Social Wealth

Here's the interior of the latest Mercedes S Class. It has selectable colour mode lighting, hot stone massage seats (yep, really does), and ionised and essential oil-spiked filtered air.

New S-Class Merc martini bar on wheels

When you have a lot of money, much more than you would require to meet the basic necessities of life, then you have to think about frivolities such as the latest S Class. For me this will be like, next week or thereabouts, so I have to watch all the video ads Mercedes releases – and amazingly, they appear to show the Germans now have a strong sense of humour. One of the ads on Youtube, titled 'ordinary people's responses to the new S Class' has several women jumping in and out getting lifts here and there across Chicago heading to whatever nightclub back-alley entrance they want to go to, and making small talk about the niceties of the car along the way. V. droll.

It all starts out in the mind though, doesn't it? Wealth comes from inside your mind. Whether there are women around today who feel comfortable to go to any of the dozen or so 'world's best martini bars' alone, I do not exactly know, as I have not been to ALL twelve of these bars (or twelve hundred, really, since the appellation is open to a lot of dispute and is highly contested). But they should do. It is the mark of any sophisticated person, male or female, to be able to feel comfortable within themselves to do so.

Not my grandmother - but close!

My grandmother rode side-saddle, fenced, and could shoot pistols too. She went out to South Africa all on her own to teach when she was only a young woman; she was an independent-minded person. Daughter of a captain on the White Star Line, and at one point she was all-Highland dance champion for the Highland Sword Dance...

I suppose because we live in a day and age in which government policy has the direct capacity to wreck whole economies – internationally through reserve-building by third world countries benefitting through quantitative easing, and domestically because politicians are at the same time utterly mindless, fat-headed, lacking in imagination about ways to spark growth, and greedy about the amounts of all of our time they take up preaching nonsense – because of all of this the individual occasionally loses sight of the real way ahead.

Look, if the visible way ahead cannot be traversed in a new Mercedes S Class, then don't go that way. The way to wealth begins in any event surely within one's own mind – and there is no point utilising second-rate thoughts, ideas, principles, and teachings, to travel the pathways of the mind.

You have the choice as to whether you will use a Rolls Royce, a Bentley, a Mercedes, or even a brand new Corvette (a great car, by the way) to drive to the mansion of the professor residing within the gated estates of your own mind. Never jump quickly to conclusions, is the moral of that – and personally I am never daunted by the potential of a confronting truth around any corner either.

People around the place, presently, for instance, think there will never be another Crash.

But there will be. It will come from the imbalances of liquidity when external reserve building begins to really bite against the United States, which was the source of the QE bubble factory fake money demand. The demand was fake, but the money real. Macro economists understand that problems of politics and national management stem from disruptions of the smooth flow between the generation of liquidity from long term capital, versus the needs of the velocity of cash circulation in the shorter term balance sheets of trade. And good politicians further understand that the ultimate recipient of smooth flows, is the human person, and the social body of people on the national spectrum of political civil society. Yes, I am talking like George here. His theory is right enough. His associations these days are dubious, that's all, not his original ideas.

A real London Martini, is not for girls

People, are the key. Human people (this is a French idiomatic expression that puts the stress on the word 'human'). Miss that point now and you will miss the excitement of the next several years.

What Is Success Today

Effete is a word that should send shivers down the backs of everyone living and otherwise thriving in any dominant empire.

Human beings somehow seem to habitually squander favourable positions as much as they are famed for their ability to overcome adversity by struggling on.

Effete simply means exhausted through growing too much.

When you look at the current value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index price, you see the point of the word 'effete.' On the one hand the price is high, on the other hand that price is not through any reason of corporate profitability. And it is especially not through any reason of circulation, or economic demand. The addiction the biggest banks have for Central Bank support is the mechanism for such boilerplate fictions about the performance of Wall Street, and the domination they wield over politicians who endlessly open the door to it.

But 'endlessly' simply means terminally. Not eternally. It means without restraint until the thing dies.

The thrill is gone

And so Wall Street today is an artefact.

The rain falls down. The skies become heavy and greyed-over seemingly permanently. Brows become knit and furrowed. People leave the streets. Everyone becomes 'serious.' Risk is always skewed in people's minds towards the adverse of outcomes. Reward is meagre. Effort is stinting.

'Leaders' are not only exhausted of any vision, but they are exhausting to watch and to listen to.

And so this is where we are...

There is a simply massive need for the thinking person to re-set the basis of capitalism into the context of the hyper-connected, device-oriented, modern world. There is no basis for it either in Wall Street or coming out of the heads of politicians or even out of any of the erstwhile business leaders.

A simple Crash – as in major stock market Crash – is almost too easy a thing to provide the phase of creative destruction that always occurs when societies reach the point of maximum exhaustion; if you assume an historically cyclical narrative.

There are yet many instances of greatness and great products still finding their way out into the world. Not everything is lost.

Arsene Wenger just won the FA Cup in London for an unprecedented fifth time – albeit nine years down the road from his last silverware at Wembley Stadium. He has interesting things to say about success:

Houses Divided

Of course it is always easy to 'just' criticize. But that's not actually what I want to to do here. I will make the distinction between just criticizing for the sake of it, and understanding tactical tools in the context of seeking eventual strategic advantage.

What is the advantage I am seeking?

Well personally I would like to see Putin and Yatsenyuk sit around at a dinner and mull over the relative superiorities of each other's favourite cuisines...

What James Bond would have with his vodka

That isn't going to happen. Not today or not even any time very soon. For one thing Putin is smiling for real these days and Yatsenyuk is scowling for real – those combinations of body language do not make for the best disposed of dinner guests or companions.

So what goes on behind the scenes? We all, I suppose, have some sentiment for the old James Bond franchise – but the glamour of the past days of Panavision and Technicolor are now replaced by predictable stunt chases and outrageous CGI effects, idiotic scripts, too skinny girls, and the dubious moral credibility of modern politics.

To some extent, the actual underlying principle of the thing – good v evil and the eventual victory of superior technology and skill and intelligence – has itself gone the way of big data and mindless drones (which have already been superceded btw) and the real knowledge held by all military leaders that an all-out armed contest, would have no one at all left on the battlefield.

When you play a game of football and go to the ground expecting the opposition team not to turn up, then you are in for a difficult time of things. The question for a businessperson is – can you make money when your side is losing, and ends up being on the losing end? You probably can, but you probably also need to prepare for this.

Team spirit is the energy of the team. I watched Munger and Gates and Buffett on CNN the other day same as many of you did. These guys have all lost the team spirit, lost the energy to win; they are in the mode of preservation of their own capital and position. And you can't win any kind of wars when leaders of capital act like that.

So fine, we're all on our own. But what if the game is now about who will be able to keep his or her own self-confidence high when all around are falling apart. If it's a question of keeping the 'team spirit' together in a team of one – one individual, or one family – then the eventual 'winning side' is going to consist of a small number of individuals who survived psychologically, as much as economically. And I think, in fact, with the stress on the 'psychologically!' Tell me the future, Solitaire...

 

Real Bond girl over there:

Thrilled About The Future

Stories of the 'lifestyle' experienced these days by people who work on Wall Street – especially the new recruits, fresh out of University – have increasingly been rather negative. These stories speak of long hours, lack of respect from others about the jobs these people do, and the failure of the money to give satisfaction.

Oh god, did I live and work through the last of the best of times on Wall Street?

Less stuff in Ali Baba's cave...
A good thing - less complicated!

Okay I was actually in Chicago at the time but I don't remember any bad things about being there. And when I was working in Australasia in finance and economics, and working the same never-ending days and probably right through weekends as well, I don't remember any of it as being onerous at all.

The fact is, though, that the media and many people in banking are not facing the reality that money has moved away from the usual 'big tall building' scene and into the hands of little guys with clever computing and a lot of unfettered creativity. And it isn't even true anymore, although it may have been for a while, that these 'little guys' nevertheless gravitated, and still gravitate, to the traditional money centres. This blip in the flow may have been added to by the so-called 'low latency' traders.

The flow, is over the cliff of relevancy. Wall Street is irrelevant.

Once people know in their gut that the money has really moved elsewhere, they stay away from the financially dead carcass. What this means for the entire world, especially the one the media has to report on every day, I am not entirely sure.

Wall Street is incapable of financing the next big forward moves for business, industry, and especially, technology. Didn't think I'd ever see the day when such a thing would be said but it is true now, today. The money Wall Street uses has too many strings on it. And the minds behind Wall Street are just not that strong anymore.

Fassbender (above) will not make the cut
 for next Bond - how to damage
an 'unassailable franchise;' just follow the 007 producers!

I glanced across an article in one of the luxury websites the other day about why an old fashioned fountain pen could be worth $40,000 in a digital electronic world, and I haven't even read the article yet. I suppose nostalgia is always a good enough reason for me. I still have a shopping list. Not a lot of things on the list are to do with computers or devices. I already have all the ones (and they are a very modest suite) that I need to have to engage in very exciting things. I remember being inside Honeywell's big mainframe rooms back in the Seventies, and my father knew a few execs from IBM. I think I retained the 'feel' of it all: because when I hold the small digital devices I use today, I do realize that I am in charge of significantly more computing power than those executives had back then. What excites me, is not the fear of the fact that modern computing is almost universally democratic – in other words, everybody has such computing power. But the fact that as far as creativity goes, it would take a long day to find anyone even close to the capability pre-installed at birth inside my own mind. And I am quite thrilled about the future. How about you?

Now The Files Are Closed.

Now that the files are closed...

A long time ago, the Russian (Federal) Security Bureau inserted some operatives into the London private membership club scene – this is where rich kids and wealthy and time-abundant wastrels go and think they are hanging out with genuine high society. Unlike the popular images of such places, in reality they are all either run-down inside and rather shoddy-looking, or just plain monuments to poor taste.

The importance to you is this – you only imagine you know anything at all about the infamous collapse of Shearson Lehman... You only imagine you know what really went on with Bernie Madoff...

But now that the files are closed, I will tell you what you need to watch out for when a confluence of events and types of people come together.

When I say, the files are closed, I mean the Russian files. Western files are pathetically sad contrivances invented by Oxford graduate-types to create facades meant to convince the theoretically dumb public about who is doing what to whom.

What Ghengis Khan might look like,
if he were around today. Or not.

Here is a picture, a very generously flattering one, of Robert Tchenguiz, the ex-Lehman top-line securities dealer, who went on after he left Lehman's to becoming one of the seriously well-off owners of property in London's Mayfair. He's not a Russian operative however. No indeed. But he was one of the people being watched very closesly.

And the meaning of that is that almost nothing that has happened in the so-called world of high finance over the last ten or even twenty years has escaped the strategic analysis department inside the control centre of 'Ancient Ruhm...'

The world is supposed to believe without question, that Madoff burnt $65 billion from only the world's most esteemed banks and finance experts. And by the way, in this same vein, Tchenguiz (who changed his family name from Khadouri although even then, he's actually Jewish) has $1.8 billion of personal wealth. These are all amazing people. True geniuses. Even Madoff really, since he was able to sell rubbish at will to only the world's most celebrated financial houses.

Which brings me to today's world. It isn't so easy to see where the rich young kids who have made their billions from gadgets and software go to drink alcohol and flirt with females (government agents unbeknownst to them). It isn't going to be so simple to thieve from these. Oh, am I saying that various government agencies steal from rich people? My my. Fancy saying such a thing.

All the same, not so easy to send agents to Mongolia to see the latest high fashion shows being attended by the new rich kids – especially not when the actual 'lords of Mongolian cashmere' are already British and will be able to detect a few inconsistencies in the sudden 'casual' appearances of English roughnecks and toughs dressed in cheap Hugo Boss pretending to be fellow members of the idle rich. What am I saying here?! My god. Nothing bad ever happens to English businessmen in China! Does it?

Mongolian fashion designer Ochirjantson's work

As I say... Now that the file is closed.

Put it this way though, if you are a rich new kid, and you see a rough guy dressed in a cheap Hugo Boss suit moving in your circles, don't get taken in by the story that he hails from Mayfair. People who sell wind-up radios into conflict zones because governments there ban the sale of batteries also often hail from Mayfair. Plenty of money to be made in war zones. And not always through the sale of actual exploding things and ballistic items. I knew this German industrial sales rep once who positioned himself in Asia and kept his eye out for sudden large production runs of wind-up radios. And he always said he could tell who knew a war was going to start well before it happened, and therefore regularly also, as far as he was concerned, who was really behind it. And I can also tell you the only two countries that he ever specified in particular, and the USA, by the way, was not one of them. When the frozen orange juice futures went up, he reckoned, it was already far past the point where the radios had been made. FOJ meant the US was going somewhere. I don't think there is a wind-up radios futures market. As far as I know.

David Brown's Speedback GT.
Out now. Retro-modern.