Just got back from a great Spring Break to Colombia. Conveniently returning before Bush arrived, although we did see some rioting on the way out. Pix here.

I hear the phrase "money doesn't make you happy" and I agree and disagree with it constantly. Personally I think there is a certain threshold you should achieve to live comfortably and happily (e.g. being able to pay bills, send your kids to college, go on vacation 3 times a year) and then after that threshold (which I assume is around $100K/family/year in the US) your marginal utility from extra money diminishes at an extremely fast rate. This threshold will obviously have to be adjusted for different cities and different families (e.g. higher for NYC than Utah, higher and lower depending on family size) but I think it is a good approximation as an average. This is by no means saying that poorer and richer families are not as happy, but I am merely theorizing that money makes you happy... to an extent.

Anyways, while we're on this subject, I think that this article from the NYTimes is extremely fascinating. It talks about Yale's money manager and how he is motivated not by money, but by what it can do for Yale, which is providing an opportunity to a great education to everyone who is admitted without the hinderence of costs.

Link to article

“People think working for something other than the most money you could get is an odd concept, but it seems a perfectly natural concept to me,” says Mr. Swensen, a slender, soft-spoken man who looks and dresses like a high school teacher. “When I see colleagues of mine leave universities to do essentially the same thing they were doing but to get paid more, I am disappointed because there is a sense of mission,” in endowment work.

“In the finance world it is very easy to measure winning and losing in dollars and cents,” he says. “That has always seemed to be an inadequate measure. The quality of life is a better way to measure winning and losing. Money is only one element of that.”

“I love the idea that undergraduates have this opportunity to study whatever they want,” he says. “Students will say to me, ‘What do I need to take to be attractive to an investment bank?’ I say: ‘Don’t do that. Take great classes that you like.’ “

Hilarious article on Bloomberg which makes finance as easy as moo.

If Hedge Funds Kept Cows, Your Milk Would Go Sour: Mark Gilbert
By Mark Gilbert

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- A famous series of jokes attempts to define political systems. In communism, for example, you have two cows, your commune seizes them and charges you for milk. In a democracy, you have two cows, the cows outvote you 2-1 to ban all meat and dairy products, and you go bankrupt and starve to death.

Similar thinking can be applied to financial markets. Here, then, is the world of money recast in bovine terms.

Leveraged Buyouts

You have two cows. You come home from the fields one day to find Henry Kravis chatting to your spouse at the dining-room table. Two days later, you have no spouse, no farm, and no table. Two guys the size of sumo wrestlers have saddled up the cows and are riding them around the farmyard.

Currency Market

You have two cows. China has 1 trillion cows. Guess who sets the price of milk?

Bond Market

You have two cows. One is Brazilian, one is Australian. They yield 25 quarts of milk per day. That's half as much as three years ago, when you traded your less-lactiferous German and U.S. cows for them. You are thinking of swapping for a pair of Namibian cows. They only have three legs but, hey, they produce 26 quarts per day.

Derivatives

You have two cows. You repackage five of them into a Collateralized Lactating Obligation, pay for a AAA credit rating, slice the CLO into 10 pieces and sell it to investors, skimming the cream from the milk for yourself. Three of the cows fall ill, and the credit rating plummets. You get to keep the cream.

Hedge Funds

You have two cows. A guy in an open-necked shirt drives up in his Bentley and offers to take care of them for you in return for a year's supply of steak and 50 percent of their milk. They won't be allowed to leave his compound for two years.

Six months later, you have half a cow, producing sour milk. ``You have to be willing to lose rump today to get rib-eye tomorrow,'' the hedge-fund guy mumbles through a mouthful of sirloin and champagne.

Economics

Assume two cows.

Carbon-Emissions Trading

You have two cows. They produce 1.2 tons of methane gas per day. After a hefty donation to the re-election campaign of your local representative, the government gives you enough emission permits for six cows. You sell three permits, buy another cow, and apply for a European Commission grant to build a methane-gas power station.

Microsoft Corp.

You have one old, tired cow. A recent heart transplant may have come too late to save the beast.

Google Inc.

You have no cows. You slap advertisements on everyone else's cows. The milk floods in. You use the proceeds to reinvent the cow.

Apple Inc.

Nobody wants your cows. You design the cutest little milk bottle. Now, everybody wants your cows.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

You have 26,467 cows. They are strapped into the milking machines 24/7. Some of them have more hay than they could ever hope to eat. Others aspire to one day having more hay than they could ever hope to eat. The cows with the most hay end up with big government jobs.

Pension-Fund Management

You have two cows. How boring is that? You pay a month's supply of milk to a consultant, who advises you to sell one cow and buy two aardvarks instead. The aardvarks die. The consultant charges you four months of your (now reduced) milk supply and advises you to sell half of your remaining cow and buy a wombat. The wombat dies. The consultant charges eight months of milk for a copy of his new report, ``Two-Cow Strategies for Alleviating the Impending Pensions Crisis.''

Russian Energy

You have two cows. Comrade, those cows are an environmental hazard. We suggest you hand one of them over to us.

Credit-Default Swaps

You have two cows. You buy insurance against them dying, and tuck the contracts into the middle of that tottering pile of documentation on your desk. One dark night, Henry Kravis sneaks off with your cows. By the time you track down the paperwork, your now worthless contracts have expired.

Interest-Rate Swaps

You have two cows. You pledge one of them to me as collateral in a swap for some of my pigs. I pledge the cow to my neighbor as collateral in a swap for some of his sheep. He pledges the cow to his cousin as collateral in a swap for some of his cousin's goats. Better pray the livestock market doesn't crash and we have to try and round up that cow.

Commodities

You have lots of stocks and bonds, but no cows. Are you crazy? Cows are the hot new market. Here, buy this exchange- traded cow futures contract. It can't lose. It gained 40 percent in the past six months.

Gold

You have two cows. You wear a cap you made out of tin foil so that the tiny black helicopters can't read your thoughts. You spend your days blogging about how the government's decision to abandon the cattle standard in 1933 was part of a global conspiracy by the world's central banks to destroy the value of your herd.

Learn how to fold a tshirt in two seconds, pretty nifty: Link

At the risk of having Jihad waged against me, I am just going to go out there and say that this is despicable: Link

These guys are hilarious: Link

A new week, a new beginning. Here are five things I hope will happen in the next few days:

1 - Oil prices rise, a lot (thanks to the new cold front).
2 - I will figure out what I am doing for the summer.
3 - I will actually start studying insurance given that I only have 3 classes.
4 - The Indianapolis Colts destroy the Chicago Bears, 41-13.
5 - I will go to bed before 3am.

Travel gurus, I beckon you:

I would like to go to Europe and China this summer. This would obviously require a multi-leg trip. Ideally, I would leave from NYC and fly to London, and then leave somewhere in europe (maybe London again due to convenience) and fly to Beijing, and then from Beijing back to Boston in mid July.

Currently on Orbitz I am looking at British Airways for the entire trip for around $1850.

If anyone knows any good deals for multi-leg trips or some airline partnership deal that I am overlooking, let me know. Thanks.