but, this video made me laugh:

I am both more educated, and more depressed for having read this interview of Ray Dalio from Barrons.

Here’s a fun excerpt (emphasis mine):

Basically what happens is that after a period of time, economies go through a long-term debt cycle — a dynamic that is self-reinforcing, in which people finance their spending by borrowing and debts rise relative to incomes and, more accurately, debt-service payments rise relative to incomes. At cycle peaks, assets are bought on leverage at high-enough prices that the cash flows they produce aren’t adequate to service the debt. The incomes aren’t adequate to service the debt. Then begins the reversal process, and that becomes self-reinforcing, too. In the simplest sense, the country reaches the point when it needs a debt restructuring. General Motors is a metaphor for the United States.

This joke is from an e-mail forward, but it is worthy of a post.

Dan was a single guy living at home with his father and working in the family business. When he found out he was going to inherit a fortune when his sickly father died, he decided he needed a wife with which to share his fortune.  One evening at an investment meeting he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  Her natural beauty took his breath away.

‘I may look like just an ordinary man,’ he said to her, but in just a few years, my father will die, and I’ll inherit 20 million.’ Impressed, the woman obtained his business card and three days later, she became his stepmother.

Women are so much better at financial planning than men.