I recently completed my 37th year at CWS. It’s been quite a journey. So many life changes have taken place during my tenure here as well as gaining invaluable business experience, forming wonderful relationships, saying goodbye to people who have sadly passed,
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When I wrote my book, the target audience was deep pockets and deep thinkers. My choice of blog subject tends to oscillate between the two. This week caters more to the latter than the former.
The Gift of You
When one has gained clarity about what gifts one can offer the world and then designs one’s life to utilize them in ways that benefit others,
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In The Lion King there comes a pivotal moment when Simba has to claim his rightful place on the throne and confront Scar. His mentor/guardian Rafiki reacts to this crossing of the threshold by Simba with the line “It is time!”. This is how I feel about Jay Powell and the Fed in terms of cutting interest rates.
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I am a firm believer that perception is reality for most people. It’s for this reason that I don’t like to wade into politics because, in the words of Paul Simon, “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest”. Another way of saying this is that people make up their minds first and then look for reasons to confirm their beliefs and ignore those that contradict them.
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For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
—Chapter 1, Down the Rabbit Hole
The impact of higher mortgage rates has definitely thrown a wrench into the typical cause-and-effect relationship between rates and home prices.
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The world lost a giant of a man and personality with the passing of Bill Walton last week. He was 71 and his death caught so many people by surprise as he kept his battle with cancer very quiet.
I have written in the past about Walton.
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The Grateful Dead have a song called The Eleven. In many ways the lyrics are unintelligible. It was written during their psychedelic phase so the lack of comprehension makes some sense as their senses were non-sensical.
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It’s always good to reflect as a year comes to a close and a new one begins. Professionally, 2023 was extremely challenging (and humbling). Our beautiful hedge capping most of our variable rate loans at 1.25% for 30-day LIBOR, when it was still in existence,
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Perhaps Powell’s pivot was highly influenced by having access to the Fed’s favorite inflation indicator, the Personal Consumption Expenditure Index (PCE), well ahead of its official release last Friday. As this headline from the Wall Street Journal shows, the index went into negative territory,
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Powell did it for the third time. He proved for the third time that you should listen to him carefully until he does something completely different, and then you should listen to him again. After raising rates aggressively starting in April 2022, after he had said that the Fed wouldn’t raise rates until the end of 2023 at the earliest,
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