Dying Broke When I wrote my book Global Pension Crisis in 2013, I laid bare a rather stark reality that the world was ill-prepared to fund the Baby Boom generation other than at the extreme cost to the younger generations. I called it a “species-defining” moment for mankind since it would establish our priorities between feeding our aged (all of whom are inevitably living longer than planned) and impairing the growth and prosperity of our…
Personal Services When I was actively in harness and shoving off for work each day, it seemed to be more than luxury, more a necessity, to use lots of personal services. I peaked in that regard in or around 2000 when I was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, acting as Chairman and CEO of Deutsche Asset Management USA. I was the senior officer at the 280 Park Avenue location, the historic headquarters of Bankers…
As Old As I Feel It’s Mothers’ Day and it is hard not to remember that I am now at an age when my mother was well into her retirement from the UN and living in Las Vegas. When she was 68, I was 30 and had my own son. That seems like a very long time ago to me and while I’m sure my sister Barb, who lived near her all those years in…
The Life of Leisure One of the categories of stories I post under is retirement. I chose that because for as long as I have been actively writing I have written on the subject of retirement, starting as early as the early 1990s when I was a mere forty-something. back then it was less about anticipation of retirement or longing for it. It was because I ran one of the largest retirement businesses in the…
Teaching to Teach I have been teaching at the graduate business school level since 2007. That represents fifteen years or approximately 20% of my life (deducting a bit for the interregnum between teaching at Cornell and University of San Diego). I have taught a variety of subjects including hedge fund investing, securities finance, pension funds, project finance, advanced corporate finance and now business ethics. This semester I am teaching a course called Law, Policy and…
Faith I am rewatching the Netflix series The Crown and finding it great entertainment and chock full of thoughtful issues worthy of contemplation. That is the sign of well-produced, directed and acted movie or series. Being thought-provoking is something I very much value in my movie and TV viewing. It seems somehow easier to do be thought-provoking in a written piece and easier to be entertaining in a visual piece, but the ability to enroll…
Waiting for Enlightenment Life is funny sometimes. Today is the the day before the much awaited arrival of my granddaughters for their Spring Break week-long visit. It has been five years since they were last here. Evelyn was one and Charlotte was four. I think it’s fair to say that this will, for all intents and purposes, be seeing Casa Moonstruck for the first time. Naturally, we’ve seen the girls many times in New York…
Hilltopping This morning I was driving to my favorite rock store, KRC, to pick up some bags of stabilized decomposed granite (DG) and I started noticing that every hilltop I could see, and there are plenty of hills around here to offer hilltops, is fully built out with one or two homes. Finding your own hilltop to command a view of the surrounding environs is obviously very popular. When we were in Italy recently on…
The Young Man Within I am rewatching The Crown, that wonderful Netflix series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II. The current episode starts with Winston Churchill speaking with his assistant, a young blonde woman who acts as his secretary. She is apparently infatuated with Churchill and at the suggestion by him that she spend more time with a young man her own age, she has taken to reading Churchill’s biography to acquaint…
Scripto Ergo Cogito Ergo Disco Ergo Sum Rene Descartes started it all in 1637 in his Discourse on the Method, which most scholars consider his seminal philosophical work. I have amended it to read (in Latin), I write, therefore I think, therefore I learn, therefore I am. My default activity these days is to write. I know this especially now because I am finishing a ten day trip to New York and Italy and I…