But truth be told, I take some heavy beatings from this International Playboy Lifestyle.
Some highlights:
1. In Dominican Republic back in December 2010, I pulled a leg muscle in a sparring session with a local boxing G. Basically sidelined me. Thank goodness for the fly Dominicanas with healing hands.
3. In Bogota, Colombia earlier this year, I broke my cell phone charger while I was closing a big deal back in The States. I had to turn my phone off after every call just to save juice. I now travel with two-three cell phones for back up.
6. In The Beaches of Spain, I spilled a full glass of water on my computer, in the middle of closing yet another huge deal back in The States. Luckily, it only ruined a few of the keys on the keyboard. For instance, whenever I typed a “t” it would type “t5”. It did the same with some other keys. You would be surprised how often you need to use the letter “t” when you type.
9. When I lost my Passport, I re-injured my back again, while lifting up a super heavy dresser from a weird angle in my apartment that I thought it fell behind (a book I had fell behind it). Then, my back went out while boxing a week later. I literally couldn’t stand up.
I had to get carted to the hospital in an ambulance! (First time in an ambulance).
My life might seem easy sometimes, but trust me, I take heavy punishment.
But I keep on punching. And if I said this Lifestyle wasn’t worth it, I would be lying to you.
Although, I think I am going to take it mad easy for a while…
Marc Faber: On Cashflow, Montreal, Girlfriends and The Economy
Marc Faber breaks it down on Montreal and The Economy (interestingly enough, I was just in Montreal chopping it up. I am completely sold on the place, definitely going to spend a month or two there next summer. Montreal Data Sheets coming soon.):
We as a society must stop pretending. Most of us think that we still have money in the bank to protect, so we go along with the game of extend and pretend. For some of us, the game has already ended. The rapacious zero interest rate policy that I call Bernankecide has already robbed millions of savers of their life savings. This is the reality that has yet to hit home for many Americans who are content to wallow in the status quo. Unfortunately, the longer it takes for them to wake up, the worse their, and our, fate will be.
My mother and millions of other senior citizens are among the victims of the game that policy makers and those who empower them are playing. Their life savings are gone because Bernankecide, the financial genocide of the elderly, forced them to spend their principal. Now the government is indirectly confiscating 8% of my income because I must support my mother. That percentage is likely to grow as her health deteriorates.
Millions of other boomers are in the same boat. They are forced to pay this immoral hidden tax because Ben Bernanke decided that the innocent must pay for the sins of the guilty. While Bernanke’s ZIRP goes on allowing the banksters to continue to collect their fat bonuses, it steals the savings of millions of Americans, eliminates their disposable income, and cuts the spending power of millions of others who must now support those rendered destitute. The guilty benefit, and the innocent are punished.
Bernanke knows that, yet he continues to side with the criminal bankers in support of the financial genocide of the super elderly, and their children, the baby boomers who must increasingly support them.
If you’re looking for a safe place to put your investments, Chad Venzke has a suggestion: Dig a hole in the ground four feet deep, pack gold and silver in a piece of plastic PVC pipe, seal it, and bury it.
The 30-year-old central Wisconsin resident trusts no one but himself to store and protect his gold and silver—not banks, not investment funds, and certainly not the government. It’s precisely because of this suspicion of institutions that he invests in those metals to begin with. In case of emergency, “you always want to have your precious metals within arms reach,” he says.
Venzke is hardly the only investor who wants his precious metals nearby at all times. A pound of gold worth about $24,000 can easily fit in a pocket; how to protect it is a decision that carries expensive consequences. Do-it-yourself investors who don’t trust banks must find creative storage options, whether burying gold in the yard, submerging it in a koi pond, stashing it behind air-conditioning ducts, or placing it under carpets. All these options are debated in online gold and silver investor forums. They’re also debated and demonstrated in youtube videos, including one by Venzke that has been viewed more than 7,000 times.
Christina Romer had traveled to Chicago to perform an unpleasant task: she needed to scare her new boss. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s top political adviser, had been very clear about that. He thought the president-elect needed to know exactly what he would be walking into when he took the oath of office in January. But it fell to Romer to deliver the bad news.
So Romer, a preternaturally cheerful economist whose expertise on the Great Depression made her an obvious choice to head the Council of Economic Advisers, gathered her tables and her charts and, on a snowy day in mid-December, sat down to explain to the next President of the United States of America exactly what sort of mess he was inheriting.
Axelrod had warned her against pulling her punches, and so she didn’t. It was not a pleasant presentation to sit through. Afterward, Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s friend from Chicago and Romer’s successor, remarked that “that must be the worst briefing any president-elect has ever had.”
But Romer wasn’t trying to be alarmist. Her numbers were based, at least in part, on everybody else’s numbers: There were models from forecasting firms such as Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Analytics. There were preliminary data pouring in from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve. Romer’s predictions were more pessimistic than the consensus, but not by much.
By that point, the shape of the crisis was clear: The housing bubble had burst, and it was taking the banks that held the loans, and the households that did the borrowing, down with it. Romer estimated that the damage would be about $2 trillion over the next two years and recommended a $1.2 trillion stimulus plan. The political team balked at that price tag, but with the support of Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary who would soon lead the National Economic Council, she persuaded the administration to support an $800 billion plan.
