Michael Edesess Journalist Profile

Articles

What Israel should have done

Jan 14, 2025 | johnmenadue.com | Michael Edesess

Israel chose the wrong way to deal with its enemies. For a better way, it could have borrowed a leaf from China. Israel’s — and the Jewish people’s — plight needs to be understood and sympathised with. Jews were hounded and discriminated against, and much worse, for decades and more, long before the Nazis slaughtered six million Jews in the Holocaust. Survivors of the Holocaust were then rejected as immigrants by multiple Western countries, including the United States.
America has twisted take on city’s ‘35-plus’ subversion case

Dec 9, 2024 | chinadailyhk.com | Michael Edesess

The United States has a habit of viewing China’s actions and statements as bad or evil, while similar actions or statements by the “free world” are good and right. No more egregious example of this phenomenon exists than that of the US labeling China’s nonlethal reaction to terrorism in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region as a “genocide”, then insisting that Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Gazans in response to its own experience of terrorism is not genocide.
The Surprising Reason It Might Be OK To Give in to Greed and Fear

Oct 24, 2024 | caia.org | Michael Edesess

By Michael Edesess, Ph.D, Managing Partner / Special Advisor at M1K LLC. Sticking to your asset allocation, no matter what, might not be the best strategy. One of the most fundamental precepts of money management is to recommend an asset allocation based on an investor’s risk tolerance and then stick to it, rebalancing regularly to ensure that the allocation stays close to the original recommendation.
The Right Way to Solve Asset Management

Sep 30, 2024 | advisorperspectives.com | Michael Edesess

The current approach to investment management has no sound basis and doesn’t work. There is a better way. I have written many articles pointing out that the current approach to investment management doesn’t actually work. The theory is all single-point-in-time. This is absurd for a process of investment, saving, and spending that takes place over the long term and aims at goals that are often far in the future.
Hong Kong should make technological innovation its focus

Sep 25, 2024 | chinadailyhk.com | Michael Edesess

For reasons both good and bad, finance is exciting to some people, especially students graduating from colleges and graduate schools. The good reason is that finance, appropriately done, is essential for moving resources toward their most productive uses. The bad reason is that people make more money in finance and are treated like celebrities even though their newfound wealth does not benefit the world.
I Was Right About Piketty

Sep 18, 2024 | caia.org | Michael Edesess

By Michael Edesess, Ph.D, Managing Partner / Special Advisor at M1K LLC. Readers may recall that in 2014, a weighty (700-page) and abstruse book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by French economist Thomas Piketty, became a surprise best-seller, reaching number one on The New York Times best-seller list for hard-cover nonfiction.
The mistaken conventional wisdom about nuclear energy - Pearls and Irritations

Sep 14, 2024 | johnmenadue.com | Michael Edesess

Recently, three articles have appeared in P&I about nuclear energy, one by Richard Broinowski on 29 August, one by Jim Coombs on 2 September, and a third by Joseph G. Davis on 3 September. All of them are negative about nuclear energy. The negativity in each case is driven by a fundamentally mistaken but widespread belief about nuclear energy safety. I respond here to these articles with a more positive view of nuclear.
The Statistical Precepts of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Aug 12, 2024 | advisorperspectives.com | Michael Edesess

The statistical and investment views of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the blockbuster book The Black Swan, are easy to summarize. First, most probability distributions are fat-tailed, not thin-tailed like the normal distribution. That renders useless or wrong the application of almost all conventional statistical techniques.
The Unsurprising Failure of the Largest Hedge Fund in the World

Aug 9, 2024 | caia.org | Michael Edesess

By Michael Edesess, Ph.D., Managing Partner / Special Advisor at M1K LLC. Few practices in the business world are as absurd, senseless, irrational, and cynical as the allocation of investments of large public pension funds and endowments. And few fail so often and so predictably to achieve their true objectives. Yet almost all outside the industry – and many inside it – are fooled into believing the opposite.
Washington finds itself in moral muddle

Jun 16, 2024 | chinadailyhk.com | Michael Edesess

The United States has long regarded itself as the most moral country in the world, with the highest moral standards and the might to enforce them globally if necessary. While this belief has never been entirely true, it was magnified by America’s crucial role during and after World War II, not only in America’s eyes but also in the eyes of much of the rest of the world. But the US has never been in such a moral muddle as it is now. Two recent incidents illustrate the confusion.