Last year Mark Cuban made headlines when he paid his $276 million tax bill. While his outspoken support for more liberal causes made some pundits ask if he was paying more than what he owed. he said that he pays what he owes. “This country has done so much for me, I’m proud to pay my taxes every single year,” Cuban went on to say that while he doesn’t expect all of his tax money…
I just had a text exchange with my red pals and I feel like it was a doozy. I keep that text chain going for two reasons. First and foremost, I shared some good times with these guys and have fond memories of many great motorcycle trips with them. Secondly, I find it important and fascinating to stay in touch with the mindset of people who I think should be ideologically aligned with me but…
Last night my friend Mike sent me a CNN article on Chile and the collapse of their electric grid due to excessive summer heat, drought and infrastructure overburdening. Yikes! Seems like Chile is experiencing a combination of California and Texas calamities just as we are heading down to begin our cruise. Mike seemed a bit pensive about it all where I felt like I wanted to take it more in stride. I take some solace…
Back in 2010 I was teaching at Cornell in my Pensions class and I was trying to explain to a rather arrogant young graduate student that gathering enough wealth so as not to need to worry about retirement savings per se (i.e. insufficient pension asset accumulation or what is often called unfunded pension liabilities) was a false sense of comfort. My point was that you have to think about the broadest implications of such macro…
We all know that I have too much time on my hands and that my laziness drives me more into sedentary pursuits than walking the roads in my neighborhood. That means I am reading more than ever these days. I have just read two articles that in strange combination have given me even more confusing thoughts than normal that I feel inclined to share. I feel like a kid who has just realized that outer…
Today I called a long-time friend who stills lives in New York City. I tend to see him whenever I’m in New York and the last time was in mid-December when I met with him and another mutual friend. We spent a full four hours at lunch having a wonderful time talking about our days in the trenches at Bear Stearns Asset Management, back what is now eighteen years ago. That’s a long time. It’s…
I must have too much time on my hands because lately I have developed some macro themes as to what some of the next big things are that are going to assail us due to all the goings on. As much as I would like to blame everything on Donald Trump, I think that is becoming trite because while he is an empowering agent for much of the change which we are experiencing here and…
This morning I got into a conversation about social media with my neighbor Melisa. It was an especially interesting conversation because we were approaching the issues of social media from very different perspectives. Fundamentally, it seems that Melisa has the same sorts of concern about the affect that social media has on young people who can’t get their face out of their phones. Her points were mostly focused on how much better it is for…
I have always been a guy who seeks to integrate various things in my life. What I mean by that is that I seem always to come upon overlaps or areas of common interest in different aspects of my life and rather than treat them as coincidental, I have always enjoyed finding ways to have them connect in more meaningful ways. For one minor example, this past weekend when our friend Chris was visiting, he…
It’s been two weeks since the Trump inauguration and I think its fair to objectively say that its already been a wild ride that seems to be getting wilder by the day. This is proving to be a very confusing moment for many of us and I would like to talk that through. In the past few days I have been contacted by a wider array of old friends and acquaintances than I can ever…