Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Always remember........................
"Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth."
-Dr. Stockman, as channeled by Henrik Ibsen in An Enemy of the People
Fifty years ago..................
The Rolling Stones...........................................Heart of Stone
better audio version here
This has the ring of truth about it............
"The complexity of modern finance has been designed, and has operated, principally to benefit financial intermediaries rather that the users of financial services. The claims of Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner and others, that the innovative use of new instruments made the financial system more robust, were false. Interdependencies between financial institutions have increased to a point at which the system as a whole displays fragility born of complexity."
-John Kay, Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance
Monday, November 9, 2015
It's Hedley............................!
.............................................The Oracle Google continues its tradition of obscure birthday celebrations.
A stranger to my eyes......................
Roberta Flack................................................Killing Me Softly
From my favorite optimist..............
Matt Ridley says:
Woody Allen once said: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
That’s the way pretty well everybody talks about the future. When I was young the future was grim. The population explosion was unstoppable, famine was inevitable, pesticides were giving us cancer, the deserts were advancing, the oil was running out, the rain forests were doomed, acid rain, bird flu, and the hole in the ozone layer were going to make us sick, my sperm count was on the way down, and a nuclear winter would finish us off.
You think I am exaggerating. He’s what a best-selling book by the economist Robert Heilbroner concluded in the year I left school: "The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed."
It was only a decade later that it dawned on me that every one of these threats had either been a false alarm or had been greatly exaggerated. The dreadful future was not as bad as the grown-ups had told me. Life just keeps on getting better and better for the vast majority of people.
Remember: bad news sells, but for the long haul, always bet on the optimist.
Fifty years ago......................
Julie Andrews..............................................The Hills Are Live
The hills are alive,
With the sound of music
With songs they have sung
For a thousand years
The hills fill my heart,
With the sound of music
My heart wants to sing
Every song it hears
My heart wants to beat
Like the wings of the birds
That rise from the lake to the trees
My heart wants to sigh
Like a chime that flies
From a church on a breeze
To laugh like a brook
When it trips and falls
Over stones on its way
To sing through the night
Like a lark
Who is learning to pray
I go to the hills
When my heart is lonely
I know I will hear
What I've heard before
My heart will be blessed,
With the sound of music
And I'll sing once more.
What could possibly go wrong...........
......................................................with the Uberization of money?
The most immediate change will be an explosion in peer-to-peer lending. Just as Uber returns us to a world where anyone with a car could offer a ride to anyone with a thumb, peer-to-peer lending is both new and old. Before there was a robust retail and commercial banking system, there were people with money to lend and people who wanted to borrow it. But the current wave of peer-to-peer services takes this much further, into a hypercharged virtual realm where pools of small lenders can combine online to disperse pools of small loans. And they can do it without the friction, cost or heavy regulatory hurdles of traditional banking.
-as extracted from this WSJ published essay on the topic.
For almost forty years, we have watched, with more than a passing interest, the intersection of real estate and finance. We don't know much for certain, but we are fairly sure that any financial practice that can be described as "hypercharged" will end badly.
One of the frictions involved with borrowing from traditional banks is their quaint notion of return of capital as well as return on capital. Or more plainly stated, they firmly believe that they should get their principal back, with interest and on time. This may seem odd, but one of the major causes of the late recent economic unpleasantness was Wall Street's hunger for more securitized mortgage products to sell. That hunger had grown exponentially once Wall Street learned that they could disconnect, without risks to themselves, the act of first lending money from the second act of getting the money back, with interest, over time, and on time. That simple disconnect almost brought down our financial system. It will be interesting to watch how the latest innovations in "peer-to-peer" financing handle the all important repayment issue.
The headline asks...................
..............................if an "economic civil war" is on the horizon.
I assumed it was going to be another story of us Boomers vs the Youngsters. Nope. Bad assumption. It is Joel Kotkin's take on the growing conflict between high tech and industry. A few excerpts:
In contrast to engineers laboring in Houston or Detroit, those who work in Silicon Valley focus largely on the intangible economy based on media and software. The denizens of the various social media, and big data firms have little appreciation of the difficulties faced by those who build their products, create their energy, and grow their food. Unlike the factory or port economies of the past, those with jobs in the new “creative” economy also have little meaningful interaction with working class labor, even as they finance politicians who claim to speak for those blue collar voters.
The love-fest between Obama and Silicon Valley grows from a common belief in being extraordinary. The same media that has marveled at Obama’s celebrated brilliance also hails Silicon Valley’s ascendency as a triumph of brains over brawn.
Full post is here.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Unwind...................................
George Winston........................................................Autumn
It's the full album, 46+ minutes worth, so just sit back and enjoy
Feed my sheep..............................
Jefferson Airplane.........................................Good Shepherd
Alinsky.............................
I have known about Saul Alinsky since I was a kid growing up in the '60's. His efforts at "community organizing" did not always meet with approval with my parents' generation, and I suppose, instinctively and without ever actually reading his works, I picked up their bias. Chicago based community organizers have been much in the news here of late. At some point the question floated by, "what did Alinsky really say?" Since he wrote a book, it seemed like an easy question to answer. Still in the early pages, but this paragraph is interesting:
Does this then mean that the organizer in a free society for a free society is rudderless? No, I believe that he has a far better sense of direction and compass than the closed-society organizer with his rigid political ideology. First, the free-society organizer is loose, resilient, fluid, and on the move in a society which is itself in a state of constant change. To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations our society presents. In the end he has one conviction - a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions. The alternative to this would be rule by the elite - either a dictatorship or some form of a political aristocracy. I am not concerned if this faith in people is regarded as a prime truth and therefore a contradiction of what I have already written, for life is a story of contradictions. Believing in people, the radical has the job of organizing them so that they will have the power and opportunity to best meet each unforeseeable future crisis as the move ahead in their eternal search for those values of equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judaeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition. Democracy is not an end but the best means toward achieving these values. This is my credo for which I live and, if need be, die.
Fifty years ago..........................
Barry McGuire...........................................Eve of Destruction
On not working forever...................
The Zero Hedge blog points to an obvious fact about Social Security: there will be some solvency issues. The big and unanswered questions are why? and what to do?
We could point a finger at the government, as he does:
Ultimately this is a just another chapter in the same story– that government cannot be relied on to provide or produce, only to squander and fail.
Or, we could point a finger at us boomer citizens, as he also does:
The US Government Accountability Office recently released a report showing that tens of millions of Americans haven’t saved a penny for retirement; and roughly half of Baby Boomers have zero retirement savings.
Ultimately though, haven't we, as a society, become confused about the responsibility of control over our own lives? To wit:
Financial literacy is absolutely critical here, which includes the ability to both generate income and manage money, two things that aren’t taught in the government controlled education system.
Ultimately, learning to rely on yourself is no easy task, but it is an incredible opportunity to become more free.
Can I get an Amen............................................?
Ed Note: For further understanding, and a lesson in government-speak, you may want to read this.
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