Sitting in the Garden This evening I was watching a man-on-the-street report on the first campaign gathering of Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. To begin with, I say nomination instead of election because it is not entirely clear that the es-president currently has the ability to gather the support needed to win the nomination, much less the election. That is a less shocking reality than the fact that Trump…
Joe Versus the Volcano Do you remember that 1990 Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movie about the guy who is a hypochondriac and stuck in a mind-numbing job who decides to volunteer to throw himself into a volcano in order to save the world? It was a funny movie about how we can all learn to live by putting everything at risk. I have watched more politics over the last six or seven years than…
The Population Irony In 2013 I published my first book about the global pension crisis. Pensions involve demographics and the demographics of China at the time were screaming that the thirty plus year old one-child policy of China was becoming an economic and pension issue for China. The fundamental issue is that economic growth cannot be had without population growth. It is an economic credo that is hard to avoid. And China had implemented what…
A World Gone Mad I am once again sitting in the sedate and peaceful setting of the NYC Cornell Club breakfast room. I find hat hen one travels, one’s view of the world takes on a different perspective. We awake in a different time zone with people we know still asleep and others we used to know less far away. The places around us are either or both more or less familiar and we tend…
Illegitimi Non Carborundum I took Latin for four years of high school and I learned lots of Latin words and expressions, many of which are used in the practice of the law. I have found my Latin education to be useful in the way everyone says it will be helpful, as an aid to understanding the English language and the various roots and derivations of words that have found their way into the English language.…
Lazy Daze There is a large cocktail party underway in the House of Representatives Chamber in the U.S. Capital today. I say that because it is past 5:00pm in Washington D.C., so officially into Happy Hour, and the scene on the floor of the House is not so much chaotic as without any discernible direction. At a cocktail party, once you have a drink in hand, you wander around aimlessly, chit-chatting your way around the…
Risking Everything I am stealing that headline from the New York Times this morning as that theme seems to be screaming this morning for attention. The article in the Times is about the rising protests in Iran and China and the fact that the oppression in those two autocratic countries has gotten incredibly severe and economic salve is so absent, that people cannot help themselves but protest. This is in the light of the economic…
The Cookie Starts to Crumble In wrapping up my ethics course, I have just gone over my final lecture where I will review all the fundamental concepts we have discussed and debated during the semester. I really think I have, over two semesters of teaching this course, pulled together an excellent set of almost universal topics that would be worthwhile for almost anyone to spend some time considering or studying. Obviously, it is geared to…
Roiled I find the word roiled to be very useful and descriptive in many circumstances. I find myself often using it to describe markets, which can become very agitated. I particularly used it in my testimony with the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York (Tillary Street in Brooklyn) as the financial crash of 2008 was unfolding. Now those were roiled markets. It is meant to describe a mixing of fluids that…
A Benign Conundrum When I returned from my stint in Gulag Toronto, the assignment I was given in 1990 as punishment for presiding over a commodities merchant banking unit (I had been specifically asked to keep charge of it as I tried to wrestle the burgeoning global derivatives business to the mat during its adolescence) when it took a large loss on a supposedly secured cotton merchant loan. It turned out that the bonded warehouse…