Aaron Brown

And this is one of several reasons why even Bloomberg, the mainstream US financial media outlet, published a very interesting op-ed in April titled The Iran War Just Broke the Petrodollar.

This was written by Aaron Brown, who's the former head of financial market research at AQR Capital Management.

You know, this is a veteran of the financial industry, a market participant.

And he acknowledged that in several ways, this U.S. war against Iran has backfired and undermined the petrodollar system.

The Netherlands plans to repatriate 86 tons from the U.S. and Canada.

Relatedly, former AQR research head Aaron Brown wrote that foreign central banks have reduced Treasury holdings at the New York Fed by roughly $82 billion since February, while the 10-year yield rose above 4.4%.

He noted that global central banks now hold more gold than U.S. government bonds.

Meanwhile, London copper futures exceeded $14,000 per ton.

Yet once a number appears in a prestigious journal, an official report, or a dramatic headline, it acquires authority and soon gets repeated as fact.

Aaron Brown's new book, Wrong Number, is about what happens when that authority outruns the evidence.

Some headline figures we hear are simply implausible.

Others rest on bad definitions, cherry-picked periods, hidden assumptions, or correlations that are dressed up as causation.

Sometimes the number is technically accurate, but the story attached to it is not.

So why do so many influential claims travel from research papers into headlines, courtrooms, classrooms, and public policy when they fail basic tests of logic, rigor, and common sense? Well, today I'm delighted to be joined by Aaron Brown himself to the podcast.

Uh, Aaron has worked on hundreds of scientific projects as a data analyst, programmer, and statistician.

He has also made money in arenas where bad quantitative judgment is punished pretty quickly: financial trading, uh, poker, and other forms of gambling.