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…
Not Invented Here I am constantly thinking about how to insure that I keep a diversified base of topics for my stories and not write too many posts about either Donald Trump and his insufferable politics and, for the moment, the Coronavirus. I think we are getting near overload on both those two topics. What I have learned is that everybody loves a good story and spinning a good story is what I like to…
Sent Home I’ve always been intrigued by Burning Man. I have never gone nor do I ever expect to go, but I am nonetheless fascinated by the annual gathering. I’m not sure I ever really bothered to understand what Burning Man is all about, other than walking around the desert naked and getting a sunburn. So I looked it up and it seems there are ten guiding principles: • Radical inclusion – all are welcome…
Calling Bullshit Today it has been announced that SXSW, the South By Southwest music/film/media festival in Austin, that has been held annually without interruption for thirty three years has been cancelled this year due to the Coronavirus.. Today, the Italian government has indicated that it is locking down Lombardy and a few other surrounding provincial areas to contain the virus at the potential cost of massively hobbling the Italian economy, where Milan and Lombardy are…
Beauty and the Beast When I wake up now, my routine after my most basic ablutions is to go into my study (conveniently located off our master suite) and check on the state of my world. I start by understanding how much sleep I have gotten. My CPAP machine nicely records that, and while I like to get seven hours, I’m satisfied with anything over six (I have yet to go much over eight and…