Close your eyes and try to remember what your life was like 20 years ago. I guess that much has changed for you in that time and all of us probably have key things that we can point to that made a huge difference to our lives. For some it will be a death, a […]
Flashback to a simpler time Read More »
On December 12th 1953,Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, was trying to regain his speed record by flying at more than twice the speed of sound. His previous record had been beaten by a US Navy pilot just three weeks earlier, Yeager (a US Airforce pilot) was determined to beat the Navy’s new record
Masterful Inactivity Read More »
Chicago is the third most populated city in the US, after New York and Los Angeles. And it has a big money problem. Currently the Windy City has $10 billion of assets and $41 billion of liabilities. To clear the debt, every taxpayer would have to pay the city $41,900 and that isn’t going to
The best and worst investment ever? Read More »
Almon Strowger started life as an ordinary man. Born in 1839, Almon fought in the American Civil War and ended up as an undertaker in Kansas Cty. From these humble beginnings though, he was to become a crucial cog in the machine that became the iPhone. We have blogged before, here about the predictions that
Necessity, the mother of invention. Read More »
Like a stuck record we keep saying that government debt is too high and that this will come back to bite us at some point. Spiralling inflation in the UK is making the cost of servicing UK government debt much more expensive but it does at least inflate away its real value over time. Governments
Debt: How much is too much? Read More »
It is hard to avoid news items about ChatGPT at the moment. It makes for great copy for journalists, who can ask it anything and write an article based on its response. If you have been lucky enough to avoid this ubiquitous language robot so far, let me explain. ChatGPT is a large language model
One section of the Altor team is living with very limited heat and hot water at the moment (and boy do we hear about it). The root cause is the inability of a major utility firm to dig a trench and lay a cable. A five figure sum has been paid six months ago and
Direct Indexing – the next big thing? Read More »
Mary Ellen Pleasant was arguably the first self-made millionaire of African-American heritage. Although she died in poverty in 1904, aged 88, her fortune was at one point assessed as being worth $30,000,000, an extraordinary amount for the time. Mary told enough versions of her early years story, that it is impossible to pin down her
Mary Ellen Pleasant Read More »
On 23rd July 1983, Captain Bob Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal were in the cockpit of Air Canada’s Boeing 767, Flight 143 to Edmonton. They were flying at 41,000 ft, through clear skies above the beautiful Red Lake, Ontario. It was 8pm and the sun was starting to set. Suddenly a cockpit alarm sounded,
How to live to your 90s Read More »
Bobby was the lead guitarist of two bands that were huge in the 70s. He still plays with one of them but touring is largely confined to Germany and the Far East now, the only places where there is still a well paying audience for the old songs. Bobby’s adviser before me (1990s) drove a
