Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Politics: Money and Promises of Money

I don't have any deep insight or even instanalysis to offer this morning.
In addition to serious sleep deprivation I don't want to waste our readers time with conventional wisdom/pablum. We're going to violate the first rule of blogthink, we take more pleasure in being right than in being fast. This handicap probably has it's roots in my childhood and is exacerbated by an internalized fiduciary sense that is, quite frankly, a pain in the butt at times.

I'll leave you with some generalizations:
1) All change contains within it opportunity.
2) The business of Washington is money. Taking it in and doling it out. In a gimlet-eyed sense, the change of an administration is the change in recipients of what politicians believe is their beneficence.
3) Years ago, one of my mentors said "It's easier to fill your swimming pool if you located it under a waterfall". I found the truth of that statement when I was brought in to save a company that had been defrauded by its president. It would have been easier to start from scratch, i.e. relocate the pool. There is a multi-trillion dollar waterfall that flows directly from Washington and a lot of folks are jockeying for that prime real estate directly under the cascade. This is your classic "little piggies at the trough". Another couple trillion is directed/redirected by codes, rules and regs. This flow is a little tougher to understand but the group of folks who figure it out have some of the highest incomes in the world.
Changes in the law can present even larger opportunities than those realized from simply suckling at the govvies teat. We've had a few posts on the topic, here are two from last year:

Global Warming, Politics, Laws and Opportunity
Global Warming, Politics, Laws and Opportunity--Part II

If I had paid more attention during high school English Lit., I'd have avoided some sweat and heartache. Here's an example most of our readers probably know but may not have made a part of their weltanschauung,
Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224:

Brutus:
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

The last time I used that quote was in "Catching the Big Investment Trends".
We'll have more over the next couple months.