After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, never to be heard from again. The first half is completely true. The second, true as of the end of 1969. Learning about both of those facts has dropped me down a fascinating rabbit hole of corporate history and Buffett lore that I’ll...
Imagine the game Monopoly, but instead of every player starting the game with $1,500, create a pile of $5s, $10s, $20s, $100s and $500s that add up to $5,000, shuffle the money, and deal it out one bill at a time to the players. Some will have start with more than $1,500 and some with far less. Or to be even more like the real world, all but one player starts with $100 and the last player gets...
Over the years I’ve asked many smart people why, after the historic public market crash of 1929 did the U.S. Government then pass the Securities Act of 1933, which disallows the sale of shares in private companies to every American? Not surprisingly, given the hows and whys of laws written before not only the Internet but also before radio are mostly lost to history. But now we have a new...
The word “poverty” has two different common meanings. First, it is the smallest income level in any given country. E.g. in the United States, over 20% of children live in poverty. Second, is the more global view, with the International Poverty Line set by the World Bank, at just $2.15. The chart above shows the drastic difference in incomes between those two definitions. Do note that...
What is money? It’s a simple question to ask but the answer is complicated. I know, as I’ve read and blogged about Wealth, Capital, Debt, Lords, Americana, and America’s Bank, amongst a lot of far dryer, far more challenging economic history books. Then along came Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein, and wow, what a difference...
Growing an economy takes power, especially electricity. One major piece of infrastructure missing in most Sub-Saharan countries is a ubiquitous electric grid. Only South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Gabon have 85% or better access to electricity, and while I don’t know first hand what the electric grid is like in all four of those countries I do know that while the Kenyan electric grid is...
You probably don’t send as many international wires as I do, and probably have never thought about how the dollars (or euros, pounds, shillings, etc.) move from your bank to the destination bank. What may surprise you is that the money never leaves. How this works in reality is best described with a so-called “minor” currency, e.g. the Malawi Kwacha. I have a few of these in my...
I have a strange attraction to worthless currencies, or those on the path to being worthless. Most people just take currencies for granted, never wondering where their value comes from nor understanding how it sometimes disappears. No one truly knows those answers, but sometimes we get accidental experiments that help us understand. The latest of those is happening now in Yemen. As described in...
Two interesting infographics from The Visual Capitalist. The first showing the distribution of GDP around the world and the second, the size of the global middle class both now and where it’s headed by 2030. Do remember that GDP is a flawed index, but ignoring that, what pops out to me on this graphic is just how insignificant the oil wealth of the Middle East is in comparison to North...
We take much of modern economic infrastructure for granted, including stock markets and the idea of publicly traded companies. While you may have heard the anecdotal stories about the first public companies having their shares traded under a tree in Amsterdam, London, or on Wall Street in New York City, the very first company (in the West) to sell shares to the public was The Marchants...
