Juggling Dynamite

Thanks to Alex for a very kind article on the healingphilosophy.com “The ethical financial advisor”. I just received a link today. It is too bad that ethical and financial advisor have come to seem like oxymorons. I know there are many good-intentioned people out there giving financial advice. The trouble is that the equities sales culture has trained them and signs their commission cheques. Everything they have come to believe and advise comes from that bias. Clients simply can't afford to take financial advice from the financial sales world. There must to be product providers, sellers, and advisors, they are three distinct roles with separate and naturally conflicting agendas. The three just cannot be one.

A friend sent me this clip which spoofs Scotiabank and the “You're richer than you think” marketing bologna. Our local Scotia branch still has a big outside banner with this saying. I keep thinking they will wake up and take it down one of these days as a dark slogan for a by-gone era when the banks levered up their profits by convincing everyone that gutting their home equity was sound financial planning.
If you are feeling really sensitive about portfolio losses you may find it in poor taste, sorry. There is always some truth and irony in the jokes of course. But remember admitting and embracing our mistakes is the first step to learning from them. There is no shame in our making mistakes, the shame is in repeating them.

Peter Schiff is a media commentator, speaker, author. I have not met Peter. According to some reader feedback, apparently his investment timing has been bad (although he has a lot of company there) and I make no defense or endorsement of him. But I have to agree with his comments in this YouTube clip when he says our present problems are more from the boom than the bust. The up side of this down cycle is that it will eventually cure (at least for a while) all the slothful, wasteful, reckless habits that got the world into its present pickle in the first place.

But just so we are clear, my central point is that individuals can understand the business cycle in advance and use it to their advantage. We are not helpless and doomed to suffer blindly through it every 4 or 5 years. It should only take one cycle for rational people to “get it”. Riding the same roller coaster straight up and then straight down time and again without figuring out any system or breakers for controlling our ride is self-destructive, insanity.