Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination.
I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don't know what the future is going to hold.
A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn't dramatic.
Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
The main reason I write the daily observations is because I want to know where I'm wrong. So lots of times if somebody points something out it helps me, and I want to have a diversified bet of uncorrelated bets.
The big question is: When will the term structure of interest rates change? That's the question to be worried about.
I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one's strengths and weaknesses are.
When people get at each other's throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.
I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I'll come out of it refreshed and centered and that's how I'll feel and it'll carry through the day.
Over the long run, the price of gold approximates the total amount of money in circulation divided by the size of the gold stock. If the market price of gold moves a long way from this level, it may indicate a buying or selling opportunity.
Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words, there's an education level that plays into the mix and so if it's inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S., that factors in.
He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.
I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed.
In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it's disruptive and it's a problem.
There are two main drivers of asset class returns - inflation and growth.
So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work - what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?
It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you're doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.
If inflation-adjusted interest rates decline in a given country, its currency is likely to decline.
What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there's inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.
I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.
