A wise article! I also saw the Daily Telegraph article where those, taking the lead in regard to the unhappiness in the UK, said that people need to give more away to help them experience more happiness.

I think there is fun in accumulating wealth in such a way as to prove the investment managers wrong and rather silly.

But there is another fun where one watches someone, who would otherwise be struggling horribly, relieved, settled and calmed as a result of one’s own giving to them or one of their creditors such as a lawyer.

I think the giving needs to be reasonably specific rather than the vague donation to a charity, who will do with one’s money one knows not what. Yet, Warren Buffet knows enough of what Bill Gates will do with his money so big charities can be worthwhile.

There is, however, the view, which I share, that, as was once said, “You will always have the poor with you”. Having read a mind-clearing article, again in the Daily Telegraph, that population growth will eventually outdo food supply growth, I can well understand the truth that we will always have the poor with us.

Malthus may be unwelcome these days but he only pointed out that population growth is exponential and food supply growth is linear. Since exponential growth will one day leave food supply growth standing, there will never be enough to feed the world’s population.

So, why give to charity at all? Well, make it specific so that you can see what your donation is doing. Then you can experience a prolonged frisson of well-being, which is worth all the money you’ve given away.

You can’t take it with you, as they say. And using all your money to buy bars of gold to put in a bank vault doesn’t create too many jobs. Modern gold mining using cyanide leaching isn’t too labor intensive. Although someone needs to build the mining trucks and other equipment. They last a long time.
Mohamed El-Erian of PIMCO said on CNBC on Thursday morning that the US economy was slowing. The day before, Mr.Taylor, a former vice president of Citibank predicted a US recession by the end of this year.
The new government of Finland (the country with the world’s most honest government) may oppose any ECB bailout of other member states, like Portugal, according to a report on CNBC early on Friday. Could that cause more problems in Europe? It can’t help. Hello, China?
An investigation by a US Senate panel found that the big banks caused the financial crisis by creating junk investment vehicles that they sold around the globe to unsuspecting investors, while at the same time buying cheap insurance on those junk instruments that they knew would pay off when the defective vehicles lost value. The Levin panel report said that the Justice Department should investigate the schemes and players. The report stated that the head of Goldman may have lied to Congress during sworn testimony. DON’T hold your breath waiting for indictments of any of these crooks for fraud because they own the US Government. Several of the subject banks are still are primary dealers of the Fed! And of course, they aren’t real capitalists, since they had to take public welfare money to keep from going bankrupt. They will preach the value of cutting tax money for other welfare spending though.
Professor Feldstein of Harvard just said that he expects US growth somewhere south of 2% for this year. “I think we are still in a very weak economy,” he said. The high oil price is a problem, taking 1% out of GDP. He is of the opinion that inflation won’t take off and interest rates won’t be raised by the Fed. He believes that the Chinese government will force inflation down. And US unemployment will remain high for years.
Those Americans hiding money in foreign banks have until the end of August to fess up and pay the 25% penalty, or risk going to jail AND paying the tax. They said that there are an estimated 400,000 such people ! I wonder why the country is broke?
David Walker, former US Comptroller General, said Congress is ‘playing with a tactical nuclear weapon’ in threatening to not raise the debt ceiling. (Yep, they sure are.) He said the median effective income tax rate for the top 1% of Americans who make OVER $500,000 a year, is only about 18.8%, the reason being, that most of their income is from capital gains, not from wages. (You won’t hear that rate quoted on Fox.) He said, “I pay a lot higher taxes, (meaning tax RATE) a lot higher taxes, that the top 1%, and I’m not in the top 1%.” (Guess why we’re broke.) He said that the US needs to develop some kind of tax that will also tax the SPENDING of the wealthy, with some sort of consumption tax, because wealthy people spend out of their wealth, not just out of their income. A VAT or sales tax are options. He said the US needs to get rid of all the loopholes etc. in the tax code.
Finally, I must pay tribute to Joe Battipaglia who died Thursday, at only 55 years of age, from an apparent heart attack. He was one of the few guests on the various financial networks who told it exactly how he saw it, with no spin. He was an honest man who will be greatly missed by financial TV viewers. He was one of the few people, that I would stop whatever I was doing, to listen to what he had to say. My condolences to his family and friends.