anecdotes

I know 3 brothers. Boomers. Went to great schools, got great jobs, raised great families. Mid-to-late sixties now. One loved to ski and moved north, another loved golf moved south, the 3rd loved big living and small bills, moved to Mexico. El Guapo lived off real estate deals, now he’s as broke as the unfinished resorts he peddled to gringos. Vermont planned well, just put the big house of bricks up for sale, time to

One of my boys runs product mgmt for a cloud computing start-up, few yrs old. Amazon.com realized they had enough servers to handle Christmas orders and too many for the other 49wks of the yr. Figured they could earn a buck leasing their spare capacity. Obvious and smart. But my boys’ company figured out how to build the pipes and interfaces to connect users and capacity faster than Amazon could, so they let him do i

My Dad fought in Korea, engineering PhD on GI bill, designed spy planes and spaceships. Raced the Reds most of his life. He moved on. Designs Predators to hunt cavemen. We have fun talking economics, he finds the theories amusing, and no one dies. I explain Ricardian Comparitive Advantage Theory and the shift of labor overseas. He says sounds great, then drives me through the Hartford ghetto, once a gem of US manufac

Few mths back, Obama sent Mara an email blasting “greedy bankers”. Took ‘em to the woodshed. My leftie friends gave me an earful. Few days later the SEC launched the Goldman investigation to leftie applause. Hard not to connect the dots. Two wks back, MoveOn.org sent Mara an email raging over the $1trln we’ve spent in Afghan/Iraq. This wk General Petraeus told the NY Times we’ve found $1trln of mine

A buddy in Santa Barbara (Dan) was a US Olympic coach and built a nice training biz. Makes $200k/yr which in the real world (non-finance) is a lot. He couldn’t afford to buy a house and rents for $3,500/mth. His next-door neighbor (Bob) bought an identical house and paid $1.2mm. Bob stopped paying his mortgage 1yr ago because the house is now worth $750k. The bank hasn’t bothered to kick Bob out. Guessing

Few of my Prop Trading boys called and asked, “So how hard is it to start a hedge fund?” Easy as climbing Everest, I explained. “Fuck that,” they said. So what’s next for the boys? (A) pray the lobbyists sneak in a last minute delay/change, (B) disperse across the trading floor like beaten Taliban fighters, or (C) take a job at Brevan. No joke, big banks are taking the Volker Rule very seriously and choos

Had lunch with one of the big real-money bond PM’s in LA. No, not the part-time CNBC anchor. Brilliant guy. Vigilante. Fascinating convo… Macro View: growth improving with obvious risk factors. The fact we haven’t collapsed yet suggest somehow we’ll survive. Biggest risk factor is overzealous Fin-Reg. Best Trades: short inflation swaps in US and EU (our favorite trade too). Buy Libor blow-out

Lots of conversation in London with wealthy people about (1) how taxes are going higher, (2) how to avoid them, and (3) how the new Lib-Con Gov’t will try but fail to bring drastic austerity measures. “Move to Ireland. Move to Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore. How much will taxes go up? What’s my pain threshold before I’d be willing to move? Spending cuts and tax hikes will crush economy, etc

US Energy Secretary, Dr Steven Chu, is a brilliant man (Obama is thankfully not scared of scientists). He funded a $400mm program this year to fund alt energy research and start-ups. One of my Silicon Valley contacts just met with the guy running the program. He showed 2 key slides in his presentation. One was a picture of the planet with graphics showing population density. The second showed the world from space at