It’s Always Something For many years I have been saying that if I ever get a yacht, I plan to name it Always Something. This was intended as a cheap bit of humor since I had and have no intention of ever having a yacht. If I was serious about it I would have called my house here in San Diego Always Something, but instead I called it Casa Moonstruck after my favorite movie. I’ve…
Lynching in the White House As you may have seen this week, the House of Representatives passed a bi-partisan bill to make lynching a Federal crime. I must admit, the issue had never occurred to me even though I am told that it has been a controversial issue in Congress for 150 years and has been voted down something like 200 times. This time there were only four holdouts (strangely enough, including Justin Amash of…
Fear and Greed The markets are all the talk of the town this week in this and every town. It is not about a a bunch of market participants going paranoid out of extreme forecasting anxiety. As I heard Rachel Maddow say this evening, the markets are merely acting as a window on the rather extreme impact that the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is starting to have on the world economy. Let’s take a quick survey. We…
Self-Insuring During my career on Wall Street, I had occasion to become an expert of hedging and insurance. Let’s be clear about what I mean by an expert. I founded and ran our futures and options subsidiary thirty-five years ago when hardly anyone understood futures and options and very few in the financial world other than traders and commodities people even understood what hedging really was all about. This was the precursor to the derivatives…
A Century in Provence I recently stumbled upon a story about Jeanne Calment, the French woman who dies in 1997 at the extremely ripe old age of 122 years. That makes her the longest living human by almost three years compared to 119-year-old Sarah Knauss of Hollywood Pennsylvania (she died in 1999). That means that Calment has held that record worldwide for twenty-three years. That’s quite an amazing accomplishment in an age when longevity is…
Staging the Next Stage We are blessed with several friends who seem to enjoy being of service to Kim, and by extension, to me. They like helping her pack, unpack, organize stuff, sort out her clothes and other stuff. For two weeks we had Oswaldo here and that was a pleasure. Every time I turned around he would be doing this or that quite tirelessly and with no complaints. I actually think he likes staying…
Decoupling I love that word, decoupling. You can go in so many directions with it. Icvbnt can be the bucket of cold water thrown on two dogs to stop them doing what they do (I witnessed that one day during my youth in Maine, when a huge dog got “stuck” tying to exploit a smaller dog that had kegeled itself into protective rigor). It can be a long-overdue divorce that has waited for the kids…
Capitalism on the Run Today I saw that a friend who is part of my motorcycle group and who declares as a conservative Republican put a post on Facebook that was intended to denigrate socialism and stand up for capitalism. He quoted Winston Churchill as saying, “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” I found it necessary to…
A Chill in the Air Today I am wearing two long-sleeved shirts, the one underneath a mock turtleneck with the MOA logo on the neck (that would be Motorcycle Owners of America) and on top I have a RESIST t-shirt. Someone asked me what I was resisting and all I could think to say (since I thought it demanded a rapid answer as it was such a bold and simple statement of intent) was “everything.”…
Battery Math Today I went to a battery fair here in Escondido. I was invited by Baker Electric, the premier electricians here in Southern California, who installed my solar system last year. They were joined in this extravaganza, replete with free donuts and mimosas and great swag (umbrellas, string backpacks and notebooks with pens) by the strong and mighty Tesla, the dominant maker of home batteries. Naturally, I had to drive to the fair in…