Cult Figures

Cult Figures
•​The long-term history of inflation adjusted returns from stocks shows a persistent but recently fading 6.6% real return since 1912.

•The legitimate question that market analysts, government forecasters and pension consultants should answer is how that return can be duplicated in the future.

•Unfair though it may be, an investor should continue to expect an attempted inflationary solution in almost all developed economies over the next few years and even decades.

The Dark Side of Dubai - a defining article..

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.



But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

The Hamster Wheel -Credits to Timothy Lee

Image via Wikipedia

If you talk to business travelers above a certain age, they’ll tell you about the good old days of airline travel. Airports used to be less crowded, the food was better, the service was more attentive, and the stewardesses were more attractive. This was because price controls kept fares high, and airlines competed for passengers with generous perks. The situation was great for the small minority of rich people and business travelers who could afford it because they didn’t have to deal with the hoi polloi clogging up the airports. But it sucked for everyone else, for whom an airplane flight was a rare luxury.

Why dictators and democracies are failing at the same time: Thomas Friedman

Kishore Mahbubani, a retired Singaporean diplomat, published a provocative essay in The Financial Times on Monday that began like this: 

``Dictators are falling. Democracies are failing. A curious coincidence? Or is it, perhaps, a sign that something fundamental has changed in the grain of human history. I believe so. How do dictators survive? They tell lies. Muammar Gaddafi was one of the biggest liars of all time. He claimed that his people loved him. He also controlled the flow of information to his people to prevent any alternative narrative taking hold. Then the simple cellphone enabled people to connect. The truth spread widely to drown out all the lies that the colonel broadcast over the airwaves. Libya. We can vote out our liars, unlike certain Arab, and Asian countries. Still, Mahbubani's comparison warrants some reflection this week, which coincides with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the president's jobs speech. It is a great week for truth-telling. 

Can you remember the last time you felt a national leader looked us in the eye and told us there is no easy solution to our major problems, that we've gotten into this mess by being self-indulgent or ideologically fixated over two decades and that now we need to spend the next five years rolling up our sleeves, possibly accepting a lower living standard and making up for our excesses? 

For me, this is the most important thing to say both on the anniversary of 9/11 and on the eve of President Barack Obama's jobs speech. After all, they are intertwined. Why has this been a lost decade? An answer can be found in one simple comparison: how Dwight Eisenhower and his successors used the cold war and how George W. Bush used 9/11. America had to face down the Russians in the Cold War.

Pictures of Ghost Chinese towns

There's been a lot written about ghost towns in China.



Now, state-owned China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC) has built a town in Angola. And it's fairly empty.

Just outside Angola's capital city of Luanda is Nova Cidade de Kilamba a residential development of 750 eight-story apartment buildings, a dozen schools, and more than 100 retail units, reports the BBC's Louise Redvers.

The $3.5 billion development covers 12,355 acres and was built to house about 500,000 people, and this is one of "several satellite cities being constructed by Chinese firms around Angola," writes Redvers.

The 10 Best-Selling Products Of All Time

Besides selling in droves, many of the products on this list changed American culture. While each product is in a different industry — from smartphones, to video game consoles and music albums — there are clear similarities among the leaders.

All the products that made the list were innovative in their respective categories when released. Before Star Wars, people never camped out in front of the theater to see the midnight debut. Harry Potter was the first major fantasy book series particularly geared toward tween readers.