Financial Literacy

CNBC has always been somewhat of a joke to people like me: contrarians, goldbugs, bears and sundry "nutjobs". We get no respect but it's hard to believe that people like this are highly paid market commentators




This happened on CNBC yesterday, when Jeff Macke started interspersing absolute non-sequiturs between a litany of tangential rants and insults. Clusterstock reported today that Macke is under a lot of stress, currently negotiating his contract with CNBC. Word is, after yesterday's stunt, he may be on his way out the door.

As Clusterstock observed:

"He couldn't carry his own show, he doesn't have any obvious alternatives and, more importantly, his latest breakdown may have torpedoed any chance to get hired somewhere else."

Back in my previous life as a failed musician, I wrote a song called Multi-Media World and the title of this post were the closing lyrics in the outro of that song. Around the same period of my life, I had zero financial literacy, was being hounded by debt collectors for my student loans and maxed out credit cards and had zero prospects.

I realize in retrospect, I had no business having credit cards back then. I also realize that most people have no business having a credit card today. Easy credit destroys lives. I was lucky, because 1) I was a middle class brat who had financially solvent parents to bail him out and 2) I was young enough to have the luxury of time on my side when it came to rebuilding my life from near bankruptcy, and most fortunate of all 3) the scenario I foresee in our collective near futures hadn't transpired yet.