Fast and Furious I keep two motorcycles out here in San Diego. My primary bike, as it has been since 1987, is a BMW. Beemers always start and rarely have problems. One time about seventeen years ago, on one of our May trips through Utah, the drive shaft rear end differential on my KLT bike shit the bed and caused me to let the group ride on to Durango while I waited in Moab for…
What’s Worse Than a Global Pension Crisis? In 2013 I was a Clinical Professor of Finance at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and one of the courses I had created and taught for six years at that time was a course on pensions. The course led me to observe a growing and troubling phenomenon about the state of our world and how central the pension issue was becoming to our collective economic health. I…
Pausing to Pause This morning I am reading reports that only half of Americans are taking the COVID-19 forced sequestration seriously. This more or less agrees with my anecdotal observations out here in San Diego. I’m betting that three quarters again of those non-conforming people are doing so out of the extreme need to maintain their lives that are more or less hand-to-mouth and unable to afford a pause to their daily routine of modern-day…
Doctoring-in-Place I went to my new doctor for an introductory visit today despite all this Coronavirus hullabaloo. As a recently moved senior citizen, I thought it was important to get set up with a new GP because you never know when you might need a doctor, right? I am not a guy who goes to the doctor with every little ache or pain, but I am also not adverse to going to see the doctor…
Of Moths and Flames We are slowly but surely getting hooked on the Netflix series Dirty Money. I’m sure that we are way behind and everyone has already watched these great Dateline-like shows. Tonight we watched both the show about the Goldman Sachs Malaysian scandal that brought down Lloyd Blankfein and remains an embarrassment to David Soloman and the one about the Kushner Company’s history of being a controversial landlord in the Northeast. I found…
A Reason to Believe that Every Picture Tells a Story I’m sitting in my dining room for a change of pace and because Handy Brad is painting a wall in the study where Kim’s bookshelves will go when Amazon delivers them. This WFH program requires versatility and my mid-back tweak requires me to sit upright while I write. The workman’s compensation board assigned to my WFH program tells me that care for my lower and…
Bubbling Away in Coronaville It’s Monday morning of the first day of the rest of our lives. I like to say things that are indisputable and I think that ticks the box. It already feels different. I have called all three of my kids in the past twelve hours and checked to see that they and the grandgerms are OK. The initial report is that one had a skirmish with his wife over a family…
The Tea Tree Time I’m sure that herbalists and Aborigines will find this hilarious, but I have only recently discovered Tea Tree products. Somehow over the last year, probably when Kim was away somewhere, I was forced to do the unthinkable, go out into the commercial sector (in this case a Duane Reade Pharmacy) and buy my own shampoo. Can you imagine? I inadvertently bought some sort of Tea Tree shampoo and as soon as…
Post -Apocalyptic Investing By Richard Marin, Managing Director of SEDA Experts, LLC During my forty-year Wall Street career I went through some pretty serious crises. At a relatively young age (34), I once sat in the anteroom of the ornate office of the Minister of Finance of Venezuela on a warm and humid Caracas afternoon. I was with our Vice Chairman, Carl Mueller, who was a wizened veteran of the Street. Carl had been the…
Social Distancing Damn, the lingo dictionary is expanding almost as exponentially fast as the Coronavirus is expanding. In one segment on MSNBC alone I heard them use the terms Social Distancing, Hand Hygiene and Respiratory Etiquette. Hand washing is well understood, though I recently saw a Facebook video explaining how to wash your hands properly and diligently and find that I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. That might explain a lot. As for…