Don’t worry, you will not be hearing about Rich and Kim at Brooklyn Mirage or the Butterfly Room in SoHo. My first real dance club ever was in 1979 when on my first trip to Europe for business. We had just formed the World Corporate Division and I was one of the new offices assigned to cover the world’s multinational corporations. The bank thought it important that we all get a taste of the international…
One of my favorite movies is a Russell Crowe film from almost twenty years ago called A Good Year. The attraction to me is somewhat obvious. It is the story of a kick-ass London bond trader who inherits an estate in Provence from his uncle, someone he dearly loved but who he ignored for the past decade as he played out his career ambitions. The set-up is that the trader gets suspended for being too…
Tomorrow is Mothers Day and it has caught me somewhat unaware. While I am like most people and regularly forget or ignore Fathers Day, I have done a reasonable job over the years of remembering Mothers Day. I imagine that I am in the top 10% of people who revere their mothers and consider them the primary motivator of their lives. I was raised, from start to finish, by my mother. She is responsible for…
Inherited wealth has been a defining feature of human societies throughout history, shaping social structures, economic systems, and political power dynamics across civilizations. In early agricultural societies, the concept of inherited wealth emerged alongside private property ownership. Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek civilizations developed sophisticated inheritance laws, with wealth typically passed down patrilineally. Roman law established detailed inheritance frameworks that influenced Western legal traditions for centuries, including concepts like wills, trusts, and legitimate heirs. The…
Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, free markets, voluntary exchange, and the pursuit of profit. It emerged as the dominant economic system in Western societies during the Industrial Revolution, replacing feudalism and mercantilism. The key features of capitalism include several socio-economic elements. There is private property rights wherein individuals and businesses, rather than the state, own capital assets like land, factories, and equipment. There is market-based allocation…
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…
Many years ago at a time which I presume was an era of higher than normal immigration into the United States by people from India, there were many cab drivers in New York City who hailed from the subcontinent. I’ve always felt that the pulse of immigration trends are often felt most clearly in the cab driving population. I’m wondering how Uber and Lyft have changed that, but I’ll bet not too much. It’s tricky…
Few words manage to embody more stages in life than the word “trippin’”. I grew up in the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s. The early 60s for me were about returning to the United States from Latin America, where I functioned under the watchful eye of a German governess with strong ties to Latin America (not sure what that history might have entailed in the post-WWII era) and with the name of…
I must have done something right in life. I look around me and the word magical comes to mind. I am blessed with a magical partner in Kim. I know plenty of friends who are satisfied in their marriages, but I know precious few who can say, as I do regularly, that they find themselves more in love with their partner day by day. Kim is not perfect, but whatever imperfections she has are almost…
The world is always moving ahead as it seems. No matter what country you go to you will invariably find that there was a city that was very important, perhaps it was a Capital or perhaps it was just a big prosperous city. And then something changed. something is always changing in this world. Everything wants that city that used to be a very important place, which had built up accordingly, to suddenly, and within…