Die you shall...

Die you shall...Live you should...

The wise men

Once upon a time, some time ago, there were a group of men who were very very rich and owned around 40% of the world's resources. They had land, industries, gold and what not. They were wise and understood how to maintain and grow their wealth throughout time. They very well knew that value is in the thought of the beholder. If the thought of value in something vanishes, the value in the product is zero. To further help themselves, they thought upon an idea to globalise the world to make use and exploit the best of everything. Further, they spread the benefits of globalisation and free market access. At this point of time, they realised that with free markets, value is being interfered by the exchange rates. The group of wise men, decided that they will have to be proactive and move as a group to maintain order and control of the maintenance and growth of their precious valuables in the world. Since they own a substantial part of the world, and markets are never deep enough for them, they could influence the markets with ease. Moreover, they realise the people's psychology and the various govt.'s response to the situations they would create. They start buying into an 'item' initially and start spreading the word how that would be the next 'big' thing in the world. The high risk takers and loyalists start buying it immediately. As the value of the 'item' increases, more people start believing the prophecy and start buying it while all the while the wise men's value increases. After a few years, the wise men believe that they have milked the 'item' to its limit and their value has stopped growing at a fast rate. Further, before someone else calls that the 'item' is overvalued, they start selling the 'item' and buying into another 'item'. And the next prophecy of how this item is undervalued and how it is the next 'big' thing, starts to grow. This cycle keeps repeating over periods of time and the only people who are always in the green are the wise men and the loyalists, while the general public is bled and slaughtered each time when they start buying at the height of the cycle and when the wise men are selling it to the blind public. These "items" could be various currencies, gold, silver, commodities, bonds, houses, land and what not. The frequency with which these wise men are interchanging the 'items' has increased in the recent years. It is not clear whether another set of 'wise men' are on the street trying to call shots on an item which is different from the first set of wise men. This fight between the two sets of wise men having contradictory ideas on some 'items' is probably being seen in the high volatility of the markets. E.g: Crude oil falling by around 6% in a week, INR moving by 1% in a day, gold falling by over 9% in 5 days.

Moral of the story: Besides the all the financial porn being thrown by the media at us and all the talk of finding value, in the end it seems you just have to stick to the side of the 'wise men' if you want to make money/store value. If only, we could easily pinpoint who are these 'wise men' and know their next move.

P.S: This is just one of the hypothesis I have to show that most people have know idea of how the market could be working against you all the time. At times, I feel like one of the little guys who feel like they are born to just get exploited by the 'wise men'.

Genders and colours

Innovation in dressing

Goof ups

In 2011, Blackberry services outage down for 3 days, UBS illegal trades and Billion $ losses, S&P mistakenly downgrades France, NATO bombing Pakistan's guard-posts and Indian govt. accepting a USD 9 billion export error.

Previously, irresponsible statements "We do Gods work" by Goldman Sach's CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 

"Its not our fault" by Tony Hayward, then BP CEO.

The frequency of the goof ups are increasing and the scale of it is getting bigger and bigger.

It is for someone to find out why. Could it because of increasing pressures of the jobs & faster deadlines to produce results without having enough quality checks? I believe so. Also, the touhgher environment thanks to the slowdown and recession is causing the extra pressure on growth and profitablity.

Compared to this, is any goof up we do in our daily work really that bad? Everyone screws up. As far as NASA's philosophy is supposed to go, the reason for any screw up is not any person, but the fault of the system. If there are enough checks and balances, screw ups should never happen, atleast of the kind mentioned above. It is time systems are given importance, and not just the profits. It is time systems are held responsible for irresponsibility and not the people on whom ridiculous expectations are held!