Traveling to Freedom On Sunday I am taking my first trip since moving to San Diego. I’m flying to New York, where I will work and see my kids, and then I am flying to London for other work and will transit back through New York to be home after what is, in total about eight days. Big deal. I’ve done similar trips about a thousand times (literally 1,000 times over my adult life/career). I…
Handy Brad Now that we’ve moved in and mostly gotten our stuff placed and staged and generally winnowed down to manageable proportions, there are several small projects that need doing that seem either a bit beyond our capabilities and that we don’t want to bother brother-in-law Jeff to do. I would never undertake anything electronic in the house without first consulting Jeff, but I think it’s safe to say that he is perfectly content…
Thank You Dem Guys and Gals And then there were two. It’s Joe and Bernie at the ripe old ages of 77 and 78 respectively. I wrote a long time ago about our needing to seek out a younger candidate like a Buttigieg, but that wasn’t to be. Then I went towards Mike and Kim went towards Elizabeth. But wait, they are 78 and 70. Amy is looking like a youngster at 59. But age…
Beauty and the Beast When I wake up now, my routine after my most basic ablutions is to go into my study (conveniently located off our master suite) and check on the state of my world. I start by understanding how much sleep I have gotten. My CPAP machine nicely records that, and while I like to get seven hours, I’m satisfied with anything over six (I have yet to go much over eight and…
Outvoting Is it just me or is everyone more attentive to the primaries this year? Have I just awoken to this process this year where everyone else has been on this game while I was distracted with work or whatever? It’s not as though I haven’t voted before. I started with a vote for George McGovern in 1972 (I was just eighteen) and the rest is history. It was a miserable loss in both the…
Benny & Joon Today is a funny day of windows and doors. I woke up at 4am to check on a final report filing for a London expert witness assignment I have been working on. It needed to be filed by 5pm London time with the court and we had worked on it for a month with a particularly intensive last ten days and a very high pressure last 72 hours since we were given…
It’s Always Something For many years I have been saying that if I ever get a yacht, I plan to name it Always Something. This was intended as a cheap bit of humor since I had and have no intention of ever having a yacht. If I was serious about it I would have called my house here in San Diego Always Something, but instead I called it Casa Moonstruck after my favorite movie. I’ve…
Lynching in the White House As you may have seen this week, the House of Representatives passed a bi-partisan bill to make lynching a Federal crime. I must admit, the issue had never occurred to me even though I am told that it has been a controversial issue in Congress for 150 years and has been voted down something like 200 times. This time there were only four holdouts (strangely enough, including Justin Amash of…
Fear and Greed The markets are all the talk of the town this week in this and every town. It is not about a a bunch of market participants going paranoid out of extreme forecasting anxiety. As I heard Rachel Maddow say this evening, the markets are merely acting as a window on the rather extreme impact that the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is starting to have on the world economy. Let’s take a quick survey. We…
Self-Insuring During my career on Wall Street, I had occasion to become an expert of hedging and insurance. Let’s be clear about what I mean by an expert. I founded and ran our futures and options subsidiary thirty-five years ago when hardly anyone understood futures and options and very few in the financial world other than traders and commodities people even understood what hedging really was all about. This was the precursor to the derivatives…