Wealth Management Singapore

Will you wish there was a housing crash in Singapore if you can get a 3-bedroom luxury apartment at The Sail over looking Marina Bay Sands for just $3,000 a month? The equivalent was what happened in Miami.

Brandon Klein, a 26-year-old tax accountant, stays at 50 Biscayne Boulevard, one of the luxury holiday condos built during the 2004 to 2008 boom to attract second-home buyers. Housing market has plummeted in end 2008, and with 7,000 unsold condos, almost a third of the 22,079 units in 75 buildings in Miami’s core, it has transformed Miami. With US$2,700 shared among 3 friends, Brandon is living in an apartment with 24 hour concierge, a ‘sick’ view of Downtown and a life he can never imagined. Some areas, previously only middle aged wealthy appear have transformed into dorm like residences. Interestingly, this has infused life into the vacation beach environment.

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We have met the culprit and he is us. It is us that cause the oil spill.

We — both parties — created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people’s lives. We — both parties — created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn’t have the means to sustain them. And we — both parties — sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you’re drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)

Article from New York Times

Parsing the Language of Influence and Affluence
Posted by Lewis Schiff in The Affluentialist

I recently read an article in The New York Times about an up-and-coming media mogul who claims to have coined the word “affluencer” which means: someone who tries to influence the affluent. In her role as the chief of NBC’s Bravo network, Lauren Zalaznick creates programming that will influence affluent people—in particular, her network’s target demographic of 18 to 49 urbanites.

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China’s wealthiest are gaining against their U.S. counterparts.

The total net worth of China’s 40 Richest, all of whom are now billionaires, doubled in the past year as bust turned to boom. A quick comparison of our new Forbes China Rich List with that of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, published in September, appears to tell a expected story. China’s 400 Richest are worth a record $314 billion, just one-fourth the total net worth of their American counterparts. China’s richest person, BYD’s Wang Chuanfu, has a net worth of $5.8 billion, far below the $50 billion fortune of U.S.’s richest citizen, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. In the U.S., Wang would only rank no. 40.

But the more interesting story is the fact that Chinese tycoons are making huge gains, at a time when many of the world’s richest haven’t been as lucky. As a result, there is a record 79 billionaires, up from 24 a year earlier, more than Germany, Russia or India had published in our worldwide billionaire rankings. The U.S. has 391 billionaires, down from 489 a year ago. The total net worth of the China 400 jumped 81%, or $141 billion, at a time when American’s wealthiest lost $300 billion, or 20% of their cumulative total, dropping to $1.27 trillion.

Chinese Richest List 2009

Forbes Full Article

By Morgan House
December 1, 2009

Over the past year, it’s been Us vs. Goldman Sachs. Conspiracy theories have multiplied aplenty. Loathing hasn’t been shy. Heads have been called for. That much is certain.

But what would a sensible Goldman Sachs look like? One that we could put up with, without being the butt of every egg-throwing anti-Wall Street protest imaginable? To answer that question, we might want to go back and look at the Goldman Sachs of years past, when it commanded respect.

Goldman Sachs went public in 1999. Before that, it was a private partnership, structured the same way many law firms and accounting firms are. Partners were senior employees who, after years of devastatingly long hours, were selected into a small fraternity of owners.

These partners owned the entire firm. All of the capital was theirs. They literally supplied it out of their own earned income. As Charles Ellis writes in his book, The Partnership: “Goldman Sachs retained most of each partner’s yearly earned income. As a result, anyone who became a partner in Goldman Sachs usually experienced a drop in spendable income.”

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Wall Street Smarts
Interesting opinion from a random guy the author met. I’ve never thought of this, but like him, I cannot find a compelling flaw to the theory. I am not sure what the smartest guys from my dad’s generation, born around war times, do as their profession. Maybe doctors, businessmen, teachers. Is there even a demand for banking people then? However, I do know that the smartest people works in banks now. Can’t imagine the cream of the crop working for the government or MAS…