I’ve avoided cigars until now, perhaps because of the wrong associations with the nouveau riche. Or because I felt I was too young. Or maybe I was simply waiting for a tempting enough invitation. José wooed me for a few months before I agreed to give it a try. He texted me about each of his new acquisitions as if he was telling me about his (fictional) many mistresses. He spoke about his humidor with the pride that only a Spaniard can talk about an inanimate object. Eventually, the technical geek in me fell for the cheap humidor talk.

We gathered around a bottle of Chianti, a platter of French brie and blue cheese and home made bread. He presented me with a Dominican Cohiba and taught me Cigar 101: “When you finish a cigarette, you put it out like this (he gestures the violent crushing of a cigarette but). But with a cigar you never do that. You have to let it die with dignity. You just put it in the ashtray and it extinguishes itself.”

Much like red wine, what I loved about cigars is that they make good conversation a mandatory accompaniment. Our smoky evening went from Churchill and Hemingway to Oscar Wilde, the puritans, the Cuban Revolution and the subtleties of the Spanish language. I learned not only about the differences in size, shape and character of various cigars but also about the Spanish sound of one of the deadliest phrases in a woman’s arsenal (“Te quiero, pero sólo como amigo!”). The conversation veered naturally from corridas to love games and to political conflicts. And it lasted until my Cohiba and his Romeo y Julieta were finally put to rest “with dignity”.

José eventually pronounced me “a natural” and emphatically concluded that there is nothing more he needs to teach me about cigars. Which reminded me. I once had the honor to interview the great Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. Prompted by one of my questions, “El Hablador” told me that love and eroticism could not be possible in the absence of civilization, of culture, of imagination and of a love for rituals.

The really irresistible thing about the evening was not the Cohiba itself, but the ritual associated with it. And it’s probably what will make me go back for more.

Me: Pick a number!
Girl: What number?
Me: Any number between 1 and 100.
Girl: What for?
Me: You’ll see. Just pick a number.
Girl: OK. 68.
Me: Thanks. Now, if I tell you what the price of an at-the-money straddle with 1 year to expiry and implied volatility of 68% is, assuming a zero annual rate, will you give me your phone number?
Girl: If I tell you the probability, rounded to two decimal places, of that actually happening, will you disappear mysteriously and pretend we’ve never met?

It has been suggested that the American public was apparently elected to the role of our old friend, Alice in Wonderland. I agree that Alice was peering into a wonderful looking-glass of the wonderful economics. White Knights had great schemes of unlimited sales in foreign markets and discounted the future ten years ahead.

The poorhouse was to vanish like the Cheshire cat. A mad hatter invited everyone to “have some more profits.” There were no profits, except on paper. A cynical Father William in the lower district of Manhattan balanced the sinuous evil of a pool-ridden stock market on the end of his nose. A puzzled, somewhat skeptical Alice asked the Republican leadership some simple questions:

“Will not the printing and selling of more stocks and bonds, the building of new plants and the increase of efficiency produce more goods than we can buy?”

“No,” shouted Humpty Dumpty. “The more we produce the more we can buy.”

“What if we produce a surplus?”

“Oh, we can sell it to foreign consumers.

“How can the foreigners pay for it?”

“Why, we will lend them the money.”

“I see.” said little Alice, “they will buy our surplus with our money. Of course, these foreigners will pay us back by selling us their goods?”

“Oh, not at all,” said Humpty Dumpty. “We set up a high wall called the tariff.”

“And,” said Alice at last, “how will the foreigners pay off these loans?”

“That is easy,” said Humpty Dumpty, “did you ever hear of a moratorium?”

GSB Courtyard, 14 February

“So what was this little concerto about?” I asked one of the band members while they were packing their instruments.

“We don’t know, they just asked us to play here during lunch.”

Kudos to the GSB management or to whoever organized this tasteful undertone, a perfect counterpoint to the invasion of plastic Cupids.

On 9/11, after the first hit, all traders were crazy buying this stuff to hedge against the market volatility.

I eventually understood that what they were doing was useful not only for themselves or for their customers, but also for the economy. Still, what a haunting image (the traders “going crazy”) to overlay on top of that of the falling man…

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.

It’s a motto I myself truly believe in and try to live by. Having said that, I now must sadly return to a few unexamined finance questions.

We were talking about incentivizing employees through stock options when somebody said:

But isn’t it so that these options are vested and they’re actually made to handcuff you to your desk?

To which the professor replied:

You’re certainly not a romantic of any kind!

© Getty Images / Rich Lam

My favorite shot from the year’s most powerful photos. Australian Scott Jones kisses his Canadian girlfriend Alex Thomas after she was knocked to the ground by a police officer’s riot shield in Vancouver, British Columbia. Canadians rioted after the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins.

This reminds me of Jacques Brel’s song,

“Quand on a que l’amour
Pour parler aux canons
Et rien qu’une chanson
Pour convaincre un tambour

Alors sans avoir rien
Que la force d’aimer
Nous aurons dans nos mains,
Amis le monde entier”