Of academic spiers and cobblestones
I just finished a teaching seminar for Rich Dad in the beautiful city of Cambridge, the home of the ultra-bright or ultra-stylish! More recently famous for the cerebral Morse and his less brilliant colleague Lewis. I didn’t see any murders, but it was graduation week. Our hotel was filled with proud parents from America, Germany, and the Orient who were leading caped ducklings and mortars through the lobby with increasing frequency.
It was an uplifting moment. Here was a new generation of the brightest who would lead the world in science, politics, literature, and the soul of mankind… the arts. Some graduates will even have studied business and economics! A sad thought dawned. Of the latter, a few would go into industry, even fewer would create industries we could not even conceive of yet, but the vast swamp would be drawn into the black hole of finance lured by the lure of fast money and the glitter of gold. goldman gold.
I was left thinking that so many learning centers teach business Studies but never financial education.
The difference?
An abyss as wide as the difference between studying history and doing history.
Perhaps our efforts would be better focused on teaching teachers now rather than entrapping students in the future.
As I sat in the lobby with the ducklings and my thoughts, the business section of the Sunday Times was a mine of information. I read that Mervyn King is ready this week to QE another £25bn into the economy. The ignorant cheered, the middle class was relieved, but the rich and intelligent went to check that their financial lifeboats were in place. For those of you who have savings in the bank, a job, or fixed retirement annuities, the Governor and his friends with a few well-intentioned keystrokes have made you financially weaker devaluing your money and decreasing your purchasing power. In short, it has, it is and it will impoverish you without you realizing it. The poor and middle classes are the frogs who refuse to leave the pot while the water slowly boils! in my book money madness I explored the concept of an unbacked or unlimited money supply in the economies of countries throughout history. All empires, from the Romans to the Spanish, the French, and even the British, have been brought down from within by the cancer of a diseased money supply. In the case of the United States, the rot began in 1971 when they abandoned the gold standard. Like a mighty oak tree that has rotted from the inside when we least expect it, an unexpected little breeze will knock it to the ground.
The wealthy, with tangible assets like property and gold, must raise a silent toast every time a central banker opens his mouth to make an announcement.
The powerful Fragment’s constructor appeared in the center of the page. The good news is that the building is finished and officially opened this week. The bad news is that he has to find tenants for 25 apartments that are roughly half a million square feet. Calls itself a member of RICS, the Royal Institute of Chartered speculators. Well congratulations on finishing it after 13 years but really apart from the ego of saying I own and sexually pleasure Europe’s largest phallic symbol I would rather have 100 HMO’s in Hull with positive cash flow and nothing of my own money. Let the headache of trying to find a commercial tenant in the current environment want to go in the 2012 version of Towering Inferno.
Well in the market we should all be buying Diageo – cheap on all financial fronts in the short, medium and long term. What do they do? They are the world’s largest owner of beverage brands – cash rich and cash flow rich. In the current environment, we all need to drink more to keep everything in order… at least that’s what central bankers seem to do!
Have a great week of investment: may your longs rise to the sky and your shorts fall into the abyss.
neil