Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Preserving Wealth

The rich and the poor have one thing in common - worry over money and wealth.

One worry over what they have not; the other over how to keep it.

Preserving wealth is as difficult as finding it - it is a full-time job.

Those who have inherited it found their wealth locked in real assets.

It's real, but you can't eat it.

I know of children who'd spent the rest of their lives trying to unlocking the value and transform it into liquidity.

Those who have made their fortune in business found their wealth locked in the business - or more specifically, the stocks of the trade. They get killed by obsolescence, or the disinterest or incompetence of their children, or the dishonesty of their old staff.

Those who have little have a house or two, a car or two, and some cash which they try to grow at a rapid speed. They end up speculating their little cash in the stock market.

Those who are cleverest are those who have invested in the education of their children - for the wealth gets converted, if they are properly brought up, into values which do not die.

At the end of the day, the value of wealth gets measured in terms of houses or property and location. (Wah, he has some many houses and so many pieces of land.)

Shares and cash are merely different modes of holding that wealth - for spending.

To sum it up, those who are really rich are those who become wealthy when others become poor.

Those who are rich but not that rich as their wealth is eroded by inflation is when they are rich because the whole society becomes rich.

But those who are poor are not poor when they do not know poverty.

Those who are miserable are those who do not accept the situation they found themselves in. They are to be pitied.

2 comments:

walla said...

This blog is almost ascetic in content. That's ascetic, not ecstatic. And it touches on the philosophy of economics. If ever there was such a subject.

Preserving wealth by personal bare minimum. How to inject that into the bloodstream that courses the vein of the inveterate investor?

What motivates an investor to invest investments that form the foundation of economic recovery today and performance tomorrow?

Philanthropic social capital that concerns others of society so that each can break out of the cycle of spiralling human deprivation which limits realization of human potential.

If everyone wants to be owner and boss, who is to be owned and bossed?

If no one is to be owned and bossed, how will enterprises run?

The problem of pareto principle applied to wealth is its tendency to automatically skew towards the owner and the boss because wealth multiplies itself, like using software to write software. Wealth accumulation at its most efficient then becomes geometric rather than arithmetic, exponential but for the risks involved which seek to depress obscene accumulations which otherwise may dampen the spirit to pursue the minimum for the self already corrupted by the maximum that it seeks in everything it attempts to do that has been the perceived reason for success as generally defined by an unphilosophical world.

etheorist said...

walla,

Thanks.

I'm trying to continue from where Joan Robinson and JM Keynes had left off - in search of more enligthened policies.

Good to hear from you.