Dear rss free blog,
Segways,
water taxis, vans, and feet haul the tourists into and out of Sint Maartin
(Philipsburg) and Saint Martin (Marigot), our
port Wednesday (along with three monster cruise ships), because the sea is too
rough for our planned berth at St. Barts (where we would have had to use a
tender.) Duty-free stores, many run by East Indians who speak neither French
nor Dutch, await their dollars. I bought a suitcase to replace the one whose
wheels came off from a Rajastan merchant who spoke only Hindi and English, and
I bargained hard.
Oddly, the
local cash and shop exchange rate for euros to dollars is 1:1, meaning, under Gresham’s Law, that we
spent dollars and kept our euros for another day. Gresham wrote that “bad money drives out
good.” The local taste for greenbacks is not a reflection of its recent
strength; it is a come-on for dollar-holding tourists, from other parts of the Americas and Europe as well as the USA.
The
vertiginous rise of global stock markets reversed on Tuesday and the dollar
made a further advance. Gold weakened along with some other commodities.
Do these
forecast a trend? Will 2010 be downtrending like Tuesday, or will it rise like
Monday? Will we see a repeat of 2009 upward movements or a sorrowful sinking
stock system like 2008? In the high wind of this port the big ships are pushed
up and down by about 4 or 5 feet from minute to minute.
Fluctuat
nec mergitur. Stocks will fluctuate but not sink away to nothing.
Just like cruise liners.
To know
more, google the guru.
In his
holy presence or via the Internet, you may express your deepest worries about
bourses in general: Bombay, Beijing,
New York, London,
São Paulo, Trinidad.
The translator at his elbow will transmit your concerns to the holy man if you
don’t speak English or Hindi.
Then the
saintly turbaned yogi will give you anodyne advice: stay invested but remember
to diversify.
He will
intone: there is no single stock suitable for all accounts.
He will
murmur: trends continue until they reverse. Simplistic formulaic investing,
into “BRIC” or “hard money” or “peak oil” or “internets”, is a way to lose
money, he will warn.
And he
will stress: Don’t say “no more stocks”, because then you’ll never be able to
make your losses back.
After this
dose of the wisdom of the East, you say “namaste” or “thank you” and pay him in
dollars, at the best exchange rate at the ashram, as he accepts all credit
cards.
The
translator keeps the books. He also maintains a list of any specific stocks
asked about for passing to the Indian insider trader at the ashram. So stick to
generalities when googling the guru.
More on
specific stocks for non-guru subscribers follows these corrections. I got the
population of Nobel-rich St.
Lucia wrong; it is 160,000 people, meaning 80,000 per Nobel Prize, still a
world record. Also the big ship next to ours was not the QE II but the Queen
Mary II. They look alike.
