“Over the years, I’ve often cited the wisdom of John Kenneth Galbraith. It’s he who said, “There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.” I find myself using this quote all the time. Another of my favorite Galbraith quotes is from his book A Short History of Financial Euphoria. In describing the reasons for “speculative euphoria and programmed collapse,” he discusses two factors “little noted in our time or in past times. One is the extreme brevity of the financial memory.”  I often cite this factor, too. But I don’t remember ever writing about his second factor, which Galbraith says is “the specious association of money and intelligence.” When people get rich, others take that to mean they’re smart. And when investors succeed, it’s often assumed their intelligence can lead to similarly good results in other fields. Further, successful investors often come to believe in the strength of their own intellect and opine about fields with no connection to investing. But investors’ success can be the result of a string of lucky breaks or a propitious environment, rather than any special talents. They may or may not be intelligent, but often they don’t know any more than most others about subjects outside of investing. Nevertheless, many are unsparing with their opinions, and those opinions often are highly valued by the general populace. That’s the specious part. And today we find some of them speaking with conviction on all sides of the issues related to the election.”