OK, I'll admit it, even I was confused about the point of my last post. I think I was trying to reconcile the disconnect between what the most successful investors are saying versus the most famous economists. Let me continue the thought.
One thing that should discredit someone from the start is whether they were able to accurately forecast what happened to the U.S. and global economies over the past few years. And while you have plenty of economists who are happy to point out the appropriate plan of attack now, these same people didn't see the storm coming, and haven't produced terribly satisfying explanations for why it happened in the first place (even with hindsight as their guide). I contrast that with the group of investors who I described as Austrian sympathizers. They were calling for these problems years in advance, and had a thesis which made a lot of sense and matched up with actual outcomes, allowing them to monetize it.
Thus, even though the school of economic thought with which they most associate does not provide an active solution for what ails us, and has been dead wrong about where interest rates would be, I still feel like they deserve the benefit of the doubt. In this type of race, it should not be measured in a couple or three years. There is something too short-term in the arguments of other thinkers. And when I lay that over their expositions of what happened (unconvincing), I am again apt to follow the guys who saw the problems coming.
So, in the context of the investor versus the economist, the former can still be vindicated, even if the interim noise gives the other folks something to puff their chests about for a little while. And, in large part, their success comes because they are not ideologues or hacks.
