The book received approval from Khamenei’s office and is thus the most authoritative document regarding his position on the issue.<\/p>\n
Khamenei makes his position clear from the start: Israel has no right to exist as a state. He claims his strategy for the destruction of Israel is not based on anti-Semitism, which he describes as a European phenomenon. His position is based on “well-established Islamic principles.”<\/p>\n
According to Khamenei, Israel, which he labels an “enemy” and “foe,” is a special case for three reasons. The first is that it is a loyal “ally of the American Great Satan” and a key element in its “evil scheme” to dominate “the heartland of the Ummah.”<\/p>\n
Khamenei describes Israel as “a cancerous tumor” whose elimination would mean that “the West’s hegemony and threats will be discredited” in the Middle East. In its place, he boasts, “the hegemony of Iran will be promoted.”<\/p>\n
Hamas won elections in Gaza in 2007 and hasn’t held an election since. Opponents are in jail, dead or exiled.<\/p>\n
In 1988, Hamas published its charter, calling for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic society in historic Palestine. Hamas does not believe in Israel’s right to exist. Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin’s initial aim was to create an Islamic state on the land now comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.<\/p>\n
This latest war will disavow Israel of ever being able to work a peace deal with Hamas. The only solution is clearly to destroy Hamas and replace it with something democratic — as we did with Germany and Japan at the end of World War II. It will not be pretty.<\/p>\n
Investing hasn’t been easy<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n My friend Steve sent me a piece showing that Penn’s endowment had grown only 1.3% in the 2023 fiscal year (ending June 30), and slightly less than 1% in fiscal 2022. It was the only university among the top seven that didn’t produce a negative return — that means most lost money investing. Even I did much better.<\/p>\n Five days ago, The New York Times<\/em> ran a brilliant article,<\/p>\n “\u2018Dumb Money\u2019 Exposes the Baffling Allure of Bad Investment Advice”<\/strong><\/p>\n I want to print the entire article because it explains investing so much better than I ever could. Here we go:<\/p>\n By\u00a0<\/span>Owen A. Lamont<\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0Richard H. Thaler<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Mr. Lamont is a former professor of finance at the Yale School of Management. Mr. Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.<\/em><\/p>\n The new movie \u201cDumb Money\u201d dramatizes\u00a0the true story<\/a>\u00a0of an unlikely messiah named Roaring Kitty who decides to sink his life savings into shares of the video-game seller GameStop and then praise the stock to his fans. So many people buy GameStop shares that the company\u2019s valuation soars, crushing the positions of professional hedge funds that had bet against it. Thus, a band of lovable misfits triumphs over the Wall Street fat cats.<\/p>\n Much as we enjoyed the movie, we are economists, not movie critics. And as practitioners of the dismal science, we worry that some viewers will continue to be inspired to copy the heroes\u2019 investment strategies, which is about as smart as driving home at 100 miles per hour after seeing \u201cThe Fast and the Furious.\u201d<\/p>\n You can see our worry in the movie\u2019s title: \u201cDumb Money.\u201d That\u2019s Wall Street parlance for unsophisticated individual investors who make mistakes that can be exploited. Is it nice to call the actions of everyday Joe investors dumb? No. Is it fair? Well \u2026 yes.<\/p>\n We aren\u2019t literally calling retail investors dumb. What we are saying is that retail investors are smart people who unfortunately behave in dumb, self-destructive ways. Their actions reflect overconfidence, financial ignorance and a wealth-reducing love of gambling. Even smart people like Sir Isaac Newton can make dumb investment decisions (he lost money<\/a>\u00a0in the South Sea bubble).<\/p>\n And in celebrating an unintelligent investment strategy in a moment when the stock market was reaching historic heights of stupidity, \u201cDumb Money\u201d raises an important question: Are American financial markets getting dumber over time? Or was this just a momentary lapse?<\/p>\n We did see a prior peak of stock market dumbness in the 1999-2000 tech stock bubble, when many retail investors made the mistake of being wildly overoptimistic about technology stocks. One of us, Owen Lamont, has even co-written (with Andrea Frazzini)\u00a0an academic paper\u00a0titled, you guessed it, \u201cDumb Money,\u201d describing self-destructive investor behavior during this period. But compared to the events of the GameStop story, that crazy optimism seems almost rational, since it at least involved a correct thesis (that the internet would eventually produce some profitable companies), however stupidly applied.<\/p>\n After the tech bubble burst a year or so later, U.S. stock markets were less obviously dumb until the Covid-19 lockdowns spurred a tsunami of retail investing, as enormous numbers of people were suddenly stuck at home with\u00a0nothing to do\u00a0and, importantly, nothing to bet on. Casinos were closed and professional sports were on hold. Meanwhile, brokers like Robinhood were offering the option of trading stocks commission-free.<\/p>\n The gambling impulse was also goosed by stimulus checks and social media platforms like Reddit and YouTube. Money flowed to \u201cmeme stocks,\u201d shares of oftentimes struggling companies that somehow caught the popular imagination owing to nostalgia or the desire to root for the underdog. This brings us to GameStop, a meme stock whose rise at the start of 2021 \u2014 despite the company\u2019s dismal business outlook\u00a0\u2014\u00a0was really also an expression of populist anger. Ordinary Americans wanted to bet on the home team (an army of individual investors) against that other team (sinister billionaires betting against America).<\/p>\n Since GameStop, a suspiciously high number of other dumb things have occurred recently. Just this year, we\u2019ve seen bizarre price fluctuations of meme stocks that are\u00a0in\u00a0or\u00a0approaching\u00a0bankruptcy\u00a0and in foreign companies\u00a0listing\u00a0in the United States. One possible culprit for this wave of global dumbening is social media, which played a big role in GameStop by facilitating investor herding.<\/p>\n Should we throw up our hands and conclude that the whole stock market is crazy? No. These crazy incidents still remain confined to only a few stocks. Stock prices usually revert to fundamental value, although it may take years. When this happens, retail investors who overpaid and held on too long get hurt.<\/p>\n Retail investors have a well-established track record of destroying their own wealth. Studies have shown that individual traders somehow have the opposite of skill \u2014 they manage to do worse than they would by\u00a0picking<\/a>\u00a0stocks at random.<\/p>\n Why? Investing is hard, and there is a\u00a0lot<\/em>\u00a0of competition. There are thousands of actively managed mutual funds. Do you think the average golfer would have a chance against Tiger Woods in his prime?<\/p>\n The ineptitude of individual investors is not for lack of trying. In fact, the harder that individual investors try (in the sense of trading more often), the more they lose. For example, the professors Brad Barber and Terrance Odean found that women investors did better than men. Why? Because men traded more. (They titled\u00a0their paper<\/a>\u00a0\u201cBoys Will Be Boys.\u201d)<\/p>\n So the conclusion from this finding is not (necessarily) that men are dumber. They are just more aggressively and overconfidently manifesting their dumbness. Perhaps this idea will resonate with some readers.<\/p>\n The wealth-destroying powers of retail investors have been demonstrated many times: in stocks, mutual funds and options markets; in different countries and in different time periods.<\/p>\n The evidence from Taiwan, which has excellent data on stock market trading, is particularly striking. Mr. Barber and Mr. Odean, together with their co-authors Yi-Tsung Lee and Yu-Jane Liu, have shown that individual investors underperform other investors by nearly 4 percent per year and that these losses are equivalent to about\u00a02 percent of Taiwan\u2019s G.D.P<\/a>.<\/p>\n If retail investors are the dumb money, who\u2019s the smart money? The answer includes skeptics who can spot a company\u2019s shortcomings and express their views by either selling their shares or betting that share prices will fall in a practice called short selling.<\/p>\n Although \u201cDumb Money\u201d depicts professional hedge fund investors as heartless villains who treat a pet pig better than their housekeepers, it would be wrong for movie audiences to think that selling short is inherently bad. As we saw in the movie \u201cThe Big Short,\u201d\u00a0which depicts a band of misfit short sellers spotting major problems in the U.S. financial system before its near collapse in 2008, these investors can also be lovable \u2014 even heroes. (Full disclosure: We may be biased about \u201cThe Big Short\u201d because one of us\u00a0had a small part\u00a0in the movie, while the other is jealous about that fact.)<\/p>\n We certainly hope that over time, widespread meme stock investing will go the way of toilet paper hoarding and people will go back to rooting for the Red Sox versus the Yankees (or vice versa) instead of Roaring Kitty versus hedge funds. We hope that citizens concerned about inequality will express themselves in the voting booth, not in the stock market. And we hope that retail investors confine their gambling to small stakes, like buying lottery tickets or placing wagers on their favorite teams.<\/p>\n Ask any finance professor and you\u2019ll get the same boring answer: The best way for most people to invest in the long term is to hold a diversified portfolio of stocks. Admittedly, a movie about a bunch of ordinary people gradually building wealth through prudent financial decisions would be the world\u2019s most boring movie. Boring, but also not dumb.<\/p>\n
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