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1 0 . 2 7 . 0 8 Got read the riot act so to speak at a bar prep meeting on Friday. Pretty much ruined my looking forward to the weekend, but I guess I needed it with a few months left of the semester, and pre-pre-bar activities coming up around the corner. In some sense it seems like its the usual scare speech for the sleep deprived evening students in the room, but then again it was very necessary to hear the level of work and time commitments that we'll be embarking on very shortly. My one comment is that I think a lot of this information probably would've been helpful like 1, 2, 3 years ago. I guess in some respect many of us would've just brushed it off, but still it might've been helpful to hear this with some advanced notice instead of all at once on a Friday evening. For the very least, I think I would've been more stingy with my leave plans to save up for the 6-8+ weeks vacation they strongly recommend we take off to study in the summer. Oh and something about very strict and stringent rules for certain states, like wearing courtroom attire while taking a 2-day long test? In a room with the air conditioning cracked all the way up that its freezing in the middle of July? Like everything else about studying law this seems like another big hurdle to jump through. Except this one is lit on fire and has a pit of bloodsucking sharks below it. Like anything else in life, I've come to approach this as a new challenge, take a moment to regroup, bitch and moan a little, just enough to get it out of the system, and then hunker down for the next storm. I'm sure this won't be my last post on this as the time comes. Some recent Youtube finds for a diversion from the usual stress in the world - Live performance by Morgan Heritage in Amsterdam. And solid group Katchafire. I've been noticing that finding good tunes has been a big factor in coping with the stress of school and work lately. Something about reggae/dancehall that especially helps. Maybe the beat that mimics a heartbeat, or maybe the walking bassline that helps keep me moving mentally and spiritually even when my body feels like its shutting down. Not that I'm quite there yet, but after going through this crazy finals period 9 times, I can already feel the exhaustion creeping in already. Oh well, back to the books. And back to work tomorrow morning. And on to class in the evening. 1 0 . 2 4 . 0 8 The fall season is progressing along, been busy at work and at school. For the most part I'm enjoying my classes, my unincorporated business organizations course is giving me more perspectives on the operations of small businesses and partnerships. Definitely opens your eyes to what kind of responsibilities, legal and financial headaches, really, owning your own business has. In my Remedies class we're covering the bottom line of a lot of cases that we flew over in con law, property, and contracts, mostly going to the most central question of all, that is after all is said and done, after the plaintiff wins his case, how does the court proscribe the appropriate remedy to make the plaintiff whole again? And more tricky, when, if at all does the Defendant need additional punishment for the wrong? Been keeping a wary eye on the market, it's getting pretty depressing watching it rocket up and down. Since the brutal crashes from a few weeks ago, the market has seen drastic ups and downs, close to 9% swings, heavy volatility all around. It's become a sick ritual getting up at 4am, getting ready for work, only to see the London stock exchange futures way down, and the Asian markets wrapping up another down day of trading. Been spending a lot of time it seems, sitting in my cubicle at work and getting distracted by the DOW and S&P way down in the red, highly caffeinated talking heads talking about investment strategies, screaming at times, for calm in the markets. Meanwhile a lot of small investors are quickly taking their life savings out of the market, apparently deciding its too dangerous to play at all. Then a few days later, a crazy rally, usually as a result of some optimistically spun economic report, or announcement from the government that there will be another bailout. It's really hard to tell what is up and what is down, what and who to believe really. Whatever gains I had preserved about a year ago due to some luckily placed re-allocations in my stock holdings are quickly dwindling, percentage-wise. For the time being I'm glad that I'm gainfully employed, and not involved in any variable rate debt or consumer debt. Due to this insane housing market we've been seeing for the past few years, I held off on saddling down a mortgage, a decision that I've come to appreciate again and again. There is a matter of some student loans, but I was able to lock about half of it at a very low interest rate through consolidation about a year ago. I have been keeping a wary eye on our finances, planning out different scenarios and what we would do. For now there doesn't really seem like there's anything we can do. Just sit and suffer. In the meantime I've been keeping an unofficial log of spare change I've been coming across walking around the city. I've been tracking it down loosely on my paper calendar at work. It's pretty surprising how much change people leave lying around. So far in the past month I've found at least a few pennies a day, with the occasional dime or quarter. I've also found a $5 bill, and a metrocard with $20 on it. I guess when times are tough, you try to do what you can. 1 0 . 9 . 0 8 More turmoil in the markets, it's becoming like a bad dream, the US market takes a hit, and then at 9:00pm the Asian markets take a hit, and then the European markets take a hit in time for the US again. Something like 21% drop in the DOW over the last 10 days, despite the talk of this not being a crash, it's looking pretty ugly. Hoping that my own situation is secure enough, I was lucky to have diversify some of my holdings a little over a year ago, which helped dodge the bullet a bit, but with the losses on the remainder, especially in the past month, it still took a pretty big hit. Problem is that there really isn't anything that seems secure anymore. People in passing have been joking about stuffing cash under the mattresses with all of the banks being in trouble, I hope it doesn't come down to that. All of this has been a big distraction from the election, especially since it seems like neither leading candidates are offering anything by means of a realistic solution. I suspect that neither of their campaigns anticipated any of this to blow up in their faces, especially not right before November. I still maintain that some understanding of finances and economics should be a quality that we look for in a presidential candidate. Whoever wins will have his work cut out for him, that's for sure. 1 0 . 3 . 0 8 Been a few crazy weeks in the financial world and the markets what not. Discussing the bailout has been a nervously recurring conversation topic around the office ever since the news first broke that the America is well, headed towards bankruptcy? Yet somehow we continue to think that borrowing or printing another $850 Billion dollars to bail out the troubled financial corporations on wall street is the best solution. Depending on who you talk to, it seems like the conventional wisdom is that the bailout or "rescue" bill although it sucks, is a necessary evil. The scary thing is that nobody in support of the bailout has any clue on how this is all going to play out, let alone where we are headed. I can't help but wonder if people had the benefit of additional information and stopped to digest the recent turn of events and really question them that maybe they wouldn't be too quick to capitulate to what might be a historic change in the structure of our constitutional republic. That is, whatever is left of it. This whole mess has been a nagging topic on my mind, call it a distraction really from school, work, life in general. Between checking up on the state of my own investments, the price of commodities, foreign exchanges, and inflation rates. I've taken a few pretty deep hits in some funds, others bad, but still could've been worse. I wish I could say that being young I still have some time to recover from all of this, but honestly I'm skeptical and anxious to what the future will bring in terms of financial security. Given the volatility in the markets lately, it seems like there is no safe haven for any kind of investment anywhere. Tonight after work I rattled off an impromptu lesson on the securitization of mortgages, credit liquidity, and overall monetary policy for Hana on a notepad and paper napkin. I think I got a little animated in my demonstration, so much that I noticed the lady studying next evesdropping. Maybe I was making a convincing explanation? I guess to me all of this seems pretty obvious if you break things down to a smaller, more personal level, call it a combination of econ 101 mixed with some basic graduate level micro/macro from policy school, and some broader knowledge of commercial transactions, business organizations, and maybe a bit of consumer psychology. I can't say that I predicted this mess, but I remember back in 2001 I was learning about basic economics and noticing that the monetary policy that we were following was unprecedented, setting lowest interest rates since WWII. One of the first observations I had about the field of economics is that it seemed like a social science pretending to be a hard science between all the statistics and mathematical formula. There is something to be said about anything with numbers having an unspoken sense of credibility or certainty. One of concepts that stuck out was the concept of "all things being equal" when describing any economic system or market. I remember thinking that it could be very dangerous assuming that you could maintain laboratory/ivory tower like conditions in the real world. When you really dissect things down, economics becomes as soft a science as sociology, or psychology. Blend that with good old fashioned politics to promote a policy and feed it to a population that is largely ignorant to personal finance and you have a very dangerous propoganda tool. Part of the problem is that lot of so called experts that we hear about that were supposed to be running all of this are actually academics whose ivory tower doctrine was rarely tested and prodded in the real world. These guys apparently got a little too cocky with their risk assessments and statistics that they fudged their numbers to convince investors around the world to make some very risky and potentially catastrophic investments. And now with the bailout signed into law, the American taxpayers and middle-class are left holding the bag. |