DON’T TRADE STOCK TIPS OR OBSESS ABOUT THE FED, READ MOBY DICK INSTEAD

YOU NEED TO be inoculated from some strange but popular notions about the economy. After the inoculation—it won’t hurt much—you can turn off CNBC and skip over most of the economic chatter. It’ll give you time to read Moby Dick. You really should. It’s amazing and is markedly less fictional than the notions here.

Let’s begin with this one: . CNBC specializes in it, with its talking, or sometimes shouting, heads. People want certitude, and stock tips provide the illusion. The industry of stock tipping came out of some century-old court decisions that trustees be prudent. The idea was to prevent the trustees from making off with the assets