Musk on the Cover of Time. Maybe not great news for him.
Being on the cover of a magazine, or getting other such praise, often forecasts a fall in status and stock price. A friend noted: “A study by Gregory Marks and Brent Donnelly then of Citigroup looked at the covers of The Economist from 1998 and 2016. They picked 44 covers that made either an optimistic or pessimistic point on a company or asset class. They found that these were contrarian indicators in about 70% of cases – meaning that if you took the opposite stance of the cover, you made money 70% of the time (so if the cover said “the end of X” and you bought X you made money the majority of the time).”
An example is when Time named Jeff Bezos of Amazon Person of the Year. The stock fell 95% in the 22 months after the magazine was published. He is still super-rich.
Shocking headline of the week
“House prices go into reverse as market cools.” The Daily Telegraph.
Is the rich world’s housing boom over at last? The reason is the prospect of rising mortgage rates as some homeowners try to sell at the top .The Bank of England was the first to raise rates this week after the US Federal Reserve said it would raise three times in 2022.
Even a big drop won’t make one of these houses in Markham Square in Chelsea that much more affordable. The recent asking price was a £6.95-million, (US$9.2-million, C$11.9-million. When a friend lent me her house in Markham Street— also in Chelsea— in the summer of 1970 she was selling it for £25,000. Ah, the world of missed opportunities.
Great Bubbles of the Past
This month is the 300th anniversary of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, one of the great stock scams in history. The South Sea Company was created to deal in slaves. It would be almost 100 years before Britain outlawed the slave trade.
The company wasn't profitable but it was promoted and investors piled in.
One of the those investors was the great mathematician, Sir Issac Newton.
Newton was an old man when he made and lost a fortune on South Sea shares.
The laws of investment gravity worked against him in his South Sea shares.
Newton’s losses would have been in the millions of pounds. However, the great British economist, Maynard Keynes, said Newton was a shrewd investor overall— as was Keynes— and died a rich man, worth £30,000 the equivalent of £30-million today.
More on Sir Issac Newton's finances
Cost of Opening a Business
Britain is one of the cheapest places in the world to open a business: $17, with all the numbers below being converted to US$. Chile is a dollar cheaper at $16. A shocker is Italy: $4,914.85 to open a business, though as someone who has spent a lot of time in Italy it isn’t that surprising. Just the kind of rules that govern drug stores — they have a monopoly on ridiculous things like buying aspirin— tell you there are too many rules.
Then there is how long it takes to open a business. Several years ago I interviewed the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. He said that at the time it took two years to open a business in Egypt. In Toronto, where I live part of the time, you take a subway downtown, line up for 20 minutes behind a guy who wants to open a hair salon, and pay C$50 to register a business. You then take the piece of paper the government gives you, go to a bank and open a commercial account. Incorporating takes a bit longer and usually needs a lawyer.
Rich Dead Celebrities
Forbes loves rich lists. This year Michael Jackson — $75-million in 2021 earnings— was knocked off number one, where he has been almost every year since he was killed in 2009. He’s number three. The list measures from October 2020 to October 2021.
Roald Dahl, the British/Norwegian writer, made number one with earnings of $510-million. It’s his first time on the list since he died in 1990.
Dahl’s heirs struck it rich when Netflix bought his literary output, which includes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl was a Battle of Britain fighter pilot and a spy.
Other famous, rich, dead people include the usual, Elvis and John Lennon, also Dr. Seuss and Charles Schulz, the Peanuts cartoonist. Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962, usually makes the top dead earners, but not this year.
Wikipedia's list of Forbes’ rich dead celebs
Amazing Internet speed
This week a company called Cogeco took over from my old provider. The internet speed is 10 times faster than my speed in Toronto. And this is in the sticks, 100 kilometres from Montreal. No wonder people are moving here to work.
Winter late in coming in Knowlton, Quebec
On Thursday of this past week it was 16C, which is 61 F. All the snow had melted and it started again on Saturday afternoon at -2C. This field could be under a foot of snow this time of year and the pond covered in thick ice. The deer are well fed and fat.
Twenty-four hours later.
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Essay of the Week
This is an obit I wrote in early 2005. It is unusual in a number of ways. The subject had an amazing war story and I knew him; I almost never know the people I write about. Father Bob MacDougall was my teacher in the second year of high school at Loyola High School in Montreal.
Shot down over the North Sea, he made a pact with God, accepted the German surrender in Denmark and then came home to take his vows and work among hardened criminals. Later, he starred on 100 Huntley Street as an evangelical priest
No one wants to be the last man killed in a war.
Hitler had just four days to live when Bob MacDougall found himself floating in the dark in the North Sea. Flying Officer MacDougall had about another 60 years to live, most of them as a Jesuit priest, but all he knew then was that the Second World War was almost over and his situation was desperate.
Minutes before, he had been the tail gunner in a Halifax bomber, carrying war material to the resistance in Denmark. The crew was with 644 Squadron and had left their base in Dorset in England at 10 p.m. on April 26, 1945. To remain undetected by German radar, the plane flew between 50 and 100 feet above the water. "When we hit the west coast of Jutland, we had to climb," remembered Father MacDougall in an interview in 1988.
A short while after they made their drop, they were hit by fire from the ground. According to Sandy Barr, a pilot who now runs the Squadron's historical website, their pilot ditched the plane just off the coast. All six crew members -- one Canadian, three New Zealanders and two Brits -- made it out alive.
The frigid water numbed his legs. Later in life, vascular problems would confine him to a wheelchair. Father MacDougall wasn't particularly religious then, but as he struggled in the water, he formulated a pact. Years later, he told his brother Ian that he had made a promise to God. "He said, 'Save me from this and I'll spend my life doing good.' He was saved, and he kept his promise," said Ian MacDougall.
After a spell in the water, the crew was picked up by Danish fishermen. As soon as the crew members landed, they left the fishermen, since the Germans shot anyone who helped a downed airman. Father MacDougall wandered for a day or so, following instructions from the fishermen to look for a church steeple, since there he might find a sympathetic minister.
"I came to a brook and crossed over, but failed to see a German sentry on the other side. He raised his gun and brought me to a halt," recounted Father MacDougall. He and at least one other crew member were arrested and put in a prisoner of war camp. Their internment didn't last long. On May 7, 1945, far away at a schoolhouse in the French city of Rheims, senior representatives of Hitler's defeated forces signed a ceasefire and the war in Europe was over.
In Denmark, the Germans wanted to surrender, but not to the Russians, who were fast approaching from the East and had already occupied an offshore island. The German command resolved to surrender to a British or American officer, preferably a general or even a colonel. They scoured their prisoner of war camps and all they could come up with was a 21-year-old Canadian flying officer who only days before had been swimming about in the North Sea. His officer rank was the second-lowest in the RCAF, equal to a lieutenant in the army.
And that is how Bob MacDougall came to accept the surrender of the German garrison in Denmark. He was carried through the streets of Vejle, the town nearest his PoW camp, and hailed as a liberator. At that moment, no one was more surprised than he. A month later, the picture of the celebration found its way back home and the face and name of "F/O Robert MacDougall of 107 Henry St., Halifax," was splashed across the front page of the Halifax Chronicle.
Father MacDougall grew up in Nova Scotia but was born in Saskatchewan, where his father worked as a bank manager. The family moved to Halifax when he was a tot. Ralph MacDougall was a businessmen, and although not rich, he was successful enough to raise a brood of children and send them all to university. He was a Presbyterian but his wife May Webb was a Roman Catholic, so young Bob went to St. Thomas Aquinas elementary school and St. Patrick's high school.
His mother died when he was quite young and his father married Gertrude Macneil, also a Catholic. Together, they raised his six children, as well as two more the couple would have together.
Bob MacDougall joined the RCAF from high school. He was the third member of his family to join, and all three went overseas -- his brother Bill as a soldier in the army and his sister Betty as an army nurse. Like everyone who joined the air force, he hoped to be a pilot. Instead, he became a tail gunner, the most vulnerable crew position on a Second World War bomber.
On his return to England from Denmark, he visited his sister at the hospital where she worked. In their happiness, a rather raucous party developed during which "he wrecked my bicycle," she recalled.
When he reached Halifax, Bob MacDougall decided to attend St. Mary's University, where he was active in organizing the hockey team and also played football. Mindful of his promise to God, he considered becoming a journalist and instead opted for the priesthood. In 1950, he joined the Jesuits, the largest of all Roman Catholic religious orders. Many of his friends bet he wouldn't last.
"It was tough for a war veteran who had seen the world to settle into that routine," said Elmer MacGillivray, who attended the Jesuit Novitiate with Father MacDougall. "He was older than everyone else and the rules were tough for him."
Life was lived in silence, from rising at 5:30 a.m. to chapel at 5:55 a.m., followed by prayer from 6 to 7 a.m., a mass, and then breakfast 30 minutes later. "You could ask for sugar, but otherwise it was total silence," said Mr. MacGillivray, who later gave up the priesthood.
Because of his age and experience, Bob MacDougall was ordained after 11 years instead of the usual 13. One of his first assignments was Loyola High School in Montreal. There he coached sports teams and taught several subjects, including Latin.
In one session, the boys learned to conjugate scio, the verb to know. In Latin, the words "I know," "you know," "he knows" are scio, scis, scit, with the "c" pronounced as an "h." His 14-year-old pupils fell about laughing at the sound of scit. To help them get over it, Father MacDougall had them conjugate the verb aloud 30 times. The giggles soon disappeared.
Father MacDougall had a varied life. He taught in schools, worked in parishes, was the priest at a veterans hospital and even worked as a missionary in South America. For several years, he served as the chaplain at Stoney Mountain Penitentiary near Winnipeg. There, he started a choir and convinced parishes in the area that his singing prisoners posed no danger. One of those he convinced was Elmer MacGillivray, who was then the parish priest at St. Ignatius of Winnipeg.
"On one trip, he stopped and he lost one prisoner when he escaped for a while. He was embarrassed about that," said Mr. MacGillivray who now lives in Edmonton.
Working at the maximum-security jail was tough and Father MacDougall sometimes found it depressing to deal with hardened criminals. Often dismissed by cynical and intractable convicts as just another man in a dog collar to offer them empty promises and meaningless rituals, Father MacDougall came to believe he was a failure and that the promise he made on that black, North Sea night had come to nothing. He was convinced he was a catastrophe as a prison priest and had not done good or helped any in his congregation. The truth, of course, was quite different. Until he learned otherwise, he grappled with more immediate demons at Stoney Mountain and found himself drinking too much. In the end, Father MacDougall succeeded in conquering both depression and alcohol.
Perhaps the most astounding part of Father MacDougall's religious life was his born-again status as a Christian evangelist. That occurred while working in a parish north of San Diego, California. Afterward, he remained a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit but embraced the scripture, the words of the Bible, and became the only Roman Catholic priest to preach on 100 Huntley Street, the Toronto-based evangelical Christian television channel.
He appeared on hundreds of television shows and started his own Food for Life program. Many conventional Catholics found his evangelism shocking and lodged complaints, but he persisted. "There are Catholic evangelicals, and he served them," said Rev. Jacques Monet, the archivist at Jesuit headquarters in Toronto.
Father MacDougall was unapologetic about his evangelism. "I know God wanted me to be an evangelist to the world -- my Roman Catholic world," he said. A natural performer, he appeared on television and at prayer meetings, sometimes in his Roman collar, other times in an open-necked shirt.
Even his brothers and sisters, all of them religious Catholics, were sometimes startled at what their brother was up to. For all that, they are intensely proud of the homeless mission he set up in Toronto.
"I think one of the highlights of his life was setting up the Good Shepherd Refuge on Queen Street East near Parliament [in Toronto] He wanted to feed the street people, and he worked at gathering food from local restaurants to feed them" said his brother Ian. "He started it in the mid 1970s and it's still open."
He made good on that promise.
Robert Leonard MacDougall was born in Saskatoon, Sask., on Feb. 27, 1924. He died on Dec. 26, 2004. He was 80.