<At some awful moment of realization and clarity of new conviction, the paradigm shift will cause perceive wealth to head for hell, and real wealth to ascend to heaven?
Next news item. I see that the Japanese Yen is strengthening (or at least not softening). Incredible, Maurice, no? >
Jay, major paradigm shift happens, but real wealth is not gold, CDMA, land or buildings. Real wealth is the state of mind of the possessors of wealth. Perceived but unreal wealth [for example the irrational exuberance of Amazon.com and the even more irrational AnyIPO.com] heads for hell. But even with back to the wall, raptors around and wounds and darkness, the wealth of the ethical, energetic, creative, co-operative, intelligent and determined is not to be bet against too casually because their wealth is their state of mind.
So, no, it is not incredible that the Japanese Yen is not softening, the Nikkei has zoomed up and the great financial calamity of 2001 has not befallen the Japanese creditors and banks or currency holders.
A little boy and his Dad, with a few nausages and that natural wealth residing inside his head can escape a dirt floor chicken run, murderous ideologues, poverty and imprisonment to live on Money Rock, with reflexology, love, fun and happiness.
One of our daughters has a relationship [I'm not sure how to describe relationships in the ill-defined modern parlance] with a young man who's father grew up in China and several decades ago swam for freedom to Hong Kong, only to be caught and returned to Mao's world. His persistence eventually paid after 3 or 4 attempts. He didn't swim with rolls of gold coins [they are not buoyancy aids].
He made it to Kiwiland, married a Chinese/New Zealand lady who it turns out was a pupil at the same high school as my wife and I attended and at the same time. In a strange coincidence, our daughter's boyfriend was in a class at primary school [age 6] at a school which our oldest daughter attended for only two weeks when we visited Auckland when my Chinese-born mother [product of a British engineer who ran Standard Oil's Shangahai and Dalian enterprise and his NZ wife when they were living in China for a dozen years - I may have misled you on my ancestry] was dying from cancer. We had a class photo of our daughter from those two weeks [they happened to take the class photo at that time] and there they were, one right behind the other!
Anyway, our freedom-swimmer had 4 children and worked hard and enjoyed a successful small-business NZ life, bringing his aged parents eventually to NZ too. Sadly, he died in a head-on collision a couple of years ago. I like his children [and wife].
On my 2 year old French grandmother's side, their escape from the invading Prussians in Alsace and then from the seige of Paris where Arche de la Defense now stands supreme was a similar story. Her mother arrived in NZ with three young daughters and no husband to a life of poverty [in the old sense, not the western world's idea of poverty today where the colour tv is only a 17 inch model and the car is over 7 years old].
The French grandmother married a young man who arrived from London with his two sisters in their teens, with no parents, both of whom had died around age 40 from one of the prolific diseases of the time.
People are remarkably resilient, persistent and the wellsprings of wealth are not the assets handed down.
Japan was not a wealthy place after Hiroshima was destroyed and Japan occupied by NZ and other soldiers. In a few decades, they became the wealthiest country, with no natural resources such as Saudi oil fields, South African gold, USA great plains of crops. They learned, worked, saved, invested and spent their way to prosperity on an island with not much more in the way of natural resources than Freedom Rock [aka Money Rock].
Singapore with zero assets had similar wealth in 1950. Singapore today is rich!
Okay, I forget where the story was going when I started, so I'll stop! A quick review and I see my point was that it is not incredible that the Yen is okay and the Nikkei is up and Japan has not collapsed. I got tangled up with the complex weavings of the world and the mayhem which engulfs us when people get nasty.
It does not surprise me that Argentina has collapsed. It will not surprise me if there is mass mayhem in the Moslem world which bases their values on medieval superstition, alpha male testosterone-fueled chimpoid dominance hierarchies and violence.
Mqurice |
