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"I struggle to understand how speculation is supposed to be both profitable and destabilising, all at once," says Tim Harford at the FT. "Profitable speculation requires buying low and selling high. Destabilising speculation requires the opposite: short-selling shares in a trough, thus deepening the trough, and betting that frothy shares will become frothier. In other words, destabilising speculation means selling low and buying high. If that is a recipe for profit, I am missing something."

Some thoughts on the cost/benefit dilemma of end-of-life medical care, courtesy of the Freakenomics blog.

"Sometimes the markets just get things wrong," says Anatole Kaletsky in an interesting contrarian piece published by the Times. "It doesn't happen very often. Usually the market's collective wisdom is more perceptive than the individual opinions of the investors who comprise it. But every now and then - about twice every decade - markets make spectacular blunders, completely losing touch with the real economy of consumption, investment, employment and world trade."

The conventional wisdom is that inflation always hits the poor the hardest. Writing over at VoxEU, Christian Broda of the University of Chicago disagrees and suggests that the larger inflation burden falls on the richest households.

And finally, for some relief from all the doom and gloom in financial markets: "America needs another bubble," Chicago investor Bob Taiken tells The Onion. "At this point, bubbles are the only thing keeping us afloat."

Eben Esterhuizen 

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