Category: Politics

Snake Plissken is the iconic fictional antihero from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), played by Kurt Russell. He’s a former Special Forces soldier turned criminal, distinguished by his eye patch, gruff demeanor, and complete contempt for authority. The story drops him into a dystopian 1997 Manhattan that’s been walled off as a maximum-security prison, tasked with rescuing the President. Escape from New York is set in a near-future America (that would be the…

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In 1983 I was asked to launch a futures and options subsidiary for my bank, Bankers Trust. Don’t stop reading because you think I am using this as a launchpad for another boring discussion of derivative products and how I was the Robert Oppenheimer of banking who helped create the atomic bomb of the financial world. This little futures and options subsidiary was intentionally a separate legal entity that would have its own subsidiaries to…

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Last week when I gathered with my old motorcycle buddies, one of them, a guy who makes his living managing money for others, brought a copy of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s newest book, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation. Sorkin is an interesting writer. He is the NYC-raised son of a playwright and Wall Street lawyer. He has a BS in communication from Cornell University, my Alma…

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The United States has always had a special advantage against its global competitors and that’s it’s isolation in the Western Hemisphere. This is a geopolitical and historical point of differentiation that cuts across geography, economics, military history, and political development. The advantage has been enormous, though with some important nuances. In terms of the geographic advantage, the U.S. sits in what strategists sometimes call a “geopolitical paradise.” It is bounded by two vast oceans, two…

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