Donald Luskin

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Donald Luskin (born April 1954) is Chief Investment Officer for Trend Macrolytics

TheStreet.com
. His media commentaries and appearances touch on investing, economic and political matters.

Luskin has published three books, Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide,[1] Portfolio Insurance: A Guide to Dynamic Hedging[2] and I Am John Galt: Today's Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It (co-author Andrew Greta).[3]

Luskin also wrote a blog, "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid," based on the title of his as-yet unpublished book. The blog's tagline was: "How big government, big business, big media and big academia block your road to financial freedom—and tell you it's for your own good." Luskin is a self-avowed libertarian, and his blog linked to other financial and political blogs espousing similar beliefs.

Biography and achievements

On his former blog, Luskin stated he "attended Yale in 1973–1974; dropped out to rejoin the real world as soon as possible."[4]

After dropping out of college, Luskin worked for several years as a creative consultant to Los Angeles companies such as

Warner Brothers, where he worked on iconic films such as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Ken Russell's Altered States. He and two colleagues developed a series of all-night treasure-hunts, one of which was adapted into the Walt Disney motion picture Midnight Madness.[5]

Luskin's investment career began in 1979, when he started a hedge fund while an

Pacific Stock Exchange. As his fund grew and evolved, he became a market maker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (where he helped pioneer index options trading, executing the very first OEX contract) and the New York Stock Exchange, where he traded the first option contract in the NYSE's history.[citation needed
]

In 1984 Luskin joined

Jefferies & Co., a brokerage firm. There as senior vice president, he invented POSIT, a crossing network enabling institutional investors to exchange entire portfolios with each other. POSIT was later spun out of Jefferies as a separate publicly traded company, Investment Technology Group
.

In 1987 Luskin joined Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, a division of

US patent.[7]

In August 1999, during the

JDS Uniphase and Extreme Networks. At the end of 1999, OpenFund was among a handful of the best-performing mutual funds in America. After the market top in March 2000, the valuations of technology companies collapsed and many OpenFund investors redeemed their shares.[10] The fund was shut down in the summer of 2001, after losing much of its investors' money. Published reports note that the open fund lost over half its value.[10]

Predictions

Over the years, some of his predictions have drawn controversy. In May 2001, when he was a columnist for the financial website

theStreet.com, he predicted a new bull market in gold and gold stocks, for which he drew intense criticism from fellow columnists including Jim Cramer.[11] Shortly thereafter, Luskin's escalating public dispute with Cramer led to his resignation from theStreet.com via real-time postings on the site's discussion boards that became a cause célèbre on the web.[12]

Luskin's predictions courted controversy again in 2008 when, in a September The Washington Post opinion piece,[13] he cited evidence of what he claimed were factual errors made by Barack Obama and members of his presidential campaign concerning the state of the economy. Luskin claimed that the market was healthy, and Obama was simply using the state of the economy to discredit John McCain. However, the following day, Lehman Brothers filed for the biggest bankruptcy in US history and two days later, on September 16, stock markets imploded, thus discrediting every prediction he made in his editorial. Additionally, in the same editorial, he cited evidence that the economy was weak, but not in recession. He wrote, "…anyone who says we're in a recession, or heading into one—especially the worst one since the Great Depression—is making up his own private definition of recession." Shortly afterward, following the sudden collapse of Lehman and several other large financial firms, the economy sharply worsened, and was subsequently declared to have been in recession all year by the National Bureau of Economic Research.[14] Foreign Policy included Luskin's prediction in its list of "The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008" on its website and noted that it gave additional opportunities for liberal bloggers to criticize Luskin.[15] The editors of The Yale Book of Quotations also made note of the inopportune timing of Luskin's editorial and included his prediction in their list of "Top ten quotes of 2008".[16] He has been singled out for "some of the worst, money losing commentary of the past few years."[17]

He has been frequently referred to by

Laffer Curve.[18]

Conflicts with Paul Krugman

Luskin has been controversial as a public intellectual. Much of his blog and many of his NRO columns were devoted to arguments that economic facts, figures, and trends are distorted by

pundits and the media. He has a particular animosity towards The New York Times, especially columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, whose economic pronouncements he endeavored to debunk. Luskin was de facto leader of what he called the "Krugman Truth Squad," an ad hoc group of bloggers dedicated to detailing and rebutting what they consider Krugman's lies and distortions.[19]

According to

National Review Online, he regularly assaults Krugman's logic, his politics, his economic theories, his character and his accuracy."[20] Luskin claims that his work has resulted in corrections from Krugman and "the imposition of a new and more rigorous corrections policy for the entire Times editorial page."[21]

Krugman occasionally responded directly to Luskin's criticisms. In one instance Luskin accused Krugman of making an error in his appraisal of the costs and effects of the 2003 tax cuts.

Hannity and Colmes, "That's a guy, that's a guy who actually stalks me on the web, and once stalked me personally".[25] The animosity between Luskin and Krugman became so intense it became the subject of a story in The New Yorker with extensive remarks from both men.[26] Krugman's characterization of Luskin as a stalker was repeated by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) prompting a threat of legal action from lawyers representing Luskin.[26][27]

References

  1. ISBN 0-471-85464-6
    .
  2. ISBN 0-471-85849-8
    .
  3. ^ "I Am John Galt: Today's Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It | Wiley". Wiley.com.
  4. ^ "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid". Archived from the original on May 18, 2007.
  5. ^ "SnoutCast #47: "Before Midnight"".
  6. ISBN 9780593087688
    .
  7. ^ "United States Patent: 7390056". January 16, 2017. Archived from the original on 2017-01-16.
  8. ^ "A fund goes live on the Net". CNN. September 17, 1999. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
  9. ^ "OpenFund closes its doors". CNN. Archived from the original on April 19, 2010. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
  10. ^ a b "ClosedFund: Seeking Buyer, MetaMarkets Shuts Down Funds – TheStreet". Archived from the original on September 27, 2007.
  11. theStreet.com
    .
  12. Barron's
    , June 25, 2001
  13. ^ Luskin, Donald (September 14, 2008). "Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line". The Washington Post.
  14. ^ "Business Cycle Dating Committee Announcement December 1, 2008". NBER.
  15. ^ The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008 Archived 2010-01-10 at the Wayback Machine, Foreign Policy, December 2008
  16. ^ Palin tops list of memorable quotes, NBC News (Associated Press), December 15, 2008.
  17. ^ Barry Ritholtz, cited in Better Trades Archived April 19, 2009, at the Wayback Machine, February 2, 2009
  18. ^ "The Washington Monthly".
  19. ^ Luskin, Donald (June 13, 2011). "Paul Krugman: The Prophet of Socialism". National Review. In 2003, I set out to expose Krugman's various distortions . . . I started first on my blog, and soon afterward in a series of columns for National Review Online called "The Krugman Truth Squad" (KTS). ... The series of columns was structured as what is now called "crowdsourcing": Within several hours of a Krugman column's appearing on the Times website, I and a network of fellow bloggers would put it under a microscope and discover all the filthy microbes hiding in every crack. We'd fact-check every claim, confirm every quotation, run down every source, and compare every statement for consistency with statements made in the past.
  20. ^ Okrent, Daniel (March 28, 2004). "The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact". The New York Times.
  21. National Review Online
    .
  22. ^ "Donald Luskin on Paul Krugman and Jobs on NRO Financial". National Review. Archived from the original on 2007-04-26. Retrieved 2007-05-08.
  23. ^ "The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page". www.pkarchive.org.
  24. ^ "The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page". www.pkarchive.org.
  25. ^ "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid". Archived from the original on June 11, 2007.
  26. ^ a b Ben McGrath, "Blalking", New Yorker, November 17, 2003.
  27. ^ "Eschaton".

External links

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