Kochland by Christopher Leonard

[Mister Imperceptible]

Well said.

[fiby41]

What I missed in the index fund argument is that not allowing oneself to make dumb decisions is a dumb decision.

Buffet has said somewhere you're allowed to make ten dumb decisions in your life.

I like the idea as it presupposes there's a healthy mean between being conservative and risky behaviour. But a large buffer is required so that the risks not panning out does not render you insolvent. Insolvent in the sense being unable to be dumb when the next opportunity arises. No one thinks they are making a dumb decision when intentionally making it. It is dumb only in hindsight.
Another catch to that statement is there are higher order fallout where you have to make the least dumb of available decisions after making the first decision that turned out to be dumb. Reasons for this being ego investment, inertia to do course correction, transition cost, or sunk cost.

[Jason]

Koch industries had learned enough corporate lessons by the time of the housing crisis that although they were greatly impacted by the event, they did not suffer a Lehman type collapse. The great recession was for them more of a political event than an economic event as it reinforced Charles Koch's belief that US capitalism was not true capitalism. He did not blame Wall Street. He blamed government policy in the bailout and this is where his real political involvement commenced. Not only that, they were quickly able to pivot into their next economic play - oil. Not to get into into all the details, they were able to do this (once again) because as a mass supplier, they were able to trade on their own proprietary information. Furthermore, they were able to increase their supply by using oil freighters not as transport carriers but as floating storage units.

As Warren Buffet once stated (I paraphrase) "Risk is not synonymous with volatility." But to the Koch brothers, not only were they beyond risk, they did not need to hedge on the swing of volatility. They had positioned themselves to monetize volatility itself. If risk is checkers, and hedging volatility is chess, they weren't playing either. They just needed others to play both games.

Working for Koch at the corporate level was like joining a lucrative cult. Working for Koch at the blue collar, union level was a click above picking cotton. I think the best way to identify Charles Koch was that he was the corporate equivalent of L. Ron Hubbard except there was no doubting that he believed in the things he stated. And of course, he wasn't concerned with aliens, he just needed an army of thousands of mid-west Tom Cruises to carry his water.