Hope all goes well. Dear NY Times, got a confession. To be great at this sport, you gotta love making money – in the short, medium, and long term. I do. And been at this for 23yrs. Played by the rules. There aren’t many. Every day we fight to take as much money as possible from mkts, counterparties, competitors. That’s the game. Our only true teammates are investors, we’re their fiduciaries. At Lehman, in the e

I take smarter risks now. Relative to my early twenties. You see, back then I did crazy stuff. Like free climbing the Whitestone Bridge. Yeah, watched the sunrise light up NYC. Dangling my feet off the tower. Or racing superbikes, through Chicago, on hot summer nights. And once you rip it up on a rice rocket, well, sports cars are, quite frankly, pretty boring. Relatively speaking. Now I drive Jeeps. They’re kind of

Vladimir stood tall. In the cold. The crowd, weary from a long bus ride, cheered. Had little choice. And from deep within, something stirred. Something foreign. A tear. And as it welled up, in Putin’s icy blue eyes, he focused that finely tuned KGB muscle, on suppressing it. “Think happy thoughts,” he told himself. Indeed, it’d been a good week. A Tibetan mother of four, suffocating under Chinese re

Hope all goes well. She pulled her knees in real close. Tight. Hugging herself. And stared out the windshield. Sobbing. “Will Iris go to heaven Daddy,” Olivia, my 8yr old, asked. Now, I got no idea. Never been there. And gun to my head, I’d say no, that landlord doesn’t allow kittens – just Lions. But truth is, even in a great year, I get it right maybe 65% of the time. And I know a cheap option when I see one

Rome’s smartest mathematicians scanned the night sky. Back in 46BC. Searched the moon. The planets. Stars too. Crunched numbers. Built models, spun ’em round and round. Looking for the missing piece of a puzzle. But some problems are eternal. Defy solutions. And in the end, Julius Caesar’s boys agreed. “F’it,” they said, “just add a leap day every 4yrs, and be done with it.” Of course, Italian’s have fudged their num

Hope all goes well. Love big families. Kids. Cats. Dogs. Frogs. Chaos is comfort. But I’ve drawn the line. Stopped the madness. Unlike the ECB boys. Yeah, they’re really rolling the dice now. Playing with fire. Unprotected. Prolific. Yeah, imagine their crowded Christmas cards this yr. Just look at all those baby Euro’s. So many noisy, naughty zeros. Overall: Rome’s smartest mathematicians scanned the night sky. Back

“Shale gas will revolutionize North American manufacturing, we’re seeing the start of a big wave, a trend,” he told me. And he knows. He’s leading it. Yes, Bruce Aitken, CEO of Methanex, is Earth’s biggest Methanol producer. Which you make from Natural Gas, then use for all kinds of things. He’s got plants around the globe, but not in America. “Twenty years ago, the US Gulf produced 8mm tons/year, which collapsed to

Never thought I’d see one. Mankind’s rarest creature. Humanity’s unicorn. He won independence, from Britain, in 1965. Ruled till 1990. Remained in Gov’t thru 2011. The world’s longest serving Minister. As a young leader, Lee Kuan Yew engineered a plan. To transform his small, crowded, impoverished, resource-poor peninsula into a roaring Tiger. A sparkling Asian jewel. He inherited Britain’s blessed Rule of Law, but f

He flew West to East. To save fuel. Growing up poor does that. Reflected back on his 6yr re-education, confined to a rural village, paying for father’s revolutionary crimes. And on his subsequent rise up Party ranks. Yeah, Xi Jingping reflected on the steep price his nation paid for its revolution. Anyhow, he landed first in California, checked his shipping-port infrastructure investments. Threw Hollywood a bone, dou

Hope all goes well. China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines. Inhale… India, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Hong Kong. Yeah, bizarre. I thought the same as you. No one in Asia talks about Greece? Or Portugal? Not even Spain? Don’t they care that French banks are broke? Iran threatens Hormuz? Assad’s flattening Homs? Nope, they don’t. So I just shut up. Listened. And dedicated w/e notes to just that. Overa