The Art Of Modern Finance

I can't say this is new to me; I have encountered it many times before, especially during the late Eighties and early Nineties, when I worked for a brilliant Sydney Merchant Banker by the name of Jurisic long since retired. There were a lot of brilliant people around the place in those days: I recall one of the most fascinating individuals I have ever met - Karl Teuchert - the woodcraftsman and designer who designed a large amount of the furniture on which Federal Senators in Australia sit. He was a man full of energy and passion and extremely generous with his knowledge of materials to all those who sought him out. Karl worked almost exclusively with an Australian hardwood known as Jarrah, which is similar to the rare and expensive American Cocobolo.

But I digress – slightly.

A beautiful pic unconnected to the gun debate

I am driving at making the point that today it is extremely rare to find someone, anyone -, who, knowing a great deal about their subject matter, will care to divulge a lot of that knowledge fluidly.

It is simply far too difficult to keep the commercial value of any specialised knowledge intact once that knowledge is allowed to drift unescorted out 'into the wild' as it were.

The banker Jurisic owned a small boutique investments house, and Teuchert owned two fairly large craft workshops in which he employed about thirty highly talented craftspeople. Both of them could supply virtually completely unique products to a high-end and individualistic market that was not able to source the same things elsewhere. And, more to the point, this 'high-end' market was not prepared at the time to be satisfied with substitutes of a lesser quality and standard.

One just has to say, however, that it is now moot if the China market produces knock-offs of a lesser quality anymore. Sad to say but true, Chinese film directors make substantially better movies than anyone in Hollywood, e-Readers are cheaper and better if you buy them from the back-alleys in Hong Kong, and space shots launched from inside China are safer than anything Morton Thiokol or TRW ever did. This will not last. But it might go on for a thousand years yet before 'it doesn't last,' if you gather what I mean.

Anyway, back to my first sentence. I recently had the experience, once again, of watching a group of intelligent people turn to water in the face of the serious prospect of actually making big money now. Far easier, apparently, was it for them to spend a lot of money going around the whole world visiting people in high places just to hear those mysterious 'yes, yes, yesses,' which really meant 'no.' Unlike the Eighties though, today, there is only the one single rare diamond that you will find once in your lifetime, rather than being able to walk up the road a little ways to cast an unhurried eye over all the other diamonds singing much similar tunes. And the one single rare diamond has forsooth even a spirit being within, which moves and lives and thinks – just like those fabled stones in the Garden of Aladdin.

To possess such a stone one must employ a young thin lad, who can easily fit down that Underworld Entrance through which no fat, well-fed and watered, modern Middle Class merchant can go.

There is much in that sentence, no doubt, and it is by no means a terminal statement. But what is absolutely certain, and sure, and true, is that the means and the mechanisms and pathways to financing, of both the high and of the low kind, may be found quite possibly only in the minds of strange sorcerers claiming to be the long lost brother of your lately deceased and much beloved father... The thrill and the magic of financing important things is – and quite possibly always has been – a secret knowledge, and an art.

Back when I was a callow youth (never was exactly that, though), then, and even now, there is this strange holiness and religiosity about finance that many many people have; it is a thing which is given to you apparently, and to you alone, especially, and above many others, because you are worthy, and you do things in a certain prescribed way that others do not. It is in so many ways a blessing adorning the worthy alone, by the gods of money.

Whereas of course it is not anything of those things. It is simply a person knowing where money is and where it flows inside a dark cavern into which few go and thus where one might still get some before a thousand hungry gnats swarm in to steal it all and to make of yet another cool and fertile place an arid desert patch. As they do. And I fear that those who are survivors in arid places are symbiotic creatures of those gnats. They seem to be in every place that has a want of necessary and adequate funding. And to me, at least, they seem to have a special relationship with gnats.

Dancing With The Sparks Of Light

This is about money, believe it or not.

And I should not be sidetracked...

But I must stop briefly and just note the odd usage of the word 'parabellum' by those philosophers of the gun around the place seemingly everywhere. I'm pretty certain 'parabellum' means 'prepare for war' in Latin. And, I also think that what it implied was a type of cheap and small round of which vast numbers thereof could be quickly manufactured, in preparation for war, where one might be expected to have to possess, and also to carry, a lot of bullets, that don't necessarily weigh a ton, and that you might also easily fire off in large numbers.

A lot of people I have heard speak recently, seem to think a 9 mm parabellum is some special kind of advanced, especially killing sort of cartridge to be used in semi-automatic pistols. Whatever. Any kind of projectile launched at a vicious speed into a human body in the wrong place can kill. Lots of things can kill.

Anyway, I actually don't want to focus on guns and bullets at the moment. However I make the point that people use words and many times what they mean, is not uniformally understood as entirely meaning the same thing as what they think they are communicating to their listeners...

Conceptions of value and wealth and luxury private material possessions are also nowhere nearly as clearcut 'uniformally defined' as we sometimes take for granted that they are.

Yes, the power or the ability to select from many choices is seemingly universally accepted as a freedom that money and wealth renders to an individual. It is of course nullified by sheer ignorance or lack of culture and lack of a wide knowledge about what things exist: people can only choose from that of which they possess some knowledge. Out of sight, out of mind; out of mind, out of any reason to be desired.



Great Car Art - even Ferrari thinks so...

I look at some modern cars around now and they seem to me excessively convolluted, even for admittedly advanced intricate machinery. A friend of mine just told me today that he found the new Black Series C63 Mercedes annoying and utterly unfunctional for driving long distances in Australia along the major outback highways.

On the one hand it may appear that electronically-fuel injected and/or turbo charged, drive-by-wire, motion sensing suspension equipped, hi-tech modern cars with alloy and ceramic engines beat the hell out of a handcrafted Aston V-8, or a Jaguar V-12 with its double bank of Weber carburettors that need to be tuned regularly... On the other hand, the obscurity of what is going on inside the hood of the car, and the shelf-life of all these modern offerings coming from over-capitalized robotic manufacturing plants in Germany, means that none of it is on the human scale anymore. It's all very – maybe too far - removed from the human physicality of sticking a hand-crank into the front of an Austin or old Ford and firing the thing 'into life.' Not that I'm saying we need to go back to all that, but the physical link to the human body/mind creature is essentially lost when it comes to modern things like cars and even buildings and city planning and art and design. And especially communication. I can still use a leaf of hand-filled deckled edge french linen paper to write a note to someone using a pen and ink – but then, nowadays would that person be able to read it and 'get the message?'

Possibly not.

And then again, I would like to be able to wear an Italian rapier on my hip more or less like an accoutrement (of clothing) when going around in public but such a thing is not legal to do, more's the pity. And by what I mean by 'more's the pity' I mean that, such a thing being illegal in my location of residence where there is no right to bear arms or to have any kind of actual or legal freedom of self-expression, it gives the general public no clue, sign, or warning as to how dangerous a person can be with words alone. I'm a dilletante when it comes to it, and I'm sure that specialized guns do a lot more damage than less-specialized ones might do, but I'm equally sure that the process of the damage and the killing begins earlier on than the moment of simply sticking the cartridge into the clip or the chamber. It begins with words. It begins with the ways in which social communication is carried on. The ideas are the seeds, and the words are the physical beginnings of actions springing from the ideas. Words – are absolutely the physically, and really, deadliest things there are.

 

Calvin J. Bear

I Try To Be Positive...

A Seriously Deluded Individual

This is John Yates, the twit who ran the Metropolitan Police in London into the ditches where Rupert Murdoch crawled in search of private conversations and personal scandals in high places that he could exploit for money.

Whether these men do these things due to genuine paranoid delusional beliefs, or whether they know only too well that they are gaining financial and other benefits at every step along their paths 'up' and are simply pretty good at hiding this inner knowledge, I do not know.

But what I am certain of is that Hebb's Rule, that 'brain cells wire together when they fire together,' is a reliable guide, and that eventually, people who continuously maintain some outward claim that they know inwardly to be false, will end up (in non-technical, entirely layman's terms) schizophrenic, paranoid, and genuinely delusional. And this is especially so when such persons actually get massively rewarded along the way for carrying off the lie - or the several lies they need to maintain, in order to push their position and their way forward.

Bernie Cornfeld - not too bad

I think J. Edgar Hoover became a seriously paranoid schizophrenic towards the end. A lot of modern psychiatrist don't like the word 'schizophrenic,' choosing bi-polar or manic or depressed – but the reality is these people have a mind split into two. I think from a little distant hindsight, now, it is possible to look back, for instance, at the financier who built the Playboy Mansion – Bernie Cornfeld – and realise that he wasn't quite the bad guy he is often made out to have been. In hindsight you can see that he brought real innovations to mutual fund investing and his legacy as a business identity might have fared better if the market had have rewarded him in any way justly for what he put into the market equity system itself, and for the support for equitisations that he gave.

But see the market never does do that and this is something well worth remembering when involving yourself in the sharemarkets at all.

The fellow that eventually caused his undoing was another of these what I would call, seriously dangerous delusional personalities – Robert Vesco. Vesco was an outrageous fraudster and criminal who exploited malicious litigation and mudslinging to advantage. He was linked to the Nixon funding regime. Whatever you might think of Nixon as a President, his backing was extremely suspect and it tarnished his political legacy, and few disagree on that point.

A really good man

But there are also extraordinarily good people about the place. They appear often in the guise of fairly simple souls. A cunning ploy, I must say. Look for more from this fellow in this coming year. (Pic on right: Tom Watson, UK MP)

Taking A Big Swing

I clearly remember the Saturday afternoon I sorta lost my nerve at the races. I had five dollars – a measly five dollars (ten dollars in all) – each way on a horse at twenty-five to one. My sister, who was working on the stand with Australasia's biggest bookmaker at the time, had confirmed to me that virtually the entire Committee had bet on this horse, which had started in the morning at 100/1.

I even remember the name of the horse now so many years later: Todvega. And it was ridden by the best jockey I have ever seen, John James (J.J.) Miller.

That's J.J. Miller on the right

The horse won in what is called over here 'a Port Hedland Photo.' This means, figuratively that the horse was in a photo-finish but the camera angle was taken from six hundred miles up North in Port Hedland, and thus it appeared as if this horse's head was in front on the line – even though it might have been way behind in reality!

Actually, I was standing at the post and this type of thing was unnecessary this time; the horse won for real coming up on the inside. Funny, though, in the published photo the shadow of its head was in the wrong place! I guess the Committee were just making sure...

During the course of the running of the race, for the first time in my life ever, I was shaking. I had plenty of time in the running to ask myself 'what the hell was I shaking for?' I had plenty of money, ten dollars wasn't going to kill me if the horse lost. Hell I had thirty five thousand sitting in bets in the stockmarket and I slept pretty good. And then it struck me, the race was a proxy for the actual bets I was really making, namely those in the stockmarket. I went right out on Monday morning and sold up everything. By Thursday the World Stockmarket Crash of 1987 had fully unfolded.

Luck? Presentiment? I don't know and it doesn't matter. Many of my friends lost massively and I had everything completely intact and was essentially in a better position because of the new context.

I had no clue exactly when the market was going to crash, even though I thought it would sooner or later. I had taken steps long before and had raised almost a million in cash from external shareholders and controlled a public company ready for the situation – this was where my main capital was, not in just the thirty five thousand I personally was playing around with.

I had intended to post today about simple and quick ways to counteract stress and/or lack of energy. And I will do that presently – if anyone is even remotely interested - but this other thing instead is calling for some attention: Bernanke says there is going to be a long long phase of slow growth ahead for EVERYONE... He bases that, I assume on the utter control he has exerted on the bond market. I think he would be correct too but for one strange dissonance that I have been observing recently. There has been way strange range volatility across sectors and categories that never previously exhibited this kind of thing. Australian blue chips varied over more than twenty-five per cent during the last year. That, is an impossibility for me to believe unless there is something, in the words of the new kids in the quant cubicles, 'latent' in the story. Something in other words, hidden to us all, going on.

You can see it too in the gold price range swings of late – the amplitude has widened noticeably.

I am told this may be because of false volumes from 'order stuffing' and that eventually there will be a price breakdown and then, if there really is genuine investor buying, the price will revert to its long term up trend. No doubt at all in my mind that the HFT people are trying very hard to damage the gold price. And maybe they can do it. But it calls into question Bernanke's certainty about a long long slow recovery for EVERYONE. Because wherever there are such large and systematic range moves, there is massive profit opportunity and when there is massive profit opportunity there is strong growth for some, not weak growth.

 

It's time for your hands to shake, again, because Ben and the 'Committee Men' want to take Port Hedland photos...

 

Calvin J. Bear 

Compositional Space

I 've been having this same old discussion recently with a few people – 'does money make you happy?'

Well if you're a regular here lookin' in on this series of tiny pieces about stuff that I think about, then sooner or later you're gonna have a pretty good idea about what you're going to spend all that money you're about to make on...

Not that you don't already, of course. But there'll be more ideas, won't there; just, more.

Desirable. I like that word. No, I actually love it.

If we don't desire things – I mean really desire them – then attaining things or getting stuff we merely want or think we want adds up to very little at the end of a day.

Composition, I find, is the great secret to all fulfilling acquisitions, that is - the secret to having satisfying possessions.

Lonely alleyways at night, for example, are composed universally of only a very few basic elements: emptiness, and stillness, almost silence, a few nondescript and old things lying about, or snow or still dark pools of water, and a solitary light or a huddling small set of lights weakly fighting the night's covering grasp. Walls demarking this place from other places.

Space – empty spaces, everywhere – are spaces just waiting to be filled. We are the people of the labyrinths. We just don't realise that it takes art, skill, and training, to be able to sidestep the monsters of the dark unknown, and to make sport of our predicament. Our supposed predicament of being in this place.

Walls between Fire and Liquid