Does money make the world go round? It sure helps make shopping at the mall more fun!
To some, money is the key to freedom. Others see it as the root of all evil.
We now live in a world where being a millionaire isn’t really such a big deal anymore. Now you if own a home or townhouse in some cities you are in the Millionaire Club!
Only problem is that if you cash in and sell your place, you still need to find a new place to call home. It’s hard to say what will pay better in these times, owning or renting, they are both expensive.
One of the interesting things about money -> It seems usually it’s the rich getting richer?
During this latest ongoing and most likely never-ending world financial crisis, there have never been more new millionaires and billionaires than ever before in our world history!
How does that work?
It may just boggle your mind to think that while the status of being a millionaire sounds cool and everything, it is nothing in comparison to the wealth of millions of new Billionaires!
Check out this time / money unit comparison between millions and billions measured in seconds of time:
IF YOU CONVERTED DOLLARS into SECONDS -> Here’s the Difference…
one Million seconds / divided by 60 seconds / by 6o minutes per hour / by hours and days = 11.57 Days (about 2 weeks)
one Billion seconds / divided by 60 seconds / by 6o minutes per hour / by hours and days = 31.7 Years
WHOA…. and WOW!
Obviously, managing one thousand millionaires is the equivalent of one billionaire.
It probably costs a million or more a year just to be a billionaire.
Just think about paying for all those planes, trains, automobiles and the yachts… Don’t forget the big boat matey 😉
It really is mainly unbelievable and hard to imagine the differences in magnitude between million and billionaire territory.
This billionaire thing is really kind of new… Wasn’t really happening until the end of the last millennium.
Back in the day before the Internet and the big bubble, most people managed to get by just being millionaires.
This days you hear about stock market valuations for companies like UBER at $54 Billion after only 5 to 10 years in business?
How does that work? Could it have anything to do with hype? Is there too much money out there when companies go blowfish?
So how is it possible that all these people and companies graduated so quickly from million to billion valuation status?
How easy is it?
Can anybody do it?
Here’s part of an answer… Value and money have a very symbiotic relationship. Think of stock markets going up and down. Think of people (and programatic computers) constantly, buying, selling and trading values over stocks and commodities.
Think about all the value won and lost in companies and stock markets that are under performing expectations and under delivering on the promises made to shareholders and new investors? All this is disruptive to the expectations everything goes up!
Here’s why America is lucky… or some kind of ‘better off’ for having crashed, burned and learned from all our previous mistakes.
North America is emerging as the number one opportunity zone for new wealth creation once again. History is repeating itself.
This time it’s different, and like Apple suggests; “Think Different” is the connection to the so called ‘new economy’ of the Internet.
As a for instance, people will pay real world dollars for products and services in the virtual world called Second Life.
Some of the inhabitants of this Second Life world can earn their entire income and spend their entire day in this virtual world.
Taking a trip to see your friends and family here in this Second Life / virtual world is when your going to need an Avatar.
Your Avatar is the appearance and and identity you project through your virtual image to others online. This is also worldwide.
As you can imagine buying a new suit, car or home and vacations in the real world, everyone in Second Life is paying to play.
So Play, Live and Work in a virtual world… part time or full time, all new choices and different thinking about lifestyles online.
It does appear evident that money makes the virtual world go round.
How much different is the real world if this virtual world kind of copied our real world model?
One could say the biggest difference is bits and bytes, or atoms. Everything in the virtual world is virtual… if the power goes out.
In the real world even after they pull the plug and you’ve crashed and burned you can recover, rebuild and rethink how to do it…
At the end of the day, everybody just wants to get back to shopping, watching movies and enjoying the food court of life, right!
If only it was so easy.
It has to do partly with pie, or pies and pie charts. Everybody wants a bigger piece, or more than one piece of the best pies. This takes us back to the value and perceived value perception we have about pies.
Did the other guy get a bigger piece?
Why didn’t I get asked about having more than one piece? Who is this other guy anyway? If I can’t have pie why should other have any pie?
This game of pie is not always as it appears, the pie looked good but was horrible, too sweet or Stale.
Many things of value have a ‘prime-time’ once they pass their ‘best before date’ they can devalue quickly.
People don’t always appreciate how this can effect the value of money in goods, stocks, markets, companies and countries.
Check out the following scenarios for more background thinking with these two examples of misleading hype about money.
Scenario One: This is when the stock market crashes (or loses value) and high value companies have low value. It’s like everything going on sale at 20 to 50% off. Supposedly the prices (values) will be going up again later? So the rich people like the chances and decide to go shopping and buy the best values they can find. As the economy picks up, this helps markets in general and most things kind of average out back to normal. This inflates the millions (or Billions?) of dollars in low value purchases to high value properties that can be held, sold or traded to acquire further gains in value. Some gets taken out as cash by investors.
This all sounds fair and normal, and maybe not the entire story as we regular or conspiracy folks might want to believe. One thing is that in North America we have produced a highly evolved class of corporate weasels who willingly to cheat the truth for cash.
It is the right thing that entrepreneurial people working to make the world a better place, or just smart people with lots of money should be rewarded, well rewarded for risking their time and money to get things happening. We can’t depend on government!
The problem gets back to the hype about money and those in governments who are highly paid to build expectations with people.
Scenario Two: Think about all the talk and hype in regard to BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) new and emerging nations with huge populations that we where led to believe at the start of the new millennium that would be the one’s controlling the new world economy. Not even close. Russia after blowing billions on the 2014 Olympics (which most Russians could not attend) is sucking wind in their oil-based military economy. China is learning about boom and bust. Brazil and India are a political mess.
In China, they took a page or DNA from some of the corporate / political weasels in America and spawned an even leaner and meaner capitalist dog for internal under cover operations in the toxic industrial wastelands once know as Chinese countryside.
The corruption in China is really the root of all evil in our present ‘market corrections’ of +10% in North America, and even more in other less stable countries and markets. Many politicians, bureaucrats and friends of friends have off-shore homes and have the cash in bank (out of China) and are all ready to bail if it gets too harsh.
Most likely half the Chinese real market is underground. This dark market was always a problem for China in trying to become legitimate. Now with their newish stock market crashing, the chinese people are pulling their money out and putting in a jar or some other dark place where they can see it! That’s the regular taxpayers plan. No real future, just toxic industrial wasteland?
As mentioned, the Chinese Government insiders and friends of friends and family are fine. After all, they made huge gains by setting the expectations they would do something good to deliver value to the Chinese taxpayers. Yet they only under delivered.
Many of these ex-patriots have immigrated to new lands with their illegitimate money exchanging at higher rates than in China. They are smugly cashing in and shopping for expensive homes, autos, high-end fashion, food and more. Needless to say this has all created new disruption in the markets which they bring their dirty money basically stolen from the average Chinese taxpayers.
As usual this is only a small group of elite Chinese losers. Most Chinese are good to great people with very high ideals and are totally driven by machinations of power, money and megalomania. This promise, or hype of there being honest politicians was was all new to the regular Chinese people. Really, did they get any honesty from working the old communist government model?
So now the whole world suffers. This lack of good leaders is expensive! And even worse, how much is it going to cost to fix this?
If it’s anything like Greece, we are in for the old Chinese curse of “living in interesting times.” Meaning no one will really know what’s going on anymore. With rhetoric and uber-hypemeisters pumping up the volumes of misdirection using ‘made you look’ distractions, it would be hard for anyone to keep their ‘eye on the game’ and figure out who’s who and what’s the new game score.
This crash, burn and relearn process will be hard on the average Chinese taxpayers and at the same time, maybe they/we all should have seen it coming. They had super fast growth (too fast!) it wasn’t built on solid ground, or well conceived and built. Too many corner got cut so the money could go into someone’s pocket. Too many farms and jobs where taken away in order to keep many a politician on track (for the achievement of their own personal goals) to create a whole new way of living for country people in China. Unfortunately, the new way of living was one sided and not really ever was going to be viable in China…
This finally brings us full circle and back around to this confusing idea that money is what makes our real world world go around.
It’s not about money. It’s about people.
Who are you?
Who do you want to be?
Are you corrupt?
Do you care anymore?
Yeah, we all want to enjoy shopping at the mall…
It would all be just so much better if we could just find some leaders to get us where ever it is we need to go.
We desperately need better people in leadership regardless which of which country who can honestly make our pie bigger!
Who are you when it comes to money?
Check out our Seven Spenditos with some profiles of how the average home-birdy spends their money!
WHICH ONE OF THE SEVEN SPENDITOS IS YOU?
Are you a Splurger, Gate Crasher, Money Maverick, Purger, Moocher, Cherry Picker or a Money Monk?
Mix and match, or share and compare with your friends 🙂
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