March 2016 / Imagine a scenario where tenant owners in a Co-Op pay their monthly maintenance and gym membership fees a year in advance. Hard to believe but we appear to be going down that track. This past January the Japanese central bank unilaterally started charging commercial banks for holding deposits with it. The Bank of Japan was following a precedent already set by banks in Europe...
February 2016 / A little commented-upon fact of the recent Powerball lottery was that the winning tickets were sold in the sunbelt states of California, Florida and Tennessee. As New Yorkers we like to believe that our town is the center of the universe but demographic shifts are signaling otherwise. The sunbelt states not only won the lottery largess but continue to win transplants from our...
January 2016 / Writing in “The Irony of American History”, the political philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr speculated that religious illusions might spark terrible fanaticism, and the Paris attacks have proved him right. Niebuhr’s dark vision has come to pass. The religious fundamentalism that fueled the Paris attacks was based on religious nationalism. The end of the first Cold War...
November-December 2015 / In this essay we begin with a critique of Mr. Jack Ma, China’s answer to our Steve Jobs. Mr. Ma founded e-commerce behemoth, Alibaba, which was taken public in the largest IPO ever on the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Ma has continually asserted that he created Alibaba for the public good, which translates to about 600 million Chinese Internet users. Economists point...
October 2015 / As we enter the 2015-2016 heating season, we first need to look back at some recent metrics to help formulate a buying strategy for going forward. North Sea Brent crude oil prices averaged around $46 per barrel in August, 2015, which was a $9 per barrel decrease from July, 2015. This was actually the third consecutive monthly decrease in prices and the trend mirrors concerns about...
Best-selling financial author, Wall Street investment banker, social commentator, award-winning poet, energy consultant, off-Broadway producer, and community organizer in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Ron Spurga is the ultimate Renaissance Man.