The Raid on Entebbe Entebbe juts out into Lake Victoria and is the main airport for Uganda. The only reason any of us know the name is because of the 1976 Arab-German hijacking of an Air France airliner enroute from Tel Aviv to Paris. It was less about the fact that the terrorists landed at Entebbe and sought sanctuary from Idi Amin, than it was about the 100 Israeli commandos that executed a near-flawless and…
Camel Money In the world of finance, everybody understands the term Camel Money. It means money that has, what we call on Wall Street, a high talk-to-ticket ratio. It is the money that has supposedly been flowing from the middle east since the Oil Embargo of 1973 and OPEC’s wanton thrashing of the U.S. consumer. That was when Petrodollars first came into visible existence and we began to understand that people who had scads of…
About the Battle Battles rage every day in every aspect of life. I am reminded today of a past battle which I feel is instructive and which I will characterize vaguely and with pseudonyms and made-up settings. It is a battle fought over a decade ago, so I suspect the statute of limitations (defined by law and by life) has long expired. Most involved in the battle probably wish it would just be forgotten, but…
Spring Break This is Easter Week and I guess that for much of the world, this is a good week for a vacation. I find it a funny time to take a vacation. I also understand that for people with kids in school, you take your vacations when your kids’ school holidays are planned. Both of my ex-wives were quite rigid on the subject of taking kids out of school to take family vacations. For…
The Old and the Restless Our semi-annual gathering of the BT Legends group was held last night. There was a total of fifteen of us in attendance. We were a group of ex-bankers, so we were not terribly diverse even though there were three women in the group. The rest were old white guys. Doing some approximate polling, I would say the age range was 61 to 81, but the mean was likely around 71…
Three Shawermas to Go The Middle East is my kinda place. I used to go twice a year for two weeks at a go. Sometimes I would get a day off (Fridays, the holy day for Muslims) and sometimes I skittle up to someplace like Istanbul where they seem to care more about keeping to a Western workweek schedule than taking off their Sabbath. I never went in summer and I was always careful…
Playing the Waiting Game This weekend I learned of the passing of an old colleague from Bankers Trust. He had been in hospice and I had tried to go see him several weeks ago, but was told by the family that he had faded too far by then. I jumped on the visit the day I returned from a trip, having heard he was in hospice when I left for the trip. I literally chose…
It’s a Rich Man’s World Money, Money, Money was written by ABBA in 1976, the very year I graduated business school and started a forty-three-year (so far) life in the business world. The song is ostensibly about a woman (presumably a lithe young Swede) trying to find a rich man to take her out of her misery of working all day and all night to pay the bills. She wants to go to Las Vegas…
The Princess and the Grain of Rice In 1992 I was asked to take over the Retirement Services Department of Bankers Trust Company. At the time, Bankers Trust was the leading retirement services bank with more 401(k) participants being serviced and more pension funds being serviced than anywhere else. I had been involved in the space indirectly by buying the largest pension company in Chile for the bank and buying, creating, and building an array…
What Makes Me Sick When you get past sixty, health suddenly becomes a big issue regardless of your state of repair. It all makes sense and you don’t need a big imagination to figure out why. For the longest time when I was young I thought I would be lucky to make sixty. Now, at sixty-five I have a greatly revised point of view, but probably not for the reasons you suspect. I have always…