Rich On Money

Obama Still Demonstrates Inexperience

I have always been a big fan of youth and giving young people a true chance to succeed and fail at doing things. I am also reminded of how long it took me to get good at managing money in the financial markets. How much could you learn from a book versus the real world? How much can one say for experience, and the importance of it, and then there is the issue of wisdom and what does it mean? 

All of this came together as I was watching a one hour interview that Charlie Rose did with Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner who is in his 40’s as is the President of the United States who is in his late 40’s. Wow the answer is as clear as a bell. Unless you have some gray hair , you really don’t know a dam thing. You haven’t lived life’s cycles. You know nothing about the mountains and the valleys that we must all go through and in fact nations must go through. 

Do you really think you can know much about what it was like inside a concentration camp compared to somebody who lived the experience? We have a massive divorce rate in this country because people simply do not know what they are getting into. And as far as money management is concerned, unless you have been through bear markets, you are simply a disaster waiting to happen. You have no feel for the downside, for how low, low can be.

Watching the Secretary of the Treasury, I realized he is so far in over his head, that the problem is, he doesn’t know enough to know how much he doesn’t know. The same thing is true for Obama, a highly respected intellect with great charisma and political instincts, he does even have a n amateurs understanding of history because he hasn’t lived long enough or through the cycles, and for a nation this is dangerous. Probably 95% of the Senate was more competent than he was to lead, but leadership is no longer based on competency. Politics has turned into a Hollywood type game. The actor looks the part, feels the part, becomes the part, but he is still not the person he is portraying. 

People like to throw at me Ronald Reagan, to which I say, he was Governor of California for 8 years, and that automatically made him qualified for just about anything. George W. Bush was in the same boat as Obama – incompetent. America has now had two in a row, and it shows. We are losing economic dominance of the world to Asia. We are a debtor nation as opposed to being a creditor nation. We are stuck in two wars Iraq, and Afghanistan without a creditable exit strategy. The Afghan war has been going on since 2001 at this point. It is sucking resources out of this country that should be used to ensure that America remains at the forefront of the world. 

Today a poll was released showing that 18 to 29 year olds no longer favor Obama as President. I personally see such a missed opportunity for this leader. There are only a few precious things he should have done to get this country moving again. Three things really would do it, 1) education,  2) education, 3) education.  You have to get this country ready for a new world. With unemployment hanging out at 10%, we should have gotten millions of these unemployed into community colleges while we paid them unemployment benefits. A country can never lose by educating its population. Instead, the wasted money on pork is just unthinkable. An $800 billion stimulus program that had very little to do with stimulus.

Am I optimistic about the future, you ask. I keep wondering why I pour more and more energy into gold stocks, all of which have worked out so far, and I think will probably go higher.