bitcoin with its underlying blockchain technology is by far the most controversial and least understood of the fintech innovations revolutionizing financial services. Since it was conceived in 2008 it has generally been viewed with suspicion, even outright derision....

Around the time we read this book, a major global growth scare was negatively impacting the financial markets.  Examples were the China slowdown which weakened emerging market exports, Japan’s ability to stimulate demand after two lost decades, and the low inflation...

Martin Ford, a software engineer by trade, projects a very bleak future for the working prospects of humanity.  In a world that sees its share of apocalypse futures through Hollywood movies and TV shows, one can easily dismiss the premise of his book as another...

“Everything can be measured, and what gets measured gets managed.” So reads the motto of one of the world’s most pre-eminent consultancies, McKinsey & Co. This month’s CFA Society Chicago Book Club Selection, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking...

The CFA Society Chicago book club met on Oct 20th, 2015 to discuss The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies written by MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.  The book discusses the digital age and how it...

The United States won the Cold War when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.  Liberal democracy and capitalism reigned supreme; the primary ideological alternative, communism, had proved to be economically and politically unviable.  In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published...

The CFA Society Chicago book club met for their monthly meeting on June 16, 2015 to discuss “The Billion Dollar Mistake” by Stephen Weiss.  Mr. Weiss brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table as he has spent nearly 25 years on Wall Street working at...

The CFA Society Chicago Book Club met for their monthly meeting on April 21, 2015 to discuss The Forgotten Depression, by James Grant.  We went around the room and shared our backgrounds and kicked off our discussion on the 1920-1921 “Forgotten Depression”.  About a...