How Many Things Don’t You Want?

Because life is simpler in the wilderness, most people learn quickly that taking too much gear with them on, say, a backpacking trip, is dysfunctional and potentially life threatening. With diligent planning the solutions are usually obvious. For example, if you are feeling cold in the wilderness you can put on every single piece of […]

Investors At The Edge Of The Fiscal Cliff

The fiscal cliff is a combination of large spending cuts and tax increases that are scheduled to be automatically enacted at the start of 2013. There is nothing unusual about any of these spending cuts and tax changes in isolation, but it’s the sheer number of them happening simultaneously at the beginning of next year that’s […]

Backpacking Lite: The Secret To Real Wealth

Last week I was asked why, as a financial planner, I am writing about everything from happiness and parenting to dying and character development. The clue is in the subtitle of the blog, “Financial, economic and wealth related issues in the broadest sense of the word.” The origin of the word “wealth” is the old English word […]

The Future Of Currencies

In an earlier post I wrote about the likelihood of continued market volatility as asset prices veered back and forth between the effects of monetary stimulus and the deflationary forces unleashed by a generational deleveraging event. In this tug-of-war between the forces of inflation (money printing) and deflation (deleveraging) the dollar is the medium through which […]

We Have To Cultivate Our Garden

I am told that successful blogs have to have strong graphics for the same reason that people need to shout in a crowded room to make themselves heard. The idea that the size of the audience can affect the message is an interesting one. Think about the mainstream press. The larger the circulation of a publication the more likely it is that the […]

Whisky’s For Drinking, Water’s For Fighting.

Whenever I do some serious backpacking I’m reminded of the central importance of water to our existence, particularly here in the American West. The earliest articulate description of the problem was made by Colonel John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), the famous ethnologist and geologist who was the first to run the Colorado River through the Grand […]

Sudden Wealth

Your life-time partner dies, you sell your late stage technology start-up to a larger company, you receive a large insurance settlement following an accident, your employer lays you off with a large retirement package. These events all have one thing in common, they are life changing in a significant way.  Your identity, your relationships, your self-image […]

The State: Engine of Creation or Engine of Plunder?

While in England recently I visited Buckland Abbey in Yelverton, Devon, the home of Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596).  As every English schoolboy knows Drake is famous for successfully raiding Spanish ships loaded with treasure from the New World, being the first man to circumnavigate the globe, and helping to defeat the Spanish Armada.  Of course, […]

Playing The Game Of Life

During a long career as a financial planner, I have had the privilege of looking through a window into the intimate lives of hundreds of individuals. Many of these have played the game of life with consummate skill and have achieved considerable success in their chosen endeavors, both financial and non-financial. However, it is also clear […]

Bond Buyers Beware

Interest rates fell earlier this month to the lowest level in U.S. history.  The fall in the rate of the 30-year Treasury bond since 1990 alone is 65%. This has happened despite record money printing by the Federal Reserve, which many predicted would lead to rising rates.  However, in an uncertain world, U.S. bonds have […]

Platonic Dialogues For Our Times: Part I

Inflacionatus: How on earth can you continue to hold on to your deflationary views Deflaticus? The monetary base has exploded, inflation is rising and while the dollar has not fallen over the last 12 months, it has not risen much either, as one would expect during a deflation. Deflaticus: The monetary base may have exploded, […]

Hayek, Candies and Keynes

The debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes over the nature and future of economics, spanned momentous times such as the Great Depression and the age of dictators, and it continues today posthumously in the discussion of how best to nurse back to health a wounded world economy.  Keynes, the optimist, believed that solutions […]

The Plus Side Of Debt Default

Back in September, 2008 Professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel gave an online presentation to Sterling Futures’ clients and friends on the state of the economy. In 1993 Hummel was the first economist to go on record predicting that the U.S. government will default on its obligations. At that time the prediction was considered extreme but now […]

The Fed: Money Wizard Or Wizard Of Oz

In November, 2010, George Selgin, an economist at the University of Georgia, gave a presentation on the Federal Reserve System, in which he concludes that in virtually every conceivable respect, the economy performed as least as well pre-1913 (the year the Fed was created) than post-World War II, and usually better. He also finds that there […]

Society At The Edge Of Chaos

We tend to assume that history moves slowly and cyclically. For example, it is commonly thought that empires grow old, over extend themselves and finally collapse and that this will eventually happen to the United States just as it has with every other empire. Similarly, most people believe that global warming will eventually have serious […]

The Backpacker’s Guide To Wealth

Having just returned from a few days backpacking in the Superstition Mountain Wilderness in Arizona, please forgive me for waxing lyrical about the unlikely connection between backpacking and wealth. The primary goal of backpacking is to survive a trip to places that are often difficult or impossible to get to by any other means than […]