Andrew Redleaf, founder and CEO, Whitebox Advisors
I was flattered when HedgeFund Intelligence recently invited me to join a panel of fund managers to prognosticate about the future of the economy. Alas, when I saw the questions I realised my only possible response was: “Sorry, but I don’t have a clue.” Macro-economics is so alien to how we invest at Whitebox that it has become a catchphrase for us: “We don’t do macro.”
The invitation, however, prompted me to rethink that phrase because, of course, we do “do macro”. A very substantial portion of our returns over the years have been driven by what most people would certainly describe as big macro calls. Those calls, however, have never been macroeconomic calls. They have been macro-market calls. There are big differences between the two, the biggest being that calling the economy is flat-out impossible while calling the market...