Exile From the Herd - Financial Literacy

What's Next, Canada Pension Plan Buys Twitter?

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:48:52 -0400

I haven't been blogging much over the summer and I've made a commitment to myself to get back into it over the fall. Here's as good a place as any to start.

I'm doing some comparative research of Canada versus the US: growth of money supply, national debt as a percentage of GDP, account surplus. From that I'm trying to figure out if I'm about to do something suicidal (buy a building for the company after our lease expires next year), or shrewd. A big part of the calculus here is to try to get a feel for the downside risk if we're just in the eye of the storm, financially speaking, and another trainwreck is about to ensure (next round of mortgage resets down south, credit card defaults, imminent crash in the USD, deflationary spiral? Hyper-inflationary blow-up?)

Usually, you don't have to factor all these Black Swan events into a routine decision like this, but we are living in a rare confluence of events where we have to seriously consider the possibility (probability) of these things occurring.

But I digress....

In the course of this, I just found out that the Canada Pension Plan was a member of the consortium that just bought Skype from eBay, so CPP will own 15% of Skype if this goes through.

WTF?! You're telling me, CPP is automatically deducted from my salary, nothing I can do about it except supposedly live off some pittance it produces when I'm 65, and they're using this money by going in on these sucker's bet private equity deals like this? Give me a break. What's next, Canada Pension Plan buys Twitter?

This is CPP: it's supposed to be a lockbox model: money goes in, stays there until we're old, money comes out. In the interim about the only place I can see sanely putting the money is into Government bonds, not f-ing SKYPE. We're not running a goddamn VC fund here, it's supposed to be our retirement income.

What a crock. Tell me why I can't just opt-out of CPP now. Kiss off the money I put in so far, relinquish any future claim to any payout from CPP, thank you very much, I'll look after myself - and keep the damn portion of my salary CPP deducts every year and invest it myself.

Oh right, that would mean taking responsibility for my own life.

Can't have that now. Gotta let the Nanny take care of EVERYTHING.

Career-ending moments in show-business: Jeff Macke

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:45:02 -0400

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."

Buy now, pay later, buy now, pay forever...

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:33:29 -0400

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.

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