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Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle
Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot – Oh Christ!
That ever this should be.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
El Niño has been dropping much-needed rain this winter on a parched American West. But it’s making little difference to the greater water scarcity issues the US as well as the rest of the world is increasingly facing.
Here to talk about the state of the world situation for fresh water — arguably the single most important resource to humans on the planet, next to oxygen — is Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, author, lecturer, and former National Geographic Fellow. The punch-line to her message: as more and more demands are placed on our finite freshwater supply by human consumption and climate change, intelligent conservation is now an absolute must:
Competition for water that arises when you have increasing scarcity — competition between cities and farms within the same area, competition between states and provinces within the same country, and then of course, competition and tensions between countries that share rivers. And so these are fundamental concerns going forward: we still have rising population and we pursue economic growth — all this places rising water demand against a finite supply. And so just navigating that tricky course in the years ahead is a tremendous challenge.
Our water future is being determined by population, consumption and technology. As well as the failure of policy to move us toward a more water efficient set of practices.
Take agriculture: the fact that we are growing with water in California, water in the Colorado River basin where water is fairly precious, we are growing some very low-value crops and using a lot of water to do that and often doing it inefficiently.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Mass Layoffs To Return With A Vengeance
Eric Von Seggern/Shutterstock
Mass Layoffs To Return With A Vengeance
Remember the mass layoffs of 2008-2009? The US economy shed millions of jobs quickly and relentlessly, as companies died and the rest fought for survival.
Then the Fed and the US government flooded the banks and the corporate sector with bailouts and handouts. With those giga-tons of liquidity sloshing around, as well as taking on massive amounts of new cheap debt, companies were able to finance their working capital needs, hire workers back, and even buy-back their shares en mass to make themselves look deceptively profitable. The nightmare of 2008 soon became a golden era of ‘recovery’.
Well, 2016 is showing us that that era is over. And as stock prices cease to rise, and in fact fall within many industries, layoffs are beginning to make a return as companies jettison costs in attempt to reduce losses.
Since January 1st, here is a but of subset of the headlines we’ve seen:
- Johnson & Johnson to slash 3,000 jobs
- Wal-Mart pulls plug on smallest store format, shuts 269 stores
- GE plans to cut 6,500 jobs in Europe
- BP to slash thousands more jobs in face of oil downturn
- Macy’s to cut 3,000 jobs, close 36 stores
- Sprint cutting 2,500 and closing call centers to cut costs
- Canadian Pacific Railway plans to cut 1,000 positions
- Brazil economy shed 1.5 million payroll jobs in 2015
- Pearson to cut 4,000 jobs in latest restructuring
- Barclays to slash about 1,000 investment bank jobs worldwide
- Southwestern Energy to lay off 1,100 workers amid oil slump
- Major banks are making cuts: Bank of America, Citi Group and JPMorgan Chase are trimming jobs and branches.
- Autodesk to cut 10 pct of workforce
- Caterpillar closing 5 plants, cutting 670 jobs
- VMware posts higher-than-expected revenue, announces job cuts
- AIG to cut jobs in sweeping overhaul
- Monsanto to slash 1,000 more jobs, total planned cuts at 3,600
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Jack Spirko: The Road To Resilience
Jack Spirko: The Road To Resilience
Continuing our focus on solutions, this week we’re joined on the podcast by Jack Spirko. His daily podcast focuses on practical, actionable steps each of us can take to “live a better life, if times get tough or even if they don’t” — a mission nicely aligned with the one we pursue here at Peak Prosperity.
In this wide-ranging discussion, Jack and Chris discuss the need for spreading awareness of the Three Es, the professional challenges in doing so, and how individuals can go about pursuing both security and prosperity in the face of the likely disruptive changes to come:
We’ve had these people predicting: This is the Big One! for 25 years. These people are hucksters who just want to make money. “End of America”, “The world is going to end!”, “In six months the dollar is going to collapse!” — people have been marketed these messages. Here’s my concern: it’s going to become Chicken Little. And when we really are at a point where you and I are going “Uh, guys…”, no one’s going to listen.
So as it relates to preparedness: being prepared for the grid to go down for a couple of months — great goal. Wonderful. But I look at preparedness this way: if you and I are in a car together and we’re going to drive from Miami, Florida to Portland, Maine, we’re going to go to Georgia before we go to Virginia unless we’re really dumb people without a map.
So when somebody asks me about preparedness, my first question is: Do you have 30 days worth of food stored up in your home? No? Then stop worrying about the grid going down. Do you have enough money to go 90 days without income and be okay?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New Harbor: A Time For Staying Out Of Harms Way
New Harbor: A Time For Staying Out Of Harms Way
Given the brutal start to the markets in the first three weeks of 2016, we thought it a good time to check in with the team at New Harbor Financial. We have had them on our podcast periodically over the past years as the market churned to ever new highs, and have always appreciated their skepticism of these liquidity-driven “”markets”” as well as their unwavering commitment to risk management should the party in stocks end suddenly.
So, how is their risk-managed approach faring now that the S&P 500 has suddenly dropped 8% since Christmas? Quite well. Their general portfolio is flat for the year so far — evidence that caution, prudence and hedging can indeed preserve capital during market downdrafts.
We’ve invited the New Harbor team back on this week to hear their latest assessment on the markets, as well as how they’re approaching their portfolio positioning moving forward:
We spend a lot of time talking about position sizing. Right now we have very little in the stock market. We never cheer for a crash in the sense that we know a lot of people would likely get harmed in such a scenario, but we also spend our time assessing reality and probability. The likelihood of probability for a crash certainly has never been non-zero, but it has developed a greater likelihood than it had even just a few weeks ago. There has been a notable sentiment change.
I’d like to point out: we’re not even a month into the year and we have already clawed back over two years’ worth of gains in the stock market. Even if you look at the S&P 500, which has been the most lofty because of its capitalization-weighted nature, where we are at right now takes us all the way back near the end of 2013.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Arthur Berman: Why The Price Of Oil Must Rise
Arthur Berman: Why The Price Of Oil Must Rise
Geologist Arthur Berman explains why today’s low oil prices are not here to stay, something investors and consumers alike should be very aware of. The crazy-low prices we’re currently experiencing are due to an oversupply created by geopolitics and (historic) easy credit, not by sustainable economics.
And when the worm turns, we are more likely than not to experience a sudden supply shortfall, jolting prices viciously higher. This will be a situation not soon resolved, as the lag time for new production to come on-line will be much longer than the world wants:
The same things that always drive prices in the end it’s always about fundamentals. The markets are peculiar and they change every day. But the fundamentals of supply and demand at some point markets come back to those and have to adjust accordingly. Not on a daily basis, maybe not even on a monthly basis. But eventually they get it right. So this oil price collapse is really straight forward as far as I can tell, and it has to do with cheap stupid money because of artificially low interest rates that resulted in over-investment in oil — as well as lots of other commodities that are not in my area of specialty, but that’s what I see. And over-investment led to over-production and eventually over-production swamped the market with too much supply and the price has to go down until we work our way through the excess supply.
Now the wrinkle in all of this is that because the supply excess/surplus was generated by debt and a lot of correlative instruments, the problem is that the companies and the countries that are doing all this over-production need to keep generating cash flow so they can service the debt, which means they have to continue producing pretty much at the highest levels they possibly can which doesn’t really allow very much room for reducing the surplus.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What Money Means
What Money Means
But there’s much about money that is misunderstood.
Many among the masses don’t realize the intense and coordinated efforts currently being waged by central planners to trap and devalue our savings through financial repression. They’re being fleeced without being aware of it — working harder and harder for less and less.
Many others overvalue the impact money has on our happiness. They make all sorts of sacrifices in pursuit of money, but remain poor in the things that truly matter.
In our new book Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting, we examine closely what true wealth is. Yes, money absolutely plays a critical part in it; but it is only one of several pillars — one of 8 Forms of Capital — that we identify as required for a rich life. Good health, purposeful work, meaningful relationships, a resilient lifestyle, self-worth, a supportive community — all of these ingredients are as important as money for overall happiness.
We wrote Prosper! as a resource that those already “awake” to these insights can use to share with family and friends who aren’t yet aware of them.
And since money is a universal attention-grabber as a topic, we’re making our chapter on Financial Capital available here for free — as a means of engaging someone you care about in the discussion. We think it’s one of the best digests of what happening right now with our money system:
The Fatal Blindness of Unrealistic Expectations
The Fatal Blindness of Unrealistic Expectations
My old employer, Yahoo!, has been in the news again of late.
Its latest CEO (and former Googler), Marissa Meyer, is currently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where she has just given her first televised interview detailing her strategy for the beleaguered web giant.
I wish her and the current team at Yahoo! well with their plans, I really do. The saga of Yahoo!’s descent over the past decade was heartbreaking to watch and experience from the inside. I’d love to see the company find a way to become a leader again.
But I don’t have faith.
In my opinion, the company can’t be “fixed.” At least not the way the tech pundits and the past parade of Yahoo! CEOs have touted it can.
Why? Because of a congenital failure to define its identity, paired with a chronic refusal to be honest with itself.
I get asked a lot for my opinion regarding Yahoo!’s fall from grace. I believe the seeds of its failure were sown from the beginning, and I’ve come up with the following analogy to make it as intuitive as possible. It all starts at the very formation of the company.
The Importance of Clear Vision
First, look at Google. When the founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page first started collaborating, the Internet had been around for a while and they were insightful enough to realize that the data on the Web was growing exponentially. They reasoned that the company who made it possible to sift through all this data and find the most useful content, when needed, would create immense value.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Death Of Hopium
The Death Of Hopium
As many readers know, I spent 13 years living and working in Silicon Valley before partnering up with Chris to start Peak Prosperity.
I got my MBA at Stanford in 1999 when the dot-com bubble was at its zenith, and worked for both a VC-funded start-up as well as one of the biggest Internet juggernauts (Yahoo!). I lived in Palo Alto, the central core of the tech scene.
As a result, I have a pretty good read on how Silicon Valley works. Many of the folks I worked and went to school with are now in leadership positions at the big operating companies, VC firms and hedge funds in that ecosystem — so I have personal knowledge of who’s making the decisions.
And it’s no secret that I think things have degenerated into a steaming pile of hucksterism.
The “engine of our economy”, the “cradle of innovation”, the “land of tomorrow” — whatever breathless hyperbole the fawning media is using this week — is a sham. Silicon Valley has become a factory of hype, funneling gobs of early-stage capital into whatever half-credible concepts it can think of, and then pimping the artificially-inflated initial results of those tarted-up ventures to whichever “greater fool” is willing to acquire it or buy its IPO. Let that idiot figure out if it will ever turn a profit…
Like the too-cozy relationship between DC and Wall Street, I see a similar one between Wall Street and the Tech sector. They collude to pump out as many opportunities as they can — private placements, acquisitions, IPOs, secondary offerings — to cash out the insiders and foist the long-term financial risk onto the “dumb money” (pension funds, foreign capital, retail investors, corporations desperate to enter the “digital age”).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
