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The General State Of Things
It's not all about AI. The equity rally, I mean. But there's a self-fulfilling prophecy afoot and wh
Hilarious! How about a dog? 🙂
“If you ask me — and I haven’t done any work to quantify this — the whole thing’s starting to look a bit like a Potemkin village, and even more so than usual. . . .”
“At some point, the sundry bifurcations which typify late-stage capitalism will have to be resolved, and if that resolution’s going to be peaceful, it has to be in the direction of more egalitarian outcomes.”
Beautifully written.
Our current market conditions remind me of the Santa Ana winds in Southern California: they usually bring warm sunny weather, and the skies are azure blue, but the wind is coming from the wrong direction, and the memory of past catastrophes is still close at hand.
Not funny, really. Too many people ignore this idea, until they can’t. 1929 was built on paper. Unrealized gains are what I call “bar talk money.” It’s not real. If the IRS doesn’t tax your for what you’d like to think of as your earnings, they aren’t real. I know how much money I had in 1966 and how much I have today. In financial terms only those two numbers are required to tell me my average annual return (as both numbers are actual cash. It doesn’t matter what happened in the interim. Otherwise, it’s all just air. Thanks for this post, sir.
Here is the “math” that I do to figure out if I can survive a crash:
Total investments (retirement plus taxable) x 50% x 3%. Next, I figure out my “fixed” living costs (excluding things like travel- which, by the way, rivals H’s clothing spend in terms of being ludicrous). The net of those two numbers should be zero.
”Life overhead“ was employed most amusingly by Lucy Kellaway, who, for sometime referred to her children as ”Cost Center #1 and #2“ in her FT column spoofing UK management practices and jargon. I dearly miss those columns, although H’s acerbic asides are more than compensatory.