The Ruralization of the World For my entire lifespan of sixty-six years, the world was moving in only one way on its inexorable trend towards urbanization. What began as a trend driven by the industrial revolution starting in the mid-1800’s, was driven into the entire world by both industrialization and the automation of farming. It was such a common theme that the song How You Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm (Once They’ve Seen…
Consulting the Oracle A few years ago on a motorcycle trip through Greece, one of our last stops before heading into the barn in Athens was the Oracle at Delphi. The Delphic Oracle used to be called Pythia and it is a place where gaseous fumes from the subterranean realm sent high priestesses into rants and visions which came to be interpreted by ancient Greeks as prophecies. Some Greek historians say they were gibberish that…
The Darkness Within This is no time for negativism. This is the time for us all to stay positive and optimistic that life will go on, that our species will persevere, and that the kindness of the human soul will prevail. When we saw Saudi Arabia rear up on its hind legs to push the oil production limits up at great expense to the price of their black crude, we were secretly encouraged. We all…
The Life of the Mind Today I had occasion to speak to a friend and colleague I worked with thirteen years ago and and saw probably five years ago. I have given him my blog address so, full disclosure, he may well be reading this just as you are reading this. Why do I mention that, because I am forever getting into hot water with people who share things with me and then find themselves…
Insuring Insurance A month ago I wrote a story about self-insuring, aimed mostly at the business of buying insurance on travel and discretionary purchases or “toys”. I have a very different topic to consider today and it’s based, as always, on something I’ve recently read about the state of the insurance industry during the Coronavirus crisis. The Wall Street Journal reports that there is increasing pressure on insurers to broaden their policy protection to not…
The New Gold Rush $2,000,000,000,000. That’s a lot of stimulus and thank God for Chuck Schumer or $500,000,000,000 of it would be the private piggy bank of one of the worst businessmen of all time and would undoubtedly go to all the wrong places. As it is, The Democratic senators managed to put in a provision forbidding that any of this loan money for corporations can go to companies owned by Federal employees. Any idea…
The Comeback There is a great deal of discussion these days about the wreckage of the economy in progress with the Lockdowns expanding by the day. The only thing that shows any variance is how long it takes for given state governments to realize that they have no choice but to declare stay-at-home mandates. It’s almost silly how fervently those more concerned about the economy think they can will their way out of a problem…
What’s Worse Than a Global Pension Crisis? In 2013 I was a Clinical Professor of Finance at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and one of the courses I had created and taught for six years at that time was a course on pensions. The course led me to observe a growing and troubling phenomenon about the state of our world and how central the pension issue was becoming to our collective economic health. I…
Of Moths and Flames We are slowly but surely getting hooked on the Netflix series Dirty Money. I’m sure that we are way behind and everyone has already watched these great Dateline-like shows. Tonight we watched both the show about the Goldman Sachs Malaysian scandal that brought down Lloyd Blankfein and remains an embarrassment to David Soloman and the one about the Kushner Company’s history of being a controversial landlord in the Northeast. I found…
Post -Apocalyptic Investing By Richard Marin, Managing Director of SEDA Experts, LLC During my forty-year Wall Street career I went through some pretty serious crises. At a relatively young age (34), I once sat in the anteroom of the ornate office of the Minister of Finance of Venezuela on a warm and humid Caracas afternoon. I was with our Vice Chairman, Carl Mueller, who was a wizened veteran of the Street. Carl had been the…