Live Well Without Working

How can this be ? One would expect to work hard in order to live well. Woah, you don’t know the inside story. There is another way. Some people think its unpalatable, but once you get used to it its great. And it is not something brutally criminal. It is just – lets say – imaginative, kind of resourceful. Legal, most of the time.
You can get rich from other peoples’ money or – more generally – at the expense of the rest of the world. Some call it ‘creating wealth’. Sounds nicer. Here are a few examples:

1 - Remember the dotcom bubble ? The entrepreneur invents those grandiose gadgets, with loads of potential, milllions of prospective clients, billlions of dollars in potential revenue. Hey, he says, why don’t I float the company ? Never mind there is no proven track record. The suckers will come running to make sure they are in on the deal. They’ll buy my Initial Public Offering, my shares will suddenly be worth millions. I'l sell quickly, then the company goes bust. Well, I did it. It worked like a dream. I won, they lost. So what.

2- Have you ever tried a fraudulent bankruptcy ? Great. It works almost everywhere, because bankruptcy laws are so user-friendly – well - debtor-friendly. It involves several steps, so you better employ an accountant to get it right. But things don’t have to be complicated. Junk bonds used to be popular. They paid high interest and had "not really any risks". Thats why mom and dad bought them. Then the debtor defaulted and your mom and dad lost their capital – and you lost the inheritance. Mr Milken and his mates won huge commissions. Well, thats how it is. This avenue has now been made more difficult, unfortunately.

3 - Asset stripping sounds unfriendly, where in reality you are doing society a favour. Take a company with a lack-lustre performance and its shares trading cheaply on the stock exchange. Upon closer inspection you find their assets (land, buildings, equipment) are quite valuable. You ask your bank for a loan of say $50 million with which you raid the company’s shares overnight. As the new owner you sell off their assets for a total of $55 million. After paying back the bank loan, you pocket the difference, $5 million. The company, of course, no longer exists. Nor the jobs of its 500 staff. But as economists say, you’ve done a great service to the economy, because society is better off without this non-performing company. Some call this "creative destruction".

4 - ‘Shorting’ is a great game. Say friends in the Secret Service tell you there will be a terrorist attack on airplanes of the UZ airline next week. Their shares are currently $55 each. You offer a contract to sell 100,000 UZ shares for $45 in two weeks time. The contract will be snapped up very quickly, because the buyer is salivating to make $10 per share, ie $1m. Don’t worry that you haven’t got any UZ shares. Just wait until after the terror attack. The share price will drop immediately to something like $25. Now buy your 100,000 shares. Then honour the contract and deliver the shares. The buyer must pay you $45. This leaves you with a gain of $20 per share, ie $2 million. Economists will applaud this, because you have bought shares at a time when everyone else was wanting to sell them. Again, you have done a great service. You think this is a strange and unpleasant thing to do ? Not at all. A respected investment guru like George S. did it with the English Pound, only on a much grander scale. Of course, his move did not involve insider trading. His was intuition.

5 - If you are into energy, buy large-scale electricity futures at today’s price, then cause a few power cuts at peak time. Spot prices will go berserk and you can fetch top dollars for your electricity contracts. Sure, causing a deliberate power cut is illegal, but then it was accidental, wasn’t it. This scheme works with all sorts of commodities. George S. did it – amongst other things – with silver, oil, grain, coal.

These are just a few examples. The sky is the limit. There are even more exotic schemes like the "Dead Peasant" insurance, the "Great Eskimo Loss" recycling, the "Greenmail" threat, etc. All of these schemes ‘create wealth’ for the inventor and cause substantial damage for the rest of us, often out of proportion. The "Great Eskimo Loss", for instance, generated $10m profit for the initiator and caused a $1 billion loss for the country’s tax base - thats $100 damage for each $1 gained. Coming up with these schemes takes creativity and a particular mindset . And an experienced accountant like, for instance, the good people at Kolossal-Profit-Margin-Gurus .

PS: After these legendary gains please spend a few bucks to improve the World.

PPS: Lets stop here for a moment and reflect: The cynicism and the a-morality of such get-rich-quick schemes is one thing. But the serious damage it does to the ‘losers’ is another. Currency speculation, for instance, has done enormous harm to the economies of smaller countries. Why should millions of people suffer because one individual is creaming off beyond comprehension ? Its OK to get angry. But: The scandal is not that some swine is doing it, the scandal is that we (thats you and me) allow it to happen.

Do You actually WORK for a Living ?

'Work' can mean different things for different people. For slaves or workers in a sweatshop it is the difference between starving to death or living a miserable life. They must work for a living – literally.
For the Chief Executive of a multinational corporation it means a corporate jet, plush hotels, and high-level discussions about mega-mergers or the future of some country. Nice.
In between there are the 'commoners' like you and me. The office workers, waitresses, teachers, nurses, foremen. The cleaners, programmers, assembly workers, repair people. Work for them often means drudgery from 8 to 5, putting up with a moody boss, shuffling paper, dealing with disgruntled clients, doing repetitive maintenance work. All rather unpleasant. Then there are the private equity capitalists, hedge-fund gamblers, and share market speculants. They, too, call their dealings 'work'.

On the other hand there are many who don’t work at all: The very old and the very young, the sick, the unemployed. Also the prisoners. One could argue whether priests, politicians, economists, lawyers, salesmen, advertising agents, and the like actually work – or just talk. For often one cannot see any results of their 'work'.
Those who don’t work are actually the majority. How do they live ? Well, they live off the taxes from those that do work (some of the old people live off their own savings, but that is a dying habit – no pun intended). Then there are those living in extreme poverty (see Poverty, due out in Dec 05). Nobody knows what they are living off.

So the working people support not only themselves but also those who don’t work ? Thats right. Therefore, they would get good rewards for their work ? Well, that depends:-
(1) Those in the sweatshops get barely enough to survive, basically just money for some food. And they share it with their extended family.
(2) The next level up are those on a minimum wage of – say - $10 per hour, 40 hours per week.
(3) Then its you and me, making from $30,000 to $90,000 a year.
(4) Above us is the Chief Executive Officer – he is likely to receive something like $10 million per year (incl. options and bonusses). That number is hard to imagine. If you are a lowly worker on the minimum wage, you would need to work for 480 years to make $10 million.
(5) Those dealing in private equity and hedge funds occasionally make $1 billion in one deal. Now, this is even harder to visualise. But as some American has calculated: "US$1bn is the total economic product of 20,000 average workers". Wow. And remember, the deal-makers, while making a lot of money, do not actually work. For more details see Live Well Without Working.

Ironically, taxes to support the non-working population are mostly paid by you and me. The Chief Executive and the private capitalist pay very little, because – you see - their income is either overseas or it is offset by substantial losses in other business ventures. Why can’t you and I reduce our taxes ? Because we can not afford expensive accountants like TwiceWaterBlouseBloopers or even more expensive ‘wealth managers’ like YouBeeS. The thing is, because we are not wealthy, we can’t afford a 'wealth manager'. Logical, isn’t it ?

And this raises another question: How does one get rich - I mean – really, really rich ?
Not from working, nor from saving. Consider this example: With a good job, you could save – say - $10,000 per year, net after tax. Put this into a savings account at 3 % real interest pa. Do this every year for 40 years and you’ll have a capital of about $750,000 - not exactly enormous. And this is assuming you have had a job for all of the 40 years!
So, the result is: You don’t get rich from working. Nor from saving.

Of course, the boss gets rich. Filthy rich. How come ? Its the famous ‘value added’ by entrepreneurs. They combine capital equipment and workers, and – bingo – here is a product thats worth more than the sum of the two. Who is entitled to this ‘more’ ? This fruitless debate was started by – hold your breath – Karl Marx.

What about those who make a lot of money without actually working ? They make it by dealing in some unsavoury businesses and - allegedly - illegal activities. Here is a menu of what is available:

Trade in arms, slaves, human organs, drugs . Mercenary activities. Abduction, torture, extortion, 'disappearances', murder-to-order, or lobbying for any of the above.

Tax evasion, common theft, insider trading, general corruption, and the like are called white-collar crimes and they are seen as ‘not quite as bad’. You know, they are more like a gentleman’s aberration. Therefore, they should not be punished as hard as the ‘real bad’ crimes. But then, of course, none of them is punished, anyway. Thats why I called it ‘allegedly illegal’ above. As long as you have a good, ie. expensive lawyer, you can get away with almost anything. "All are equal before the law"? Yeah right. As they say: "If you kill two people, you go to jail. If you kill 20, you go to a psychiatric hospital. If you kill 20,000, you get a nice palace on the shores of Lake Geneva and a generous income for the rest of your life."
For some examples of how you, too, could make a good living without actually working see Live Well Without Working.

PS:
With some spare money you could easily improve the rest of the World.