COMMENT: Dear Martin,
Thank you for spending your precious time to compose such a detailed blog post. The gems within your answer truly clarify this seemingly impossible situation for me. We *are* all connected and cycles are clearly human nature playing out. Greed, as you noted, is part of that equation. Socrates is the most important contribution to mankind that I can think of. Socrates can one day (finally) allow us to see our humanity and alter our course for the better.
Warm wishes,
J, Austin, TX
REPLY: Thank you. I have seen the world and how it functions. I’m extremely fortunate to have had a front-row seat from Europe to Asia, and even advising China during the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis. There are some things you can only come to understand by doing it. All the great economists who actually contributed something were traders who were not formally educated. Trading is the ultimate teacher, for it makes sure we must remain humble. Being called into China taught me something that should have been obvious, yet was never articulated.
I was taken to a secret installation in a motorcade that was surrounded by tanks and had three huge satellites on the roof. They were monitoring every commodity in the country, but they were not interfering. They were tracking 249 varieties of tea. They were fascinated that the same tea was selling for different prices in different cities. I had to explain transportation costs and human desire always mean something different from someplace else has a premium. Under communism, they were used to everything being the same price even it if cost twice as much to transport it across the country. I was there for the transition from communism to capitalism.
I have witnessed so many things around the world being called in to even the birth of the G5 (now G20) to the stock market and economic collapses. I have been called in by so many governments in times of crisis that it has taught me a variety of events and opened my eyes to the world economy and how we are all connected.
What I have witnessed is that we are all connected and it is IMPOSSIBLE for any head of state to stand up and promise some economic solution that requires global actions. The world economy has been destroyed from manufacture to food supply and distribution chains. What has been done is just beyond stupid. We cannot even imagine how world leaders were stupid enough to follow the advice of Neil Ferguson. It is my hope that Socrates will one day be consulted rather than this sort of unprofessional approach to something that is so damaging that it threatens, not just starvation, but world war.
ANYONE who bad-mouths me personally is trying to prevent anyone from discovering that a computer can do an unbiased job, which threatens some aspect of their income or they are being paid under the table to try to prevent any change to the status quo. Attacking me personally is like attacking your wife because you did not take out the trash. All I can do is hope that when I am gone, they will be left with the reality of just a computer — not me.
