A year ago, my brother-in-law gave my brother and me several lectures about life, while we were staying with he and my sister for a few days.
He felt we were "sleepwalking through life," since we did not yet understand the day-to-day workings and effects of the stock market on our lives. I suppose he felt that if we did not understand this, then we must not have a care about it; and so, we must not have a care for much else, except for our own entertainment and pleasure.
I believe he was wrong, to an extent. We didn't have much care or interest in the market system, that was true. But that did not mean we were uninterested in other "meaningful" things, like current and global events.
He would rag on us from time to time throughout our stay, all the while, teaching us and explaining how a company on the stock exchange can be watched just by following their pricing schemes in the retail world. He used Sony and their price cuts on the PSP and PS 3. That was pretty interesting.
According to Rob (that's his name) price cuts mean that the product is probably not selling. And since the PS 3 was such a large investment for Sony and at least 2 other major companies (see Cell Microprocessors, IBM), this meant lots and lots of bad.
When the product doesn't sell, the company doesn't do well, he told us, and so their value to share holders and investors wavers. Which isn't good. A bad enough state of affairs for a company can mean that investors will leave, taking their money elsewhere.
All by looking at price tags, Rob explained, we could come up with a fairly accurate theory about how Sony is doing, if I wanted to invest.
But then, later that evening, Rob remembered that Sony also owns the rights to the Spiderman franchise, which was cleaning up at the box office that summer. So this changed things. Sony didn't have to rely only on their huge electronics-division investment to make money.
This debunked our theory. Which is fine, since I can't afford to invest in anything, especially Sony.
But this experience made me more interested in other sections of the newspaper, so to speak.
These days, as I'm sure most people agree, the business and finance section is much more interesting, as life as we know it will, very very soon, become a lot harder and a lot more expensive to live.
NYTimes.com has a story online about the cost that we as "Taxpayers" will have to burden. I believe the title is,
Here's a quote:
Despite everything, the biggest fiscal problem remains, far and away, health care. Based on the rate that medical spending has been rising, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts that Medicare and Medicaid will take up 10 percent of G.D.P. within two decades, up from about 4 percent now. In today’s terms, that would be the equivalent of adding at least $900 billion to the deficit every single year, in perpetuity. It makes the cost of the bailouts look like a rounding error.
When it comes to health care, we have a situation that is blatantly unsustainable. With the right choices, we can prevent that. But so far, we instead seem to be hoping that the situation will magically resolve itself, which is a recipe for big problems and perhaps even a crisis.
Let’s see. That doesn’t sound familiar, does it?
-DAVID LEONHARDT (nytimes.com)
note: Image from wikipedia.org
While I wait, I'll listen to some Muscles. The up-tempo, lost-in-the-rhythm melodies and fun-loving words can't not make me smile. That's a lot of hyphens. This song has a warm weather feeling that sort of makes me think of the days when I could waste large blocks of time (say, four-and-a-half hours) simply hanging out with friends. I haven't had the pleasure of doing that since high school. Now, that isn't to say that I've never spent long periods of time doing very little, I just feel that I have things to do when I do "waste time." Back then, I had no qualms about wasting time; and now I do, to say the least.
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