I am literally the last man standing in my Spanish class. All the girls proceed to the next level. The guys have other plans. It appears that the girls are doing much better in languages. I wonder why. Must be in our DNA.
Following AIG episode, I texted my Prudential insurance agent this morning. Do I want to know Prudential’s exposure to AIG, Lehman, and Merrill Lynch stocks? Certainly. Where is the promised market update? I have no clue. Chances are they are scrambling to measure the exact losses like the rest of the financial institutions right now, as in now.
You would have thought with the Basel II Accord’s three pillars concept implemented in some forms or another across the financial industry, the risks are well managed, the system is more resilience to shocks. Yet, right before our eyes, we see the collapse of the giants like dominoes. Do practitioners have what it takes to deal with the complexity of the exotic products and the financial structures? Do they have the agility to deal with shocks – scenarios that should have been tested regularly? Are risks thoroughly understood and monitored from the front to the back office or are the front line people too absorbed in carrying on with their daily jobs and making money? I often have my doubt. Time for Basel III.
Besides being a coffee boy and a note taker, nowadays I have a list to administrate. My new neighbor constantly on a conference call, and so are some others around me. In this office with so much surround sound, with so many people making a living by talking, I feel as though I work in a call center. Thank God I have my Nokia phone and my MP3 collection.
No doubt this list must have a certain level of importance since I need to deal with some rather senior people from different geographies, I literally doze off for a couple of seconds every time I scroll up and down this list. I certainly haven’t heard of countries like Kazakhstan or Qatar until now. But look, a list is a list and it still makes me fall asleep. My vision would go blur (much like the picture above), I would doze off for a few seconds (no kidding), wake up, do the thing I need to do, and doze off again while scrolling up or down.
People in my industry are in panic mode (the closer you are to the trading portfolios, the more intense the panic is I suppose) worrying that jobs may be lost. I have seen the up and down cycles and I have switched in and out of different jobs and industries throughout these cycles. The only constant is change. Wrong! The only constant is that whatever we are holding onto, whatever we think we own, are not permanent. All can be taken away in a snap.
A job is a job and I am concerned about my savings more. Time to take out my cash, buy some gold bars, and hide them underneath my bed.
10 replies on “Snippet Of My Life Episode 15 – I Wonder Why”
Haha, I used to really think that “investing in gold” means buy gold and find a safe place to hide them.
Isn’t the price of gold going down now?
Si Ying – You mean it is not?!
Ha ha ha.
I would. I don’t even trust the bank that keep my gold bars inside their vaults.
CSC – It could be. People’s savings can vanish when a bank collapses. Gold bars seem to be something more … tangible?
Over here, people still buy houses in “teals of gold” which is also listed in the property websites.
The banking sector is not so sophisticated, a rare few have credit cards, people still keep gold at home. While some others might say “eeee so backward” I totally can see why this can actually be a good thing!
I love the way you ended your entry.
I totally agree with you.
Going into a mad frenzy about how the financial world is unfolding is definitely not what we should be focusing on!
G – Is this financial crisis affecting Vietnam? I have got one colleague just came back with a queue number to surrender his policies. It is pretty organized here. I wonder how long AIG will last with policy holders withdrawing such a huge amount of money at the same time. In the end, it may not be the exposure to the Lehman, Merrill Lynch stocks, and etc. that bring down AIG. It’s the market sentiment.
Wilf, so far I have not heard of any major “scary” news yet.
Maybe it’s been censored? Maybe inflation is their biggest worry?
Agree it’s the market sentiment. I have always been a big believer of that. Whenever I hear bad news, I just hope people will not panic too much or it will make things worse! But not everyone is as nonchalant as me 😛
G – Talking about inflation, I read that in Zimbabwe, the inflation rate has reached 11.2 million! It is now trading about $350 Zimbabwean dollars ($35 trillion in the old value) against USD.
haha yes! I was reading the papers and they were talking about the gazillions and whatnot for the number of zeros!
G – That got me thinking. This is what it’s like when a country goes bankrupt eh? I am not an economist. Basically, what it means is that all the “values” built over time become zero. Zimbabwe has to start from ground zero again on what the outside world may want from them.
Life as such.