Juggling Dynamite

• Canadian stock market volume slump deepens (buying volume is anemic in other stock markets too.  Maybe retail investors aren’t as “dumb” as Wall and Bay Street thinks after all.)
• The trillions the government doesn’t account for
• Birth Citizenship controversy heats up (protectionism is growing, but in our aging populations, immigration is life blood)
• Euroland will pay for this monetary madness
• Will Wall Street ever face Justice?
• Confessions of a reformed broker:  Josh Brown:  “In 2008, everything really crystallized for me. The market was melting down. But at the retail brokerages, there were analysts still picking stocks. Nobody said, “Go to cash.” That’s when you realize: This has nothing to do with taking care of clients and everything to do with generating gross commissions. I put people into cash in some instances. I tried to put some people into gold and bonds. The problem is, as a retail broker, you don’t make commissions when you sit in cash. You put all your clients in cash, you are going to end up going to the soup kitchen.” [yes, but then there are all the fee based advisors who never sell stocks either…they buy when ever you happen to give them money and they have no rules about when to reduce risk.  They charge a fee but offer no valuable risk management.]

Yesterday I took the historical tour at the Kennedy Space Center. It takes you all the way back to the origins of the US space program, Apollo 1-13, Challenger, all of it–very interesting. I love the assurance of outer space–that humans are small and insignificant in the big picture.

As the guide spoke of patriotic heroes who had taken steps of personal danger for the greater good of space exploration I was touched. But I also could not help but think how much further advanced and evolved the world could be today if we had thrown the same amount of tax dollars, brains and scientific determination behind some of the key struggles of humanity: sustainable, clean energy, water and food. Imagine if we had spent the last 50 odd years funneling trillions of dollars and the brightest math and science minds into the sole purpose of not riding rockets (or financial engineering), but solving the world’s need for clean, sustainable, domestic energy. Think we would still be cremating our environment and fighting over oil in the middle east? Somehow I doubt it.

Driving in the US yesterday a couple of things were very clear.  Everyone is texting and talking on the phone while driving, especially on the freeways.  It is madness.  I know, I know, its the land of the free and all, but anti-talk-text laws while driving are desperately needed.  This is like motoring with a majority of people intoxicated at the wheel.  Needed now:  bans and enforcement with heavy fines along with media campaigns to underline just how reckless this behavior is.  That goes for Canada too.  In Canada we recently legislated some bans but you still see a fair amount of drivers thumbing away on the freeway.  This is not a personal choice issue, this is endangering everyone.  Has no one seen the movie “Seven Pounds?”  Watch it.