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Wednesday, July 1, 2009

The more I read about the world and the state of its finances, all I find myself saying is thank God for the spiritual principles of abundance and prosperity with its emphasis on gratitude, grace, and connection with the Divine. From Yesterday's Financial Times:

Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression.

The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.

The amount by which the elite has benefited is startling, and illustrates the problem with lightly regulated free markets: the rich get much richer while the rest do not get richer at all. According to Société Générale economists, the inflation-adjusted income of the highest-paid fifth of US earners has risen by 60 per cent since 1970, while it has fallen by more than 10 per cent for the rest. As was recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books, the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame, is wealthier than the bottom third of the US population put together – about 100m people.

Posted by Paul Kaye at 9:52 PM
Keywords: The Economy
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Demographic Collision Course

Great summary from Nielsen on the the demographic collision course we are on. Best parts below. If it is any comfort, it's a lot worse for Japan and China in the years ahead.

The recession of 2007–2009 has placed a great deal of strain on marketers and retailers of consumer products. Price and value have become more and more important, challenging marketers to rethink product and distribution. Everyone just wants things to get back to normal, but will they? While discretionary spending will return to moderate levels as markets rebound, the economy of the United States—as well as the rest of the more developed World—is well on the road to longer-term difficult times. The economic hard times to come do not stem from the misuse of arcane investment instruments that can take a degree in calculus to understand, but rather from simple demographics. The emerging marketplace will be very different than today, and filled with wide-ranging challenges.

Since the early 1970s, birth rates in the United States have been at least 40% lower than at the heights of the Baby Boom. When a falling birth rate is combined with a very large generation like the Baby Boom, the effect is a gradual aging of the population. The median age of the population increases as the large group grows older because there aren’t enough babies being added to balance them out. For much of the large group’s life cycle, they are typically a boon to the economy—especially when they reach their prime economic productivity years (usually from the early 40s into the middle 50s). However, as this large group continues to age, they stop being an economic asset and begin to become a burden—as the Baby Boom generation will become over the next several decades.

Aging populations place stress on an economy in two ways. First, if the generation is sufficiently large, retirement can lower the size of the labor force—particularly its most skilled and most experienced component—lowering overall economic productivity. Starting in the next two years until 2030, the number of persons who reach the retirement age of 66 will increase by over 100,000 each year throughout the Baby Boom retirement years. For many of the early years in that period, the number of persons who reach the age of 19 and enter the labor force will actually decline by more than 40,000 per year for the next decade.

The second impact of an aging population is perhaps larger—the costs incurred by society to care for a large number of retirees. Social Security will begin to run at a deficit in about eight years and will deplete its trust fund by 2041 unless changes are made now. At that point, money coming into the program would only cover about 70% of the money paid out each year. Medicare and Medicaid will deplete their trust funds in only about ten years and will be the largest component of all U.S. government spending by 2030.

Additionally, many private pension plans are currently under-funded, and given the current economic difficulties, may not have time to recover adding more people to the public dole. The Baby Boom generation has suffered a disproportionate share of the $11 trillion in lost market equity and $3 trillion in lost real estate value from the current recession and they will find it near impossible to retire and sustain their current standard of living—particularly the 38% who will be eligible to retire in the next ten years.

Posted by Paul Kaye at 1:55 PM
Keywords: Getting Ready, Retirement, The Economy
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Ilusion of Time

Brilliant short post from Seth Godin today:

There's always room for Jello

This is one of the great cultural touchstone slogans of our era. A culture where there's so much to eat we need to try to find a food that we can eat even if we're stuffed.

Often, we'll decide that something is full, stuffed, untouchable but then some Jello shows up, and suddenly there's room.

Think about your schedule... is there room for an emergency, an SEC investigation, a server crash? If you took a day off because of the flu, is your business going to go bankrupt? Probably not.

So, if there's time for an emergency (Jello), why isn't there time for brilliance, generosity or learning?

Posted by Paul Kaye at 12:40 PM
Keywords: Art
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Monday, June 29, 2009

The Madoff Lesson

From The Curious Capitalist:

If Madoff's clients had only put 5% or 10% of their assets in his Ponzi scheme, it just wouldn't have been that big a deal. Instead we have for months been hearing story after story about individuals and families and even foundations that put all their money with the guy. These weren't the kind of folks who spend much time reading Harry Markowitz or Burton Malkiel—instead, they didn't want to have to think about their investments at all. They wanted to leave their money with somebody they trusted, and get on with their lives. Which is a pretty reasonable desire. But, it turns out, a dangerous one.

Posted by Paul Kaye at 10:02 PM
Keywords: Basics, Letting Go, Security, Trust
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Thursday, June 25, 2009

Stunning!

SImply stunning art work using just sand on glass.

Posted by Paul Kaye at 3:50 PM
Keywords: Art
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Echolocation

I had heard of dolphins using echolocation but I was truly blown away when I first heard of echolocation being used by blind people to negotiate their way through life. This fascinating article explains the process. Truly a miracle--one of life's wonders.

Excerpt:

I am 6 years old and it's my first day at school. The bell rings for recess and all my classmates run gleefully away. But unlike them I cannot see. At least, not with my eyes. Instead, I click my tongue, listening for echoes from the wall to my left. I walk with my hands slightly outstretched to keep me from running into chairs that may have been left askew. I hear kids laughing and shouting through the open door, and by clicking I also hear the presence of the sides of the doorway in front of me. I go through it to the playground for the first time.

Echoes can be used to perceive three characteristics of objects: where they are, their general size and shape and, to some extent, what they are like - solid versus sparse, sound-reflective versus sound-absorbent. This allows the brain to create an image of the environment.

For example, I perceive a parked car as a large object that starts out low at one end, rises in the middle and drops off again. The difference in the height and slope pitch at either end helps me identify the front from the back end; typically, the front will be lower, with a more gradual slope up to the roof.

Distinguishing between types of vehicles is also possible. A pickup truck, for instance, is usually taller, with a hollow sound reflecting from its bed. An SUV is usually taller and sounds blockier.

A tree has narrow and solid characteristics at the bottom - the trunk - broadening and becoming more sparse towards the top. More specific characteristics, such as the size, leafiness or height of the branches, can also be determined.

Passive sonar that relies on incidental noises such as footsteps produces relatively vague images. Active sonar, in which a noise such as a tongue click is produced specifically to generate echoes, is much more precise. My colleagues and I use the term FlashSonar for active sonar, because for us each click is similar to the brief glimpse of the surroundings sighted people get when a camera flash goes off in the dark.

Posted by Paul Kaye at 12:07 PM
Keywords: Abundance, Health, Letting Go, Practice
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Monday, June 22, 2009

Inspiration

Absolutely stunning shots of ice in Greenland. It will transport you to another world.

*

A must read short article on the thoughts of a 90 year-old vibrant Rabbi, 6 Reasons to Grow Old. Excerpt:

Tranquility tops his list. “You have achieved in old age what you have wanted to, if you are fortunate,” he said. The important battles have been waged, the decisions made. “You no longer have to do the pushing, the striving, the struggle.”

“You don’t rush to quick action,” Rabbi Haberman explained. “You’re more likely to stop and think.” These days he’s hardly indifferent to the world’s problems, he added, but he’s less inclined to think he can solve them, or that they’re soluble at all.

Americans are activists by nature, but “more happens to us than we cause to happen,” he has found. “You have to accept the unalterable.”

Moreover, the rabbi confessed, he’s increasingly apt to consider the possibility he’s wrong, a gift of old age (fourth on the list) he labeled “liberation from the compulsion to set everyone else straight.” He has loosened up, he told me, since his more dogmatic youth.

Each night before bed, he recites in Hebrew a passage from Psalm 31: “In God’s hand I entrust my spirit, when asleep and when awake/My body and spirit, God is with me, I shall not fear.”

“And I leave it at that,” the rabbi said.

Posted by Paul Kaye at 11:42 AM
Keywords: Attitude, Happiness, Joy, Letting Go, Practice, Values
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