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Chelsea Clinton’s husbands faux pas is nothing new in the investment industry. In the early 1980s when I was a broker at Merrill Lynch they had a mutual fund called the Phoenix Fund. They would buy stocks in a diversity of failed companies, most of which were in Chapter 11. Investers were warned that this was a very risky venture, that, on average, less than one in ten companies would recover. I don’t recall all of the data on the success of this fund, but the 1 in ten was pretty optimistic.
For my own part, I got a few of my more adventurous investors to buy Union Carbide after it dropped more than 60 points following the Bopal, India tragedy. It recovered quite well, and they made nice money on the deal. Later, on my advice a client of mine bought a large batch of Texaco bonds at deep discount when Texaco was under attack by Penzoil. That also gave excellent returns.
I made great returns for one client who wanted to invest in stocks and bonds denominated in Deutsche Marks just before the dollar began to drop against European currencies.
These three were risky ventures, but not insane. Investing in a country which has dug itself into a hole and refuses to stop digging fits my definition of insane.