Musings Report #22 05-26-12 On Pilgrimage, Exotic and At Home
You are receiving this email because you are one of the 483 subscribers/major contributors to www.oftwominds.com.
For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights, and thank you for supporting the site.
On Pilgrimage, Exotic and At Home
Before we start "On Pilgrimage," I want to note that the search for adding some modest value to the lives of my most loyal and generous correspondents and readers (you) is the one constant of the Musings. In our market-survey-saturated world, the conventional path to "finding out what your readers want" would be to canvass you via an online survey. The thinking here is that if the "provider" (me) finds out what readers want, then he can offer up exactly what people say they want and thus offer the highest possible "customer satisfaction."
For some reason, my mind rebels against this conventional method of divining what constitutes "value," at least in the case of the Musings. Weirdly, perhaps, I suspect that knowing too much about your expectations (if any) might well ruin the entire project, which is to thank you for your critical financial support with a "here's a peek at my open notebook" kind of confidence.
Though I cannot quite pin down why, the entire methodology of surveys and "customer satisfaction" seems artifical and empty, more a simulacrum process and metric than one with any real meaning. Perhaps this reflects some prejudice on my part towards consumer marketing, but I suspect we all feel the inauthenticity of this canned approach.
Knowing that many of you have come to oftwominds.com for financial analysis, I do try to share a few thoughts on investing trends in the Musings, but other than that, it truly is a pot pourri of things I have found worth noting and perhaps developing. This hit-or-miss, non-market-survey approach has at least one advantage, and perhaps it is the only one: you really don't know what the next Musings will be about. That unpredictability is refreshing (I hope) in a world where "customer satisfaction" is measured by multiple-choice questionaires and surveys.
On the recommendation of a friend, I recently watched the film "The Way," a contemporary story set on the famous pilgrimage from France to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain, where tradition has it that the remains of the apostle Saint James are buried. The route is known as "the Way of Saint James," "El Camino de Santiago" and "Route de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle."
I had researched the pilgrimage and route a few years ago as it is a key setting in my novel "For My Daughter," and so I was already familiar with the pilgrimage's long history.
The movie started me thinking about the nature of pilgrimage, and how we are drawn to pilgrimages in exotic locales even as potential pilgrimages in our own daily lives go unnoticed. This led to the thought: perhaps we're all on various pilgrimages in our daily lives that we don't label pilgrimages.
What is a pilgrimage? There are as many answers as there are pilgrims, but certainly the resolution of some emotional or spiritual pain or condundrum figures in many pilgrimages, as does the attainment of some spiritual or internally significant goal.
To gain the official stamp of completion on the route passport (symbolized by a shell that conveys the image of many routes converging on one destination), the pilgrim must walk 100 KM (about 62 miles) or bicyle 200 KM.
We might ask: what if we set out to walk 62 miles near our own home, but with the mindset of a pilgrim, i.e. focused on redemption, forgiveness, spiritual humility and attainment? Would we accomplish our internal goals in equal measure, just as if we had walked 100 KM along the Way of Saint James?
What if we walked 2 miles a day along a quiet path near our house for 31 days, pondering our goals and pilgrimage for the time it took to walk the 2 miles? What could we accomplish in this more modest at-home pilgrimage?
This leads to other questions: aren't many people on a pilgrimage with a goal of financial wealth and security? Did they select that as the most meaningful goal of their lives, or did they accept it as a default after absorbing thousands of marketing messages about the "value" and "meaning" of wealth and financial security? How many reach this goal and find it disappointingly hollow?
Redemption, forgiveness, humility and spiritual attainment are worthy goals in any setting. Perhaps what an exotic pilgrimage offers is the potential for adventure and an experience of the unknown that lends itself to insight and a change of perspective. These are certainly attractive and meaningful features that set a sustained, exotic pilgrimage apart from smaller-scale pilgrimages we are pursuing (consciously or not) in our daily lives.
I have no conclusions or "answers" here, but I think the questions raised by pilgrimage are worth pondering.
A Finance-Related Thought on US Decoupling
By all rights, the U.S. stock and bond markets should decline as the global economy is clearly slowing/derailing. Yet US markets seems to be exhibiting a certain resilience. Is this a temporary pause that presages a crash, or are there other forces at work?
I tend to follow lines of inquiry like this by recalling that markets tend to be most heavily influenced by "big money," and so asking what money managers responsible for $100 million and up might be thinking and doing makes a certain kind of causal sense.
It seems self-evident that the euro and the eurozone are increasingly risky bets, as is the renminbi and China. If you need to park $1 billion, for example, and your primary goal is to not suffer losses (never mind scoring gains, the Prime Directive is don't lose capital), then how many global markets are there that can absorb billions of dollars and remain liquid, i.e. you can sell and extract your capital without crashing the market. Japan and the U.S. come to mind, and perhaps this is one reason why the yen remains strong and the US dollar is gaining in relation to both the euro and the precious metals.
If $1 trillion is seeking a safer haven than real-estate-bubble-popping China and recessionary Europe, then small markets like Brazil and Korea are out because they simply aren't large enough to absorb these scales of capital flow.
If we follow this line of inquiry, the possibility that the US markets will "decouple" from other markets as "big money" seeks safe haven becomes less remote.
From Left Field
The Facebook fallacy (via B.C.): "The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. I don't know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn't engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn't manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value."
Discovering Anna May Wong--the first Chinese-American International movie star (9:56 video) in the 1920s and 30s: limited by racism to minor roles, she still managed to carve out a long career and acheive stardom. Born in Los Angeles to a family that had come to California in the 1850s, she was an LA girl typecast as either "dragon lady" or "China doll." She was most definitely neither.
"Insightful 5-part 30 minute analysis of how the current U.S. war in Afghanistan bears an eerie resemblance to Alexander the Great's invasion of Afghanistan in 300B.C.. Of note is the fact that Alexander invaded 300 years before the birth of Christ and 900 years before the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, so there were no Christian vs. Muslim issues. Ends with some reasonable suggestions on how we might achieve some valuable objectives if we would pay more attention to the Afghans' culture." (via Ishabaka)
After Barreling Ahead in Recession, China Finally Slows: "But with the country having finished building much of its infrastructure, it is having a harder time finding further projects that can pass cost-benefit analyses."
Thanks for reading--
charles
