Carl Hegelman
Most Recently: The Day the Gold Disappeared
Carl Hegelman (a pen name) is a corporate bond analyst and a connoisseur of leisure.
The Day the Gold Disappeared
In the long summer vacation of 1971, I "worked" on a construction site in the English countryside where they were proposing to build a new hangar for the U.S. Air Force, and used the proceeds to take a holiday in Greece with my friend Charles. Originally, the idea had been to hitchhike, having crossed the channel on the boat and made our way from Calais to Paris by bus. We soon found out what I had been warned of, that the French can't abide hitchhikers. After sleeping in the Bois de Boulogne we fluked a short ride to a small town by the name of Auxerre, and there our luck ran out. We stood by the side of the road and for the rest of the day stuck out our thumbs in vain. There was a storm that night, the worst they had suffered for many years, and, abandoning the woods, we laid down our dampened sleeping bags on a narrow strip of shelter by the pumps under a gas station canopy which rang all night with the fusillade of golf-ball sized hailstones. Having stood by the side of the same road for most of the next day, we got tired of looking up Gallic nostrils and spent some precious money on train tickets to Dijon (in the south, named after the mustard). Amazingly, even after dark, we got a lift from the eastern outskirts with some clergymen—they were Belgian, not French—stayed the night for free at their monastery in the mountains, and arrived in Lausanne the next day full of warm feelings for les Belges. The Swiss, too, were much less snooty than the French, and it took no more than a couple of hours to get to the border town of Brig, where we were picked up from the Shell station at the foot of the nearby Alp by a truculent Italian workman in a Fiat, who drove us to Bologna without a word. And that's when Richard Nixon stepped in. He decided to take the U.S. dollar off the gold standard, and as a result, for a couple of days, nobody would change any money. All you could get in the cambio for your travellers' cheques or your leftover francs were Italian shrugs. READ MORE
Our Debt: Why Rich People Should Be Worried Too
Back in the days before the great bull market began to charge in August of 1982, there was a soothsayer called Joe Granville. He was the Mad Money Jim Cramer of his day, a showman and exhibitionist whose performances included walking on water (across a swimming pool in Tucson, dressed in a tuxedo) and a piano-playing chimp. Despite that his demeanor wasn't what you would expect of a great financial brain, he attracted a large following of investors for his $250-a-year financial letter (about $615 in today's money), partly because, as People magazine explained, he had called four major stock-market turns in two years. His reputation grew to the point that when he issued a "sell everything" fax to his premium subscribers in January 1981 the market dropped 2½% on its busiest trading day to that point in history. READ MORE
The Global Casino
A long time ago I was involved in an attempt to finance the buyout of a card club in LA. It was quite a profitable business, doing about $100 million a year in revenues, on which it cleared close to $30 million after cash expenses. They made their money by charging people to sit at a table and play poker, taking a little piece of each hand. That way they could get away with not being a gambling establishment, which would have been illegal in Los Angeles, because they weren't actually a participant in the game; they were just a venue where people happened to sit down and play a game of skill against one another for money. The people who pitted their wits against one another won or lost, and the owners of the club took their cut and lived the high life. READ MORE
Endless Boom and Bust: Two Proposals Towards a Way Out
The 1970s began in late 1973 and ended in early 1982. A decade-long hangover. The childish joie de vivre of flower power had faded by 1973, five or six years after the Summer of Love, three years after the breakup of The Beatles. The bloom was off the rose and a kind of cynical sense of entitlement had set in. To be cool in 1973 you needed to live in a squat (preferably in The Smoke, as we called London in those days), go on the dole and wear an Afghan coat. Brightly colored underwear was still OK, but the important thing was to be weary and jaded on the outside. A beard, if you could manage it, helped achieve this effect. READ MORE
The End Of The Glorious Future
At boarding school in the 1960s we had to go to evensong every Sunday. A few prayers, some chants and responses, four hymns, a couple of Lessons, the Nicene creed, a sermon and – at long last – the benediction ("The Lord make his face to shine upon you"). The sermon was the main variable in determining how long it would be before we could all go back to our Houses for supper. To make it more exciting and to help while away the tedium, there was sometimes a pool on how long the sermon would last. If the preacher was one of the staff – the Chaplain, the Headmaster (d. 1998), or the young Chemistry master, Dr. Kitwood (d. 1998) – the boy with the stopwatch had to be on his toes because the bets were tightly grouped around their known averages. Tom Kitwood was everybody's favorite because he was quick – usually about nine minutes, sometimes as short as seven. The worst sermon in history was given by a visitor, a fat lay preacher who, aptly enough considering he was from the Gas Board, droned on for a record-breaking 45 minutes. The best was the Dean of St Paul's, whose sermons were quite long but enormously entertaining, more like a standup routine. READ MORE
The Economy: Why It Sucks
The economy is terrible right now. Almost everybody seems to agree. The business community, as represented by the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and most Republicans, has some ideas as to how to fix it: cut taxes; reduce the deficit (!); rein in Big Government spending (except defense); stop over-regulating business so they can get on with business. The Democrats have their own idea: more stimulus, in the form of, for example, extending unemployment benefits. Who's right? If anybody? READ MORE
How To Save European Soccer From The Players
Soccer players are stealing our profits! READ MORE
Your Summers Are Numbered
In the immortal words of the philosopher Will Smith, "lay back and relax, 'cause this is summertime." It's an excellent point because, with Memorial Day just around the corner, here comes summer. READ MORE
