Many years ago during the height of my days at Bankers Trust (late 1980s, I think), our then Chairman, Charlie Sanford (rest his soul) got on a kick of predicting the future and wrote an paper that he presented at a gathering at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. The paper was titled Quantum Finance, and it was a prediction that our consumer financial system would evolve into a complex kluge of payment processing where…
The world is filled with people with gripes against one another. I don’t like being a cynic, so I try not to suggest that they are all bad people, but if there were ever a means to expose the dark underside of human nature, it would be through the reading of deposition transcripts from various and sundry civil litigation and arbitration conflicts. Just when I think I’ve heard and read it all, I’m confronted by…
I ran the Global Private Banking business of Bankers Trust for most of the 1990’s. At the time, I was quite dogmatic about NOT using my own operation as my money manager. It just seemed too close for comfort given that my personal financial information would be in a system that was accessible by many of the people that worked for me. But when I left that job at the end of the Millennium, I…
While we were rounding Cape Hirn last month, Viking showed the movie Master and Commander, starring Russel Crowe as the captain of a British Naval vessel who is chasing a Spanish galleon through the Southern Ocean waters, trying to capture its prize trade booty before peace got declared back home between their two nations. The concept of rushing to justify larceny rather than anticipating peace was somehow portrayed as noble and manly in an era…
“Of Mice and Men” is a novella written by John Steinbeck and published in 1937. It is set during the Great Depression in the agricultural fields of Northern California, where it follows two migrant ranch workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, who move from place to place in search of job opportunities. They are the real Americans in the heartland during the worst of the Great Depression. That Great Depression was caused by a complex…
The era of globalization doesn’t have a single, universally agreed-upon starting point, as it evolved gradually through several phases. There was the early globalization (1500s-1800s) that some historians trace to the beginnings to the Age of Exploration and the establishment of maritime trade routes connecting Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. There was also the Columbian Exchange of goods, people, and ideas between hemispheres, marking an early form of global interconnection. The Columbian Exchange was…
Today we are in Puerto Madryn, a coastal harbor with good natural attributes about halfway down the length of Argentina. I think Viking has done a good job of finding a reciprocal stopping point in Argentina to what we visited on the Chilean side in Puerto Montt. Where Puerto Montt was founded by Germans, Puerto Madryn got its foothold here on the northern edge of the Patagonian Pampas through the arrival of a large Welsh…
Last year Mark Cuban made headlines when he paid his $276 million tax bill. While his outspoken support for more liberal causes made some pundits ask if he was paying more than what he owed. he said that he pays what he owes. “This country has done so much for me, I’m proud to pay my taxes every single year,” Cuban went on to say that while he doesn’t expect all of his tax money…
A few weeks ago I got a call from a lawyer I had worked with on a case in November. He called to tell me the outcome of the arbitration. I only got the case in October, so it was not the usual careful and drawn out process that has characterized most of my expert witness work over the past six years. It was a case where I represented the respondent/defendant in an arbitration over…
Today I had to kill some time while the cleaning crew was at the house, so I went down to the local Public House, called the Sideyard. It was named that because the owners of the deli to which it is attached built it as an addition to their structure and created it literally out of the sideyard of the property. I remember seeing it under construction and thinking it was a really unfortunate place…