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My God. Russia. Egypt. Iraq. Syria, Venezuela. India. Give thanks, you don’t live anywhere there

+ Russia.

Oil and gas brings over half its budget. Meantime, Putin is consolidating more and more control of the economy into fewer and fewer hands, mostly government. Russian “innovation” is in Israel or Silicon Valley.

+ Egypt.

In the beginning of November, the government allowed the Egyptian pound to float, and the currency has lost more than half its value. Life will become much harder for the average Egyptian. More than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, and yet the country as a whole has enjoyed a kind of economic fantasy. “Compared with other countries in Africa, Egypt has quite a high standard of living, even though it’s a dysfunctional economy,” a foreign businessman in Cairo told me. “Have they been living beyond their means?” He continued, “When you have a lot of imports, a large workforce, and wages that are quite low, and yet you’re not exporting,-it doesn’t add up.” From Egypt’s Failed Revolution. Read more here.

+ Iraq. From this week’s New Yorker:

A Bigger Problem Than ISIS?
The Mosul Dam is failing. A breach would cause a colossal wave that could kill as many as a million and a half people.
By Dexter Filkins. Click here. 

+ Syria.

Assad just destroyed the largest industrial city in the country. That’s like destroying New York, LA, San Francisco and Dallas in one swoop.

+ Venezuela.

People are starving because of price controls and insane government policies. Solution: the army now distributes food. Which means graft is rampant. From the New York Times:

MATURIN, Venezuela – His name was Kevin Lara Lugo, and he died on his 16th birthday.

He spent the day before foraging for food in an empty lot, because there was nothing to eat at home. Then in a hospital because what he found made him gravely ill.

Hours later, he was dead on a gurney, which doctors rolled by his mother as she watched helplessly. She said the hospital had lacked the simplest supplies needed to save him on that day last July.

“I have a tradition that in the morning of their birthdays, I wake up my children and sing to them,” his mother, Yamilet Lugo, said. “How could I do that when my son was dead?”

Venezuela has suffered from so many ailments this year. Inflation has driven office workers to abandon the cities and head to illegal pit mines in the jungle, willing to subject themselves to armed gangs and multiple bouts of malaria for the chance to earn a living.

Doctors have prepared to operate on bloody tables because they did not have enough water to clean them. Psychiatric patients have had to be tied to chairs in mental hospitals because there was no medication left to treat their delusions.

Hunger has driven some people to riot – and others into rickety fishing boats, fleeing Venezuela on reckless journeys by sea.

But it was the story of a boy with no food, who had gone searching for wild roots to eat but ended up poisoning himself instead, that seemed to embody everything that had gone wrong in Venezuela.

The country’s economic crisis had spent months encircling his family, only to snatch away its second-born son.

His neighborhood, on the edge of what was once a prosperous oil boomtown, had long been running out of basics like corn flour and bread.

The cutlery factory where Ms. Lugo had worked shut down in May because it could no longer obtain the materials to make plastic, joining many across the country that have gone idle. That left the family unable to buy what food was left.

At the hospital, Ms. Lugo said, there was no respite. Like so many clinics throughout the country, the one in Maturín ran out of basic supplies like intravenous solutions, leaving the family to search the city and haggle with black-market sellers in the hours before Kevin died.

+ India.

You can only imagine what happened recently when overnight the government declared 85% of the paper currency in the country worthless.

In short, be thankful you don’t live (or invest) in one of these sad places.

I could never imagine — until now — how fast insane, greedy politicians could mess things up.  But then, my father saw Hitler’s rise and ran from that insanity — on the last boat — into Australia. And that’s the only reason I’m here.

Amazon is a cult stock. A reader asked What is a good entry point? Here’s my “logic.”

When it reports, Amazon earns little or nothing.

It pays no dividends.

It invests “for the future.”

Jeff Bezos is a genius, the story goes. His money-losing on-line retail business is pointing up opportunities in Kindle readers, Echo AI devices, streaming video and most importantly, AWS — Amazon Web Services — which is the largest cloud provider (and arguably the most creative) in the entire planet.

That mantra has convinced Wall Street to push its stock price up, and keep pushing it up. (Except today.)

There is no connection between the stock price and its financials. Except that if it stopped growing, or stumbled, the stock price would stumble also.

Hence you buy it, and lock it away. Perhaps give it to your children. Don’t look at the day to day fluctuations. They’ll drive you nuts.

Stuff:

The 15 Best Things to Do in New York City, courtesy Conde Nast Traveler. Click here.

+ VRBO is better than Airbnb. VRBO stands for Vacation Rentals By Owner. Click here. 

Auto-pay is OK. But paperless is NOT OK. You need paper to check the errors. There are ALWAYS errors. Trust me. There are always errors. And they’re NEVER in your favor.

+ Bluetooth headphones are great. Like Apple Earpods. They make and receive phone calls. They play music. But they don’t do noise cancelling. Bose QuietComfort 20 dooes noise cancelling, plays music and answers the phone. But it’s wired — not Bluetooth. I’d wait for Bluetooth noise cancelling ear buds. Should be out in coming months. Note: Bose calls one set QuietComfort, the other QuietControl. You want the latter.

+ Rights, warrants and options expire. Fidelity sent me a reminder of some rights expiring on December 28. I opened the letter on December 29. Lesson: Keep track of your stuff on your calendar.

+ The Canon G5X remains my favorite pocket, traveling camera. Despite many new cameras from Canon and others, The Canon G5X did a sterling job over Christmas. Want to see samples? Send me an email. Buy it here.

More bad Christmas cracker “jokes”:

+ What’s the difference between the Christmas alphabet and the ordinary alphabet?

A: The Christmas alphabet is Noel.

+ What did the grape say when the elephant stepped on it?

A: Nothing. It just let out a little wine.

+ Who hides in the bakery at Christmas?

A: A Mince Spy.

+ What happened when a truck full of tortoises hit a truck full of turtles?

A: It was a turtle disaster.

HarryNewton
Harry Newton, who misses the Christmas chaos of six children under eleven in one house. They were wonderful.

What is wrong with today’s stockmarket? Is this the end of The Trump Rally?

4 Comments

  1. Thought Police says:

    I am very disturbed by your anti Muslim rant. How dare you say such hateful things about Arab Countries? I call on Loretta Lynch to have you arrested for hate crimes. I am very concerned that your racist comments shouldn’t cause any backlash by your types, evil white straight bigoted bible carrying gun-toting racists!

    • lucky says:

      Check with VRBO and I am sure you will find a very nice filthy pad in one of those Arab countries and be happy. Please hurry…be happy! Don’t let the door hit you in the butt. Yes, I have been to some of them and am very happy and proud to live in America.

  2. Tim Linecum says:

    Harry, I got a pair of Bose Quiet Control 30 for Christmas and it works perfectly. It IS wireless, has noise control and you can make and receive calls & plays music. It is out and can be purchased so there you have it:) I recommend it.