According to the NYTimes,
The Pakistan army readied a major assault to rid the main town in the Swat Valley of entrenched Taliban militants, who the military said Friday were shaving their beards in order to mingle undetected with fleeing civilians.
How beautiful these deeply held beliefs are that can be tossed aside to save one’s skin, if this truly is what’s happening. Or perhaps, it’s another tactic to get close to the Pakistani army before self immolating.
Source:
I have often wondered about our measure of well being – the Gross Domestic Product. We hear it all the time. We know that this indicator is important, but it doesn’t really account for the value of nature or personal well being. In the 70′s, Bhutan came up with the Gross National Happiness. Today, the NY Times had a small feature on the Minister of Happiness and the process of reevaluating the indicator.
Find out more about Gross National Happiness.
Sources:
I saw this a while ago on The Big Picture, but I lost it until a friend asked me about the sub-prime crisis. I think it’s a great description and depiction of the crisis. Enjoy!
I heard this benediction on (you guessed it) Democracy Now!. The Sierra Club recorded Edward Abbey during a talk they sponsored at the University of Utah. I thought this was brilliant!
May your trails be crooked, winding and lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys, tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal, mysterious swamps infested with crocodiles, and down from there into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down, down again, into a deep, vast, ancient, unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
I thought I would share. I just looked at my mutual fund balance. Depressing, just like everyone else’s. It’s gotten worst in the past two months – or at least since the last time I looked at it. There’s a cool graph of my fund’s return on investment. If you didn’t know it represented the value of money I put into it, you might think it’s a cool mountain profile to climb.
Returns on my Investment
I particularly like the Personal rate of return schedule:
Personal rate of return
Invest for the long-haul, right? Except what is the long haul? I guess if you started saving in 1982, you’ve only lost 1/2 your peak value since then, but what about people who were expecting that money for retirement? Oops.
Next time, invest in bonds. I looked at one of Vanguard’s bond funds, it has about a 6% return over the 32 year life of the fund. I’ll take slow, steady, and not losing 43.3% of my value in one year any day over stocks. If only I had money to start investing in the bond fund …
Here’s a link to interesting graph from a blog I read pretty regularly. It shows that in late February 2009, we hit the 50% mark between the beginning of the bull market in 1982 and the peak in October 2007. 50% Dow Retracement: 1982 – 2009.
I heard about this in class tonight – an investment firm run by a Nobel-prize winning economist went bankrupt. I pulled the thread. According to crainsnewyork.com:
Management consultancy and financial-advice firm Trinsum Group, a blend of management consulting with financial advisory services founded by former J.P. Morgan chiefs and a Nobel Prize-winner, filed for bankruptcy Wednesday after just two years in business.
According to papers filed in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, the company reported liabilities of about $15.8 million against assets of just $1.2 million—$1.1 million of which is listed as the value of a patent for an investment management software program called SmartNest.
I don’t know more details, but does it strike you as odd that the firm with a Nobel Prize winner and founded by J.P. Morgan execs failed in the market? In the spirit of honoring risk taking and giving people room to fail with new ideas, I don’t want to be harsh. I just wish guys like them hadn’t failed in a way that the world economy is in jeopardy.
According to Trinsum’s website:
January 30, 2009
Trinsum Group, Inc., a holding company, announced this week that it has filed a voluntary petition under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York. The Chapter 11 proceeding does not include the Company’s operating subsidiaries, including its consulting subsidiary, and their operations will not be affected.
A quick Google search turns up an interesting chain. A company called Marakan Associates, Inc. merged with a company called IFL to form the Trinsum Group, Inc. In July, 2008, creditors filed involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy papers:
On July 3, 2008, an involuntary petition for liquidation under Chapter 7 is filed against Trinsum Group, Inc. in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.
As early as 2007, someone trashes the merger and says the company has an abysmal record:
Even though IFL was founded by several “serious heavy hitters”, as you mentioned, they have completely failed to deliver. In the 4 or 5 years that IFL has been in business, they have done only one M&A transaction (and the banker who brought the deal left shortly thereafter). Most of IFL’s investment bankers have left in frustration (I think there are two or three left). I personally know a dozen of people who spent one or two years there and then left to return to a real career. IFL has also failed to launch a fixed income hedge fund a couple of years ago, and their small emerging markets hedge fund is being spun off. Those guys have been absolutely unable (or unwilling?) to focus on the top line, and they have been on the brink of bankruptcy for almost two years. The real issue, from what I have been told, is that nothing gets done at IFL, and the work ethics are certainly not what they should be at an investment bank or PE shop. The merger with Marakon is a way for the senior partners to exit and avoid major public embarassment. As far as their plans for a PE fund is concerned, I would think that prospective investors will probably think twice before giving their money to people with such an abysmal track record.
Just a little more digging turns up that Merton was on the board of a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management that exploded in 1998 and led to a Federal Reserve organized $3.625 BILLION dollar bailout. In the aftermath a GAO Report says:
Although no federal money was committed to the recapitalization, FRBNY’s intervention raised concerns among some market observers that it could create moral hazard4 by encouraging other large institutions to assume greater risks, in the belief that the Federal Reserve would intervene to avoid potential future market disruptions.
And Hank Paulson, former Treasury Secretary, engineered his boardroom taker over of Goldman-Sachs, ousting Jon Corzine, former Goldman CEO, for his close involvement with LTCM.
Absolutely shocking. And we wonder how we got here today? It’s amazing we weren’t here sooner.
Sources:
I just saw this on the front page of the NY Times: 1 Killed by Blast in Cairo Tourist Area. According to the article, someone threw a grenade into the mass of tourists. The last time something like this happened was in April of 2005, but it was a suicide bomber. I consider myself lucky because I had been in the market only hours before the April 2005 explosion. Natasha (girlfriend and travel companion at the time) and I had a train to Luxor to catch, so we were out of harm’s way when the bomber killed people. Here’s my blog entry from that day [Travel Entry 104].
SAFE!
I just found out, about 24 hours later, that someone tossed a bomb in to the bazaar where we were yesterday (7 Apr 2005). We left the bazaar around 15.00, the bomb exploded around 17.45 according to the news. At that time, I was being frustrated by Microsoft Paint on an Internet computer about 3km from there.
For now, I just have to deal with the hassle of people peddling tours, boat rides, and taxis here in Luxor. I promise to stay safe.
Our folks, my folks in particular, were worried senseless. The had no way of calling us. They sent about 6 or 7 emails, each more frantic than the last, wanting to hear it we were OK.
The only time I ever experienced hostility in Egypt was when I was heading down to a subway station. A man walking up the stairs started shouting at me, “Get out! Get out! We do not want you in this country! We do not need you in this country!” I ignored him for the moment, but eventually did leave Egypt.
The most recent connection to the bombings in Khan el-Khalili also remind me of the temporal brush with disaster in Kyrgyzstan. There was a snow storm that blanketed the Khan Tengri and Peak Pobeda (victory in Russian) base camp in snow. We needed a helicopter lift to get out because it would be too dangerous to walk back over the glaciers. Where was that crevasse?
About a year later, I was in London and overheard a TV news report that a helicopter had crashed in Kyrgyzstan near the Chinese border. They hadn’t yet said where in the mountains, but I knew from looking at the video that it was the same place I hopped on the helicopter.
Again, my brush with disaster was temporally separated from my geographical presence. The recent bombing in Cairo made the echoes of my experiences a little louder.
From the NY Times Article “Premier of Iraq is Quietly Firing Fraud Monitors“:
One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.
$13 Billion? Squandered or wasted? I’m going to pretend I’m not cynical about how much more has truly been squandered in our adventurous disaster in the Middle East, but at a time when there are lots of people in the US that need some financial help, it’s great to know we’ve lined the pockets of Iraqi leaders and politicians.
What does the State Department have to say about it?
The United States Embassy in Baghdad did not respond on Monday to a request for comment on the dismissals.
Nothing? Imagine that. How embarrassing.