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Carnival of Personal Finance

Carnival of Real Estate

Sometimes, we'd all be happier if life imitated Scrappleface more often.

Putin eyes full merger with Belarus

One way to stay in power. New political entity, new constitution, no more term limits.

I think I've learned how to embed videos without using bandwidth that I'm paying for.

I've seen this linked to all over the place the last few days:

Here's one of the Not-So-Secrets of the Universe that most people just won't stop and think about:

There's an awful lot of people out there with an awful lot of passive wealth. Often it's inherited. It may also be from a windfall of some sort. The people who have it often suffer from at least two of the following three failings: laziness, excessive greed, and stupidity. They keep hearing about what wonderful returns this or that hot investment paid this last year. Because of this, they spend a lot of time chasing last year's hot investment, buying in when markets are already overheated, and when the inevitable letdown comes, they don't come out very well, and often end up eating a huge loss.

These last few years, housing was the "It" investment. Before that, internet companies. Before that, biotech. Before that...

The thing that all of these investments have in common is that they really are terrific investments, played properly. But if you overplay them expecting a fast payoff, remember the old saying about how "If you can't point to the sucker in the group, it's you."

There is another thing these have in common, by the way. When the performance chasing money exits, there's always an opportunity. That's real estate now.

Quite a while ago, I wrote an article Passive Asset Allocation, which is pretty instructive in how not to be one of the performance chasers.

Hugo Chávez tried to overturn the results of Venezuela's recent vote but was rebuffed by the military

But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d'état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded--but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world

I am not surprised. Nobody should be surprised at his antics. This is what I wrote December 3. The man has a history of electoral fraud worse than anything Chicago has ever been accused of. If the real tally was as close as Reagan vs. Mondale in 1984, I'd be amazed.

HT: Captain's Quarters