Butter and Markets I am just finishing reading 48 essays on Free Markets for my ethics class. The assignment I gave was to discuss the pros and cons of free markets in the context of being a asylum-seeking immigrant from Central America. It has proven to be a fascinating exercise (at least for me, but I also think for the students) because it has forced them to consider the libertarian value of free market capitalism…
The Demographic Dividend I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about demographics. That stems from my writing of Global Pension Crisis in 2013, because you cannot talk about pensions and retirement dynamics without getting into demographics. I wrote that book on the back of a course I taught about pensions at Cornell’s business school from 2008 until 2017. In fact, I found the demographics that I kept seeing and tallying every year when I…
Self-Education Due to a clogged roof drain on our flat roof over by the office side of the house, during the heavy rains of March we developed a leak. We went through the normal process of sleuthing out the origin on the leak by having Handy Brad open up the outside wall between the sliding glass door and the window next to my desk. That was an area of about six feet wide, floor to…
Buying Quality I’ve just written about how overpriced the world has become and how difficult it has become to capture value in today’s world of runaway generational wealth expectations. What I mean by that is that people seem to feel like they are being stupid if all they do is get by and earn a fair wage. Everyone wants to own their own business and sell it at some wonderfully high multiple and spend their…
Killing Myself Softly When I was in college we had music and we had TV, but there were no home computers, no internet, no Worldwide Web, and certainly no social media. There are many things that these advancements have provided us and I have generally been a big proponent of technological advance. I would go so far as to say that I have positioned myself until recently on the bleeding edge of that change. I…
The 8 Billion Person Paradox National Geographic magazine continues to amaze me and feed me information that is relevant to the most important issues we face today. The April, 2023 issue just arrived on my doorstep with a cover graphic that looks like the earth transformed into some combination of a high-viz articulated world map and a funky coronavirus with spiky outcroppings. The large title emblazoned across the globe simply declared “8 BILLION” with a…
Tik-Tik-Tock, China’s on the Block My son Tom made his chops at Shake Shack a few years ago by bringing his Gen Z perspective to their marketing department by suggesting that they would benefit by using TikTok for getting their product message out to the young target market that they wanted to attract. He had been using the TikTok app to generate personal mini videos that gave him a creative outlet for his video making…
Chinese Menu We have just seen the conclusion of a pow-wow between Xi Jianping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. In theory this should be no big deal since the dynamic duo have met together over 25 times (I heard a pundit say it was 40 times, but I can only verify 25 or so of those), and that’s a lot. That speaks to a number of things, not the least of which is…
Insuring Eternity Back in the late 1970’s when I was beginning my career in banking, I was traveling across New England almost every week, visiting a combination of banks and insurance companies to sell them our banking services. I was a member of FI or financial institutions side of the bank. For some strange reason, the FI side of banking was always the red-headed step-child of the banking business compared to the corporate side. The…
Here I Go Again Kim worked for David Coverdale in the 80’s when she started working in L.A. trying to jump-start her musical theater career. She was the personal assistant for the band Whitesnake, who came out with the song in 1982 on the Saints & Sinners album. I’ve always liked the song and did even before I met Kim. There is something so familiar and lonely all at once about the lyrics that suggest…