Cheater’s Row, take 1
Cheater’s Row:
Hi, my name is Alex Kudera and although I am running for President, certainly by 2023, I write today to humbly welcome you to my “blog in brief” Cheater’s Row. Our main concern will be the unethical, illegal, and more overtly theft-oriented aspects of American culture, so expect the current lineup of liars and cheats to get an ample share of our meager webspace.
But before we get into all of that, since we really don’t know each other — and therefore, I could be your broker — I thought I’d start with some inspired financial advice.
“Keep all assets liquid” is one of my favorite lines from “A Wife’s Story” by Bharati Mukherjee as well as sage advice offered by the Oracle of Oligarchs, George Soros. But rather than merely recommend you sell your house, rush your bank, sleep in a mobile home with cash and gold stuffed in your night shirt, I instead offer a more flexible approach.
In all cases, keep doing what you are doing!
1) If you are prone to live for the moment and spend it all anyway, keep living and spending! You’re not getting any younger and imagine what delight you can have blowing coin across town when the prudent stock investor next door has lost half his nut and is worried to tears or even death. Savor those moments when you caught his condescending frown as you returned from a shopping expedition laden with transient plastic possessions for your dining or living experience. If inspired to more forward passive aggression, offer him the cooking utensils you have just replaced; better yet, offer him your old color tube if by good fortune you’ve pounced upon HDTV paradise in the back of your local Wal-mart.
2) If you are investing in stocks and bonds, stay the course! Particularly if you are certain a regular paycheck is in your future, a future of at least three weeks or years. Attend to your dollar-cost averaging and recognize that even as the market heads down you are buying your privileged asset classes at increasingly affordable prices. True, Jeremy Siegel, Mr. Stocks for the Long Run, is now hawking sector-based ETFs, but call Buffet or Bogle or any other old codger worth millions, and they’ll affirm that buying them low now is much wiser than buying them high tomorrow. It would seem the only long- or near-term drawback is such securities could continue to lose value.
3) If you save only in FDIC-insured vehicles like cash, cash equivalents, money markets, and CDs, enjoy your prudence! With glee you can wait on line at the bank, deposit another $327 check, and savor your 1 ½ points of interest. Take pride in knowing that the spendaholic asshole next door loses 30 percent off a car or TV the minute he drives it out of the showroom or installs it in his living-room wall. And you don’t need to spell or define schadenfreude to recognize that the Jeremy Siegel wannabe two doors down is deep in the hole at Janus, Schwab, or Fidelity, peering at you, and wondering how you got so rich! If he asks, be sure to tell him the ticker symbol of your favorite is C-A-S-H.
That ought to do it for now. I feel a little better although frankly not much wealthier for having offered such sage advice. Be warned! I am not a licensed financial advisor, a hawker of schlock shelved under personal finance, or even a hedge-fund manager; perhaps I am a bit of a wannabe ponzi schemer or some other kind of American in professional attire. But for now, invest, spend, and save wisely! In closing, I go out on a limb and predict the lottery will not suffer this spring, and intuition tells me both drug and religious paraphernalia will weather our current storm. I hope we do as well.
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Very funny. Your contradictory pseudo-punditry mimics the collective voice of the media gurus. It reminds how, on one hand, the economic bailout is the only solution to save us from spiralling into decades of misery and gloom. On the other hand, the bailout will destroy the world, breeding massive inflation and resulting ultimately in riots, cannibalism, fire storms from the sky. Your blog inspires me to think that perhaps both are right.
To get us through these troubled times we need someone with your sunny disposition and total disregard for the laws of logic . Thanks, Alex.