And They Called Him Pedro Blanco For the first time since its founding in the days of John F. Kennedy, the Peace Corps has recalled some 7,000 volunteers from around the world due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Think about that. Sixty years of global hostilities and scary events and it was this event which has caused a noble and stalwart body to send out an emergency message to all its field staff to leave where…
Out and About Recently I wrote a book for my motorcycling friends. It is a 444-page chronicle of the twenty-five years my little group of motorcycling friends have ridden together through thick and thin at home (mostly Utah and Vermont) and abroad. I had been planning on lugging thirty copies of the book to our next gathering in southern Utah. We have a spot we are particularly partial to in Teasdale, which is near Torrey,…
Travel in the Time of Cholera The 2006 movie, The Painted Veil is a glorious and poignant movie that for some reason I thought was called Love in the Time of Cholera. When I looked it up I realized my mistake. Love in the Time of Cholera is book written by Gabriel García Márquez that was made into a movie at about the same time (2007) and is set in Colombia in the same time,…
Fast and Furious I keep two motorcycles out here in San Diego. My primary bike, as it has been since 1987, is a BMW. Beemers always start and rarely have problems. One time about seventeen years ago, on one of our May trips through Utah, the drive shaft rear end differential on my KLT bike shit the bed and caused me to let the group ride on to Durango while I waited in Moab for…
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…
Bubbling Away in Coronaville It’s Monday morning of the first day of the rest of our lives. I like to say things that are indisputable and I think that ticks the box. It already feels different. I have called all three of my kids in the past twelve hours and checked to see that they and the grandgerms are OK. The initial report is that one had a skirmish with his wife over a family…
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…
On Golden Pond Flying to New York for my first visit since moving to my own Golden Pond on our hilltop. I started at the airport and then for the first three hours of this flight (while pretending to sleep for a few hours) to listen to an audiobook which I just downloaded. It’s called Dark Towers and its about the rise and imminent fall of Deutsche Bank, including its strange and tangled relationship with…