Investment advice....5 cents. Hurry, this deal won't last long.

How's this for some twisted logic:  The CEO of Germany's Deutsche Bank is telling his corporate customers that they should prepare to look elsewhere to borrow money to grow their businesses.  

He says his bank, like all European banks, are being told by the wacko regulators they have to put more money in reserve TO COVER LOSSES DUE TO BAD LOANS they've made.  (This means they need to put a pot of money off to the side to cover the stupid high risk/high profit potential loans they've made that didn't pan out, money that now won't be available to loan out to customers.)

So it's the banking regulator's fault business loans will now be harder to get?

Ummm....try this Mr. Greedy Banker:  Only make loans to quality, credit worthy customers.  Then you wouldn't have all those horrible losses.  Greece is/was NOT a quality, credit worthy customer.  Nor was Ireland, or Italy, or Portugal.  (Of course then you wouldn't have your whopping big bonus either.  Ohhhh....now I get it!)  

As for my own investment strategy, I'm playing it safe.  I've put everything I have into Gallagher's Sledge-O-Matic, becoming the exclusive North American distributor for his fantastic "slicing / dicing / cuts Julianne fries but you gotta hit  that sum bitch juuuuust right" miracle kitchen device. 

Cha-ching!

S

If you're gonna dream, dream BIG

After spending my life building homes, it probably won't come as a surprise to anyone that I like the TV show "House Hunters", and especially "House Hunters International".  

I often find myself ROFLMAO when an American goes looking for a home in picturesque Tuscany, for example, and they tell the Italian realtor they're looking for 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, a gourmet kitchen with dishwasher and a 48" Sub Zero refrigerator, with a big yard for the dogs and a post card view.  Their budget:  $1,000,000.  Something like this is what the realtor will often show them....

Really?  Those are some mighty expensive rocks!  I always wonder, is this property really a million bucks, or was it $20K until the realtor saw their American passport?  Regardless, Americans always have a wildly unrealistic expectation of how the rest of the world lives.  Four bedrooms and 3 baths?  They're asking for the Presidential Palace!

And it's now immensely popular to request a home "with character", which apparently means this:

I keep looking for a red "Condemned" sticker on a window.

And of course they want to live the "charmed life" of a local.  Sipping espresso and playing bocce ball all day, strolling the piazza and dining alfresco in the evenings....

Then I tune in the domestic version and see couples asking for a move-in ready home for $400K, and in many/most parts of the country they're shown something like this:

Nice, cute, well kept house....absolutely.  But $400K?  *choke*

It all makes my humble little apartment feel quite special.  I guess you could say, to me, House Hunters is a "comfort show".   :)

S

And nobody saw this coming? Really?

Once again it has been brought to my attention that the world's economy is royally screwed up.  This time it's the tiny island/nation of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean that has imploded.  It seems Cyprus and its banks have become a major tax safe-haven for the world's oligarchs, particularly the newly-rich Rooskies.

Except, as with banks almost everywhere, the Cypriot banks didn't have enough safe places to invest their depositor's money.  Instead they chose the high-yield but also high-risk route and invested in Greece.  Yes, THAT Greece.  

Here's the problem in a nutshell:  There is too much money concentrated in the hands of too few people.  The wealthy have already bought essentially everything they want....homes, islands, exotic cars, planes, trains, jewels, art....and they still have trillions of dollars left over. Their excess cash just piles up and they often have no where but high-risk places to put it.  That's a disaster just waiting to happen.  

Meanwhile, with too much of the world's wealth in the hands of too few, there isn't enough left for the masses to buy enough of the things that spurs production and creates jobs.  That's why unemployment is so high worldwide.  The wealthy simply can't buy enough "stuff" to keep the rest of the world busy producing it.

So how do you fix it?  No, you don't just pull a "Robin Hood" and confiscate money from the rich and drop it on the poor.  That's a double-bad move.  The rich won't have any incentive to work because they'll just have their gains taken away from them, while the poor won't have any incentive to work because they'll just be handed a windfall for doing nothing.  

So what then?  Level the playing field.  We need a new tax code written on a clean sheet of paper and not just another band-aid on what we have now.  Start right now phasing out all the hundreds (thousands?) of tax credits and deductions and subsidies that are increasingly making our "free-market" economy anything but.  

The idea that we need to give all those loopholes to the wealthy so they can have more money to "invest" in the economy is bull!  They have several trillion (with a "T") dollars on the sidelines right now doing very little.  (And let's be honest....it isn't just the wealthy that benefit from loopholes.  We all benefit from a few....it's just that the rich's are bigger.)

Without special favors for a few I think you'd see in short order income becoming more equal based on the efforts of those working and not just flowing one-way to those who know someone important or can afford a lobbyist.  

The rich can still work and get richer, but it will be due to their superior intelligence or by the sweat of their brow and not by just knowing a congressman willing to sponsor their heavily camouflaged loophole.  More well paid workers = more  consumers = more production = more tax revenue.  See how this works?

It's called "growing the economy", and it's not a new idea.    We've heard a lot of talk about it recently, but very little movement towards it.  That's because some toes will have to be stepped on for it to work.

Finding someone willing to do a little "toe stomping" is the first challenge.  Any volunteers?

S

A country that gives us Ferrari's, wine, and Sophia Loren is my kinda country....WITH EDIT

The headline read, "Without a Pope the Vatican is running in slow motion."  So last week it was in overdrive?  Outwardly I don't see any difference.  I'm not Catholic, and I certainly don't mean to make light of the Church, but it just seems like the Vatican moves at its own pace and nothing can change its velocity.

Sort of like Italy that surrounds it.  I've never been to Italy, but it intrigues me.  It's hard for my mind to stereotype Italy and the Italian people.  There seems to be such a wide chasm between perception and reality, more so than just about anyplace I can imagine.

For example, newspaper reports suggest they're a very dysfunctional people.  They form and dissolve governments about as often as Kim Kardashian changes shoes.  They have mastered the art of cheating on their taxes.  They have a very generous welfare state....people seem to take it easy, preferring to sit around and eat pasta and drink vino.  Work is almost an afterthought.  The government is flat busted broke.  People seem to live in hovels that date back to Roman times.

Yet they have a tremendous sense of style.  Italian women are Ooh-la-la gorgeous... 

...as are their cars, even their little proletarian Fiats.

Their carabinieri (police) even patrol in style, with uniforms designed with fashion in mind.  Isn't Prada an Italian company?  In many ways they seem backwards, yet they make world class Ferrari's, Maserati's, and Lamborghini's, and machine tools, and firearms, and helicopters, too.  Lots of very high-tech stuff is made and exported from Italy.  Does that mean they have a top-notch educational system?

I'd love to go there someday and unravel the mystery Italy has become in my mind.  I think I'll make that my daydream for today.  

If I ever make it there, will I be disappointed?

S

EDIT....Did you hear that when President George W. Bush was in Italy he was granted an audience with Pope John Paul II?  After a nice visit, as he was leaving, "W" leaned over and quietly told the Pope, "...and please tell Mrs. Paul how much I like her fish sticks."  :)

A downward spiral?

Just an observation:  One thing that differentiates the USA from countries like Italy and Greece is that Americans by-and-large pay their taxes.  Our tax compliance rate is very high, while they have a huge cash economy, one where cash changes hands, there are no receipts, and income goes unreported to the tax man.  I predict we'll see more and more of that here.

Americans are rapidly losing faith in their government.  As more and more people become self-employed, the opportunity will increase to stiff the Infernal Revenooers.  When people feel their government isn't listening to them....to their concerns....then people will begin to tune them out and start looking out for themselves only, screw the "collective good".  I think we're on/near that threshold right now.  It's called "self-preservation".   That's the corner we're being backed into. 

It won't happen overnight, but it will happen.

Oh yeah....Happy New Year!

S

The end is near!

The end of our long holiday weekend, that is. I'm the world's worst about looking forward to time off, and dreading seeing it end, too. Right now K and I are drowning our sorrows non-alcoholicly at Starbuck's. K does this every Sunday, but as I usually work Sunday afternoon's, this is quite a treat for me. My instructions are to sit here and read for hours on end. And if my butt starts hurting, shut up and keep reading. Haha!


I saw on the Internet that Eurostat, the EU agency that keeps track of all the statistics, says that the UK has the highest obesity rate in Europe, and Italy has the lowest. Italy, with all the pasta and bread they eat? How's that possible? If I ate that kind of food daily I'd be the size of a house! I'll just stick with my meat and potatoes. Um....wait...


I read in the newspaper that Sergio Scaglietti has died. If you've ever admired the beautiful lines of a vintage Ferrari, you've admired the genius of Mr. Scaglietti. Just look at the cars driving around today (IMHO usually very bland) and you'll appreciate his sense of style even more. RIP, sir.


A family birthday party tonight, then it's back to the cold, cruel world tomorrow. :(


S

Bazinga!

Craig's List came through for me again.  Yesterday evening I delivered to the new owner a beautiful framed signed/numbered print that used to hang over our fireplace, but for the past 2+ years has been leaning against the wall in our spare bedroom collecting dust.  We're slowly-but-surely disposing of stuff that we don't use so that when the day comes that we can move, hopefully to Colorado, moving will be a breeze and we can comfortably fit into a smaller, less expensive abode.  Read:  more money for fun activities/travels.  Fortunately I/we don't have much sentimental attachment to our "stuff", so letting it go isn't that difficult.


Speaking of Colorado, I see the first snow of the season has arrived in Denver.  That same storm will be arriving here in north Texas today, except in the form of 50 degree temps and rain.  I'm ready....let 'er rip.  Things here will be back to 70 and sunny by the weekend.  :)


In the news I see the too-big-to-fail European banks got a rude awakening.  They're being forced to write off half the value of the loans they made to Greece.  Looks like their greed bit 'em in the butt.  Whatever happened to prudent lending?  They should have known better.


Did you see where two members of the Italian Parliament got into a fistfight while "debating" the necessity of raising the retirement age to 67?  One accused the other's wife of retiring with a full pension at the ripe old age of 39, saying that's what's wrong with the system now.  Thirty nine?   Mama Mia!


S