QE3 was announced today and reactions have been relatively muted. There are some complaints that money is again being redistributed from asset holders to debtors via the mechanism of negative real rates. It seems like a good occasion to put forth two oddities that I’ve always seen as embedded in capital markets as they’re currently constructed. They are: the assumption that money doesn’t spoil, and the assumption of market optimality.
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There is some rumbling (here, here) regarding the formation of another tech bubble, this time riding on the so-called “Web 2.0,” i.e. social media. To that, I’ll attest that over the past year, there has been a steady stream of stealth startups of this sort arriving seemingly out of nowhere and hiring all comers.

What to make of this? Is social media any more viable than e-commerce of the first dot-com bubble?
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Lately, for good reason, there has been many advice columns telling people how to plan for personal financial goals. It always used to boggle my mind when I heard exhortations to save, where “save” is used in the sense of an action among which to choose, parallel to things like “invest” or “work”. Until I realized, some years back, that to save is a parallel action of choice to some.
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