by roscoe00 | Dec 30, 2017 | Current Events
It doesn’t matter if you voted for Clinton or voted for Trump. The political world as we know it has now changed and not necessarily for the better. What used to be a relatively docile political climate under a very restrained President Obama, is now the wild wild west. What used to be cordial relations between siblings, parents, relatives and friends is now an ongoing war of political opposition. No longer can conservatives rationally talk to liberals. No longer can parents talk to their college bound children. To say this is a divided country is an understatement.
To blame it all on Trump is irrational but it is to be fully expected given the hotly inflamed election and the blustery stream-of-thought persona that Trump projects. What has evolved, or rather devolved, is the integrity of any number of institutions, including journalistic media, government bureaucracies and Congress. Before I unsubcribed to the New York Times Facebook page I was inundated with anti-Trump opinions, one after another ad-nauseum… it was all that was available from this revered publication – and this was before the election. This rag had the audacity to publish unabashed volumes of propaganda against this candidate even before the primaries started. It was a disgrace. Even the judicial system has been infected with unprecedented one-sided legal overreaching.
What has been completely and utterly exposed is diametrically opposed ideologies that flourish in this country. Red and Blue states might as well be red and blue planets. You can start with California which is its own commune based country and then look at big cities on the East Coast from Washington to Boston. Nearly everything in between, in the middle of the country, is in a different world. As if the laws didn’t matter, sanctuary cities exist to roll out the welcome mat for everybody coming from outside the country. As if Presidential authority is irrelevant, judges conspire to block every decision. The political climate is nothing short of bizarre. Everyone is choosing sides.
Colleges now wave the banner of far left liberal thought to such an extent that freedom of speech is in jeopardy. Conservative speakers now routinely are in danger of their lives if they attempt to use the podium at any number of U.S. colleges. Not to mention the ongoing demonstrations violence and protests at those institutions. This is all to say absolutely nothing about Russian Collusion, Uranium One, Clinton Emails, sexual harassment. What we are witnessing is such a divergence of party lines that one would think it is prelude to the dissolution of the U.S. as we know it. I mean how can a country exist if we cannot reach a consensus on anything? Democrats and Republicans have ceased all interaction. How can that work?
This phenomenon seems to have happened all in a year or two. But the old line Media didn’t need to move much to the left to become a political operative for the democratic party. Perhaps Trump made this easy by acting the way he does. However this isn’t all about Trump’s personality, this is about exposing the new norm of attack politics – the strategy of destroying your opponents not just defeating them. Trump just happens to be suited to attack politics because he can be counted on to counterpunch at all times. The door is now open to full scale attacks across the political spectrum both liberal and conservative. And anyone who wishes to hate our President publicly can do so with cheerleaders lined up. There is an implied justification for doing so, because its a pile-on and anyone can join. It seems to be in vogue. The strategy isn’t new, just watch the parade of Hollywood elites and entertainment moguls crawls out of the woodwork every time a conservative President is elected.
So whatever the President’s capabilities are, his achievements, his policies, anything to do with the actual job at hand, they were from even before the election fully and willfully ignored. This is the way the media now works. There is indeed pretty much fake news across the board. However fake news is not really the problem. The problem with the media is a selective reporting driven by deaf, dumb and blind bias. They have simply ignored reporting most any news that has a positive spin towards Trump.
And fascinatingly enough Trump pretty much embraces it. They have never seen anything like it. Trump simply doesn’t care the way they would like him to care. Sure he seems to reject and turn on anybody with a bad opinion, but he keeps right on chugging. The part that is astonishing is that he is getting things done, and people don’t want to like it. He is not only keeping his campaign promises, but is showing some leadership and actually making some positive and well thought out decisions. There is progress. There is a stock market that is going straight up. There’s an economy that is getting stronger. There are positive things happening that the media would loathe to admit.
So when the polls show 35% approval rating you almost need to treat it as a joke. Just look at the CNN website to see what “fair reporting” looks like. The media bias has driven the public opinion as much as humanly possible and they know it. It all shows up in the polls. It is nearly impossible to hear anything positive through the noise. There is no President in the history of this country who has had anywhere near the amount of negative press as Trump and as a result the media is now justifiably and universally distrusted.
But it’s ok, we needed to see all this. We needed this to be exposed. We need our children to learn from this. One need only to look at Russia and China to see the other side. Where such discourse and opposition are not permitted. Next time a college mob threatens bodily harm and suppresses the opinions of an invited speaker, think of the concept of free speech. Remember how Hollywood stars all wanted to leave the country when Trump was elected? Did they all leave for Russia? At least there they wouldn’t need to hear anyone’s opinion but those of Vladimir Putin.
by roscoe00 | Dec 26, 2017 | Wealth
As the new year blasts into reality for 2018, I’m going to try and write a good deal more in blog posts for the coming year having to do with many things including genealogy, the stock market, leveraged buyouts and politics. Now why leveraged buyouts? Well leverage buyouts were the lifeblood of the 1980s and probably still are today. However leverage buyouts simply do not have the all those years ago. Although you can go buy a company and hold it until you die, that’s not the way the world is going anymore. Technology has taken over and all the sudden you have websites like this. This is kind of the business model of the future.
I happen to be caught in the middle. I am not exactly a techie, but I am not exactly an old school leveraged buyout guy either. Rather a little bit of both. I used to love the idea of being a leveraged buyout guy. I would listen to Henry Kravis and hope one day that he would impart his expertise on me and I would go on to make big deals. In fact, I did do some deals, but they just were not that big. I loved the idea analyzing companies just like I did when I was a banker. But it sort of got old and then the Internet Technology showed up and that was and the newest shiny object. A course the Internet was no shiny object it was a shiny galaxy. Here I sit more interested in the Internet down I never could be and leverage buyouts. However I still teach how to do leveraged buyouts because quite frankly not everybody is interested or even cut out for doing online businesses. There’s nothing wrong with bricks and mortar businesses as long as they stay in business.
Basically you can make your big money one of two ways. You can own a bricks and mortar company or you can own an online company. I find this a fascinating juxtaposition of collections of business models. I can attest to working both. So, what are the differences? Well we can go into a lot of different points. The old school bricks and mortar company is a very static world. It breaks down into a number of different categories which are universes unto themselves. For example, manufacturing companies are completely different than retail stores. Distribution companies are completely different than service companies. Yet I had just about covered in those previous two lines about every type of company in the bricks and mortar world. The online world is the wild west, the new breed, the new economy, the high tech world. This world is filled with colorful stories of the pioneers, Jobs, Gates, Case, AOL, Microsoft, Apple.
You have Gates at one end and Buffett on the other? Gates symbolic of technology, Buffett the old school value investor. Which one do you follow? The new or the old? If you are just starting out you must be torn, I know I am, and I am not even starting out.
The Manufacturing Model
Of course, if you have been keeping up with current events you might think that manufacturing companies are a thing of the past. You might believe that China owns all the manufacturing of the world. While this has become a reality in the last few decades, it certainly wasn’t always the case. Indeed, the highest quality products still come from the United States. Until recently, China was the new Japan. Following the Second World War, Japan became a symbol of cheap manufacturing. They essentially had to rebuild their infrastructure, and with it came brand new manufacturing facilities.
And then came China. China still has the stigma of low quality manufacturing, but it also has a much higher rate of technological advance as well as pay much more vibrant growth curve from manufacturing. Starting a manufacturing company still takes some substantial amount of capital to build the required manufacturing equipment. However, my business was never starting companies in the old world. My business was buying them, and manufacturing companies provided an excellent leveraged buyout structure because of the value of the equipment and assets are retained in the companies.
These days the world at large has not embraced the idea of starting up manufacturing companies. It costs too much money and too much time. It is now much easier to buy goods from the manufacturers in China and sell them right here in the United States. This utilizes an element of arbitrage to sell cheap foreign goods using cheap labor to wealthy Americans at heavily marked up prices. This is a great business model, especially if you are utilizing the potent marketing aspects of the Internet. Or perhaps you’re using the potent aspects of such selling platforms as Amazon and eBay. To the outsider looking at Amazon, or Home Depot, or target, or Walmart, it seems we are flooded with so many physical goods that it is a wonder anyone buys anything at all anymore.
I have an eBay account through my business. If it sells the most obscure hardware component’s imaginable. I’m amazed that sells anything at all, but it does. So even though we are flooded with so many physical goods, it doesn’t matter, there’s somebody out there to buy them. It might just be a question of where they’re located, and perhaps having the right price point.
So, what used to be a manufacturing model in the United States is now a distribution model, or perhaps a wholesaling model, or perhaps a OEM model. The private labeling craze is alive and well. By product from China, put your name on the product, and sell it as your own. This allows you to market the price and differentiate your brand from others in the same space.
These days there still is a place for manufacturing, but if you are not buying from China then you better have a good business plan to get off the ground in the United States. The wages are high and so are the rest of the costs. But there is one advantage, that is that you don’t have to ship your U.S. made products from the other side of the world. This reduces a substantial amount of costs. But if you have ever run a business you know that employees cost a great deal of money in the United States. It doesn’t even take a bunch of old corrupt unions to make it so. You have minimum wage, you have a competitive environment, highly skilled workers, and packages of benefits that make everybody cost six figures. So let’s presume for the moment that we must leave the manufacturing duties to those in the third world and move onto another business model.
The Distribution Model
So now have the distribution model. We have just seen how the manufacturing model has taken a back seat in the United States to China. What used to be a highly profitable proprietary business model is now relegated to obscurity. In contrast, the distribution model is now flourishing. The distribution model used to be typified by a very thinly capitalized, thinly margined, high volume food or dry goods distributor in an urban warehouse. Perhaps the business was distributing paper goods, hardware or many other commodities with tiny margins and the propensity to borrow heavily to support high inventory levels and not so fast turnover. Such companies still exist today, but you don’t care about them because they aren’t particularly exciting. They also don’t grow as fast as they used to grow unless they have embraced certain aspects of modern technology, namely an online presence.
So few of them have developed an online presence and that is quite surprising. Most of these old line companies still exist in the boroughs of New York, such as Bronx and Queens and low priced areas of the city where they have existed for generations in closely held family ownership, and often from immigrant backgrounds and surviving barely, long past their heyday.
However, today’s version of the flashy distribution business model is quite different. Now there are such things as online platforms which can make you a distributor overnight. There are third party warehouses that rent out space and manpower which can eliminate rent, overhead and even inventory levels. There are vendors that drop ship goods from anywhere in the world, reducing the carrying costs of your products. All the costs that used to burden the old style distributors can be reduced or eliminated in the new millennium business model.
All this has made the risky proposition of a distribution company into a high tech machine capable of generating high volumes and high margins. So what we have here is a dramatic shift in business models over the course of the decade or two. We now have a manufacturing environment which is pretty depressed and a distribution environment which is a budding entrepreneurial playground. Now it shouldn’t be too difficult to see that the likes of Amazon and EBAY are the face of the new distribution model. Funny that Amazon and eBay can’t manufacture anything, but they manage to grab the lion’s share of sales of everything. So the new breed of distributors, or perhaps wholesalers, or perhaps even retailers, are replacing most everything having to do with manufacturing. This model embraces efficiency rather than innovation. The innovation is taking place, not in the manufacturing sector, but in the software and systems area.
by roscoe00 | Dec 26, 2017 | Current Events
I never knew that criminal investigations were a political tool to shut opponents up. But it seems I have overlooked the obvious when it comes to the fate of many high profile politicians such as Rick Perry, John Rowland and Tom Delay who have had the weight of the entire legal system to contend with.
by roscoe00 | Dec 26, 2017 | Theron Ludlow Marsh
Loose Leaves was an invention of my father Theron “Curly” Marsh, who, once he retired, starting writing the Marsh family newsletter. It wasn’t just a newsletter it was a well researched set of documents that contained our genealogy, chronicled the family exploits and presented much folklore that went well beyond just our immediate family. Indeed there was news, information and background on the extended families that Dad accumulated through marriage. When all was said and done there might have been hundreds of people in various families that were connected to Loose Leaves in one way or another.
This was back in 1977 or so and he carried on with it for about 25 years of annual issues of fifty or more pages each, personally typed on an old typewriter with many pictures, cut and pasted, poems and writings of ancestors and other memorabilia. Dad died in 2007 and I had hoped to continue the the plan of issuing a new Loose Leaves every year as he did. Unfortunately life gets in the way and I published only one such issue – just after his passing – which dealt most with his life and youth and contained many pictures which have been handed down through they years.
While I could never hope to match the loving care he gave Loose Leaves over that many years, I have always wanted to continue the effort in one form or another. Enter the internet, computers, Facebook and websites. Dad had none of these modern tools with which to generate the volume pages that he did. His was an entirely manual effort and, when visiting him, I often found him in his home office with pages spread around, scraps of cut up paper, Elmer’s glue everywhere, extra photos and copies that would be thrown out. And off to one corner of the room there was a freshly purchases laptop computer, hooked up to Compuserve, which he never learned how to use. It was hunt and peck from A to Z.
So now that I have allowed a few years to pass, I have decided that the technology is sufficiently advanced to enable me to efficiently create voluminous Loose Leaves style content and share it with the world that has been patiently waiting. I do have much to share as there are so many archives to publish and anecdotes to retell. My only problem has been deciding where to draw the line. Dad never drew the line. If he married someone, he would write about the whole new family. If someone in the whole new family got married, he would write about them. Thus I would think the geometric progression of all this would propagate to infinity and everyone would already know about Loose Leaves. Well, I guess we will find out!!
Dad
[nggallery id=”1″]
by roscoe00 | Dec 26, 2017 | Wealth
I ate more candy than ever this year but I had an excuse. The stock market made an all time high on Halloween. Now most of the time this wouldn’t be particularly amazing since we have been experiencing this phenomenon for a couple of years now. However, it was Halloween and the amazing part is that it did this despite everyone on the planet saying there’s going to be a bear market. Ok not everyone on the planet but at least two thirds of Wall Street shouldn’t show up for work on Monday because they are stupid. If anyone is managing your money fire them and do it yourself. Trust me throwing darts at the S&P 500 is genius stock picking compared to the stock market advice out there now. The only person you can believe is Warren Buffet, who would have you go into the SPY (the S&P 500 stock) and hibernate for ten years.
In a nutshell what happened is this: Earlier in October the market experience a massive downdraft in a very short period of time. The S&P going from about a high of 2000 and losing about 10% in a matter of a week or two. Now after the long bull run which we have had this should signal a protracted change in direction or at the very least a pause in the upward trend. Or should it? The ensuing snap back to the 2000 level was so violent that it blew out all the resistance levels and now appears to actually be bullish. Dow theorists and Fibonacci targets would have looked for a ceiling somewhere in the early 1900, then resuming the downward trend to take out the 1820 low and make its way further down. However, what has actually happened is amazing. The markets have essentially recovered 100% of their recent losses and the downward trend has been aborted, at least for now.
So this Halloween was quite historical from the perspective that…. this never happens. Enjoy the bull while it is still charging.
by roscoe00 | Dec 26, 2017 | Current Events
What is black and white and red all over? A joke told to me fifty so years ago by an 8 year old. Sad as it might be, racial riots have a consistent history that overshadows everything else that is good about ethnic culture. Even the children are affected. The riots in Baltimore indicate that we still have a problem. It is the latest venue for what appears to be a racially motivated arrest and subsequent death of an African-American from a high crime area in Baltimore, which then proceeded to ignite an anti-cop protest and riot. Back in the day this type of oppression was called “police brutality” a mantra that was chanted by, among others, white upper class hippies when they were being arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and college students across the country after the 1970 Kent State shootings. Even then the Kent State incident was massively reported with graphic and inflammatory photographs of the victims.
But wait, what are we talking about here a racial riot or police misconduct? Well it seems this is a little bit of both. This is a racial riot by a people who believe that the police in Baltimore, or everywhere for that matter, are targeting the African-American race. However, this was also an arrest by six officers, three of whom were black. So how then is this a racial issue? If not, it must then be a reaction against police conduct in general, which would make it fair game for all races. Meaning everyone should be rioting. But everyone, thank God, isn’t rioting so this event isn’t quite as simple as your typical white on black lynching by the police bullies.
No, this event needed some swift action to defuse the racial tension, and some political spin to appear fair to the general population. Thus we have a stack of very serious charges leveled at officers of both races, the most serious against the African-American van driver, who one might have thought must have dragged the victim through the streets by a rope.
According to CNN prosecutors tend to give the officers the benefit of the doubt. Not here. This indictment happened so fast there was no question or mitigating circumstances – the prosecution made it clear, this was cold blooded murder. Why was it prosecuted so fast? Well there must be a no-brainer in there somewhere. That no-brainer is probably the “probable cause” for arrest. There wasn’t any. The guy was arrested because he ran. I really don’t know if it is illegal to run from a cop while not committing a crime but I am pretty sure if they tell you to stop you better stop.
In Fred’s case having a criminal record may give you enough cause to run away from cops for no reason. And I think I can say that sometimes just being black may give you enough reason to assume you are being targeted. But all the reports seem to indicate his only apparent crime was making eye contact with the officers. Of course when you run, even for no reason, it’s an open invitation for police to chase you and throw you in the van. However my issue isn’t with Freddie, it isn’t with the officers, it isn’t even with the “thugs” who think they can take the city apart when the actions of a very few people bother them.
My issue is with the prosecution, a fraternal order of its own ilk that has too much power, and the laws themselves. For one thing consider that the US incarcerates more people (2.0 Million at the moment) per capita than anywhere in the world, by a longshot. Then look at the six police officers which each have a handful charges slapped on them (the driver committed murder?) in very short order and clearly as a political maneuver to appease an angry mob of constituents. Moreover, this prosecutor apparently faces some conflict of interest allegations.
I’m going to be race blind and legally blind here for a second and ask a common sense question: how can six people kill this guy without some sort of premeditated conspiracy? I mean they weren’t beating him up. Did the guy on the bike kill him too? I mean the way the laws are written I’m sure they can charge them with whatever they want and perhaps public support would be on their side. But common sense isn’t. Prosecution misconduct these days is every bit as rampant as police misconduct but isn’t easy to discern and even harder to challenge. And mandatory sentencing guidelines now throw just about everyone in jail and the folks who should be most concerned with that are black males who comprise about 40% of the prison population. My most vehement objection to this mess is that rushing to judgement and overcharging the police in the face of an angry mob is more egregious than the police attempting to do their jobs and failing miserably. Did these police set out that day to kill someone? Was this seriously “depraved murder” and manslaughter? I’m all for charging them with the correct crimes. But when it comes to potentially giving them 50 year sentences for doing their job in the most dangerous sections of the country, I’m not on board with that.
Charles Barkley, at his level headed best, says “we need the cops” especially in black communities where is would otherwise be chaos. Who will be a cop after this? And if these guys aren’t convicted, what happens then, more riots?
by roscoe00 | Dec 26, 2017 | Theron Ludlow Marsh
Theron L. Marsh was born on December 9, 1911 in Madison, NJ to parents Spencer S. and Edith Marsh. He graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover MA in 1929 and from Princeton University in 1933. He joined the National Newark & Essex Banking company in 1934 where he spent his active years, retiring as Chairman of the Board of the bank’s holding company in 1976.
He was drafted into the army in 1941 and attend officer training school continuing as a teacher of tactics and gunnery. He married Virginia Drewry and they had 2 daughters, Judith Fay and Cynthia Lee, and in 1953 a son, Rockwell Drewry.
In 1945 Mr. Marsh left the army as a Major, returning to the bank as an assistant cashier. In the years that followed he rose through the ranks as the bank expanded by becoming a bank holding company – Midlantic Banks Inc. – so as to own banks in New Jersey and other states. Mr. Marsh was active in civic affairs having served as President of the Welfare Foundation of Newark, the Chamber of Commerce and the Robert Treat Council of the Boy Scouts of America. He also served as a director of Kidde Inc.
Mr. Marsh married Mavis Conklin in 1973 who brought 5 children into the Marsh family as step children. Mavis died in 1993, and Mr. Marsh married Marry Louise Vogel who added three more step children.
When Mr. Marsh retired he spent many years as a volunteer for the Morristown Memorial Hospital. He was also active in the alumni affairs at Princeton as president of the class of 1933 He was an avid sailor, having owned the Dickerson 41′ Angelica and golfer, belonging to Somerset Hills Country Club in New Jersey and Hole in the Wall Golf Club in Naples Florida.
He is survived by his three children and four grandchildren.
