An Opening Salvo on Bastille Day

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . ."

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

While I expect that this will be a relatively untrodden area of the internet super-highway (I mean how many people really want to expend precious leisure time perusing a blog related to finance/investing), at least I will have an outlet in which I can engage in a variety of tirades, rants and disquisitions. A warning to readers up front: I love a good (or even bad) run-on sentence, I tend to write the way I think (lots of parenthetical breaks) and I have the grammatical skills of a second-grader. Reading this will likely not be pretty.

As for me, I am a former lawyer who has been a professional investor/pro bono financial adviser for the last six years. As a way of doing penance and possibly escaping that special circle in Hades reserved for litigators, I have been attempting to steer people into responsible personal finance decisions for almost a decade. Upon leaving law I published a sporadic financial newsletter for a couple of years. In a way, this is a reincarnation of that project. However, being a staunch Luddite, it has taken me several years to try the whole blogging thing. This, despite the fact that numerous friends have been prodding me to do so for far too many years. So that is a little bit about me and this enterprise.

Whenever I do financial advising for people I make explicit to them that I wear two very distinct hats when providing counsel. The first is my generic financial advising hat. Namely, there are many things that any good sound financial adviser should be telling people (save more than you spend, diversify your portfolio, make long-term financial goals, etc.). The second hat is very different. It is one in which I give specific guidance based upon my beliefs about the desirability of particular investments. This advice is informed by my personal beliefs about the global investing milieu.

While the opening passage of Dickens' masterpiece quote may be a bit histrionic for the circumstances the US faces today, there is no doubt we are in a period of extremes and excesses. It is with the second hat I noted above that I will focus a good portion of the analysis contained in this blog. My views are both unorthodox and contrarian. The vast majority of investment professionals would either take strong issue with my point of view, or simply disregard it as such utter nonsense that is not even worth seriously considering. But I have always loved a good argument, and exposing the financial services juggernaut for being the emperor with no clothes that it is gives me unparalleled satisfaction.

In short, I believe the US is in the early phases of what will be a long, inevitable period of hegemonic decline. There are very few traditional investment vehicles (e.g. domestic stocks and bonds or real estate) that will provide impressive investment returns over the next decade (at least after considering inflation). It will require particularly canny and shrewd investing to achieve success.

But I will leave it to future posts to flesh this out.