By "accident," I was a third generation property and casualty insurance agent, owner of the George Hammerlein Agency, but educated to be a professional philosopher. Before my tenure at the Hammerlein Agency, I worked as a commercial fisherman, fishing off of the Aleutian chain out of Dutch harbor, ...more

By "accident," I was a third generation property and casualty insurance agent, owner of the George Hammerlein Agency, but educated to be a professional philosopher. Before my tenure at the Hammerlein Agency, I worked as a commercial fisherman, fishing off of the Aleutian chain out of Dutch harbor, for Alaskan and Brown crab, as well as taught logic and philosophy of science at the University of Cincinnati. The one enduring element to my work is that whenever I am working (i.e. selling insurance, using an equity portfolio as collateral to purchase real estate in cash, derivative trading by selling puts and calls, or importing art relative to the strength of the dollar), my labor is unalienated and grounded upon "critical capitalism." Even though capital markets are not rational and are driven by fear and greed, patterns do emerge and can be exploited for profit. Accordingly, "critical capitalism" is the fusion of postmodern philosophy and greed, so to discover and exploit those patterns of collective "fear and trembling." The operating philosophical hypothesis of critical capitalism is that the reality of financial markets is the absurd, since reason has no place in these systems of collective "fear and trembling." Postmodern philosophy (Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Lucan, etc.) provides a framework to apply the absurd hypothesis to financial markets in order to make "reasonable wagers" relative to respective markets. Just as Kierkegaard writes his works in names of different and rather ridiculous characters, so my commercial works in real estate, investment grade art, and equities are LLC(s) named after Paracelsus, Agricola, and Agrippa. Or, in other words, "credo quia absurdum est."less