Name Dropping
I met some interesting people on my recent travels:
* I went to dinner with Kevin Duffy, an Austrian (in the economic sense) hedge fund manager who had quite a good 2008. The industrious von Pepe has located an April 2007 interview with Duffy.
* During my lunch talk in the Q&A someone challenged my recommendation to stock up on gold. The guy said something to the effect that if we’re in a scenario where owning the S&P 500 is useless, then having gold won’t matter either. I said something flip like, “Well if we’re in a Mad Max environment, that will obviously be awful, but even so I’d rather have a few pounds of gold than not.” Later, when signing books, a different guy said, “You mentioned Mad Max. Well this book you just signed is a gift for Mel’s father.” (If you are going to put jokes in the comments, they’d better be really clever.)
* But the big event was meeting the infamous Robert Wenzel across the street from the Treasury. (This occurred during my DC leg of the whirlwind week, of course.) I finally put to rest my suspicion that RW was a 15-year-old blogging from his mom’s basement. Unless that kid was out in a van, feeding lines to a guy he hired for the night…
