Cliff Asness — Stream of Consciousness

Ever since a few friends started to work at AQR, I’ve noticed that Cliff Asness loves to talk about how much of a libertarian he is, how everything should be seen and told as it is, how nothing should be censored or filtered. Well at least as far his writing style goes,  he is consistent with his own philosophy. Asness spells out some great criticisms regarding the government having blamed all short-selling for the current crisis. It doesn’t make sense to me either, and his summary is informative, even if it is padded with a lot of self-descriptive “-isms.” 

I guess this is the benefit of sitting atop of an empire which is run by automated black-box trading programs, tweaked by analysts once a week. You can say whatever you want and your investors couldn’t care less. 

The best part of this whole thing is the legal disclosure which Asness attaches to all of his releases, it’s even crazier than his op-eds: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/22nocera-blog.pdf

And here is the article:

http://executivesuite.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/cliff-asness-is-mad-as-hell/

On a lighter/heavier note, it’s interesting that soon we will be able to open checking accounts at Morgan Stanley and GS. I’m sure the brand dilution is worth it, given how much capital (i.e. deposits) they’ll have and how cheap it will be to borrow. 

(Also, as far as we’re talking about short-selling, I would short the dollar if I could. But I can’t, given my 3 digit bank account balance.)

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