Brian Gongol
The Chicago Cubs offer a lesson in getting rich slowly
After getting tired of more than a century without a World Series win, the Cubs have hired Theo Epstein as the president of baseball operations. He, in turn, has brought in Jed Hoyer to operate as general manager. Hoyer worked with Epstein before, and he said something instructive: "There's no magic formula that I learned in Boston, no 'special sauce.' It comes down to the building blocks of baseball, which are scouting and development." In other words, Hoyer's saying that it's going to take some time and a lot of hard work at the fundamentals. This contrasts markedly with the rather large number of Americans who are obsessed with getting rich quickly -- rather than doing the hard work of getting the fundamentals right, year in and year out. Fundamentals -- whether it's in baseball or investing or anywhere else -- are boring. But they're the only way to really get it right. It's interesting, too, that the baseball news is happening at the same time as billions of dollars are rushing into the stock market, just because things are starting to look a little brighter. The real winners in the stock market are those who bought a while back, when things looked most gloomy.
Sooner or later, the Occupy Wherever-We-Want movement has to tell the rest of us what they believe
Supposedly, there are sub-groups now agitating for a national "general assembly" to put together a statement of purpose. But just like the Tea Party movement, the Occupists are bonded more by generalized anger and frustration than a coherent worldview.
We're about to have 7 billion neighbors
The world's population is expected to reach 7 billion within days. That's many times more people than occupied the planet at, say the time of the American Revolution.
Letting the mortgage market hit bottom: We have to do it sooner or later
