MAS o Menos

My plan was to step away from my hobby of studying finance and economic history so I could focus on the next version of the INeedCoffee web site.  If I could turn off the financial news and focus on the web site then there would be a November release.  You can guess what happened next.

Wall Street decided to throw a tantrum.  And it doesn’t appear to be a normal cyclical tantrum.  It is starting to look like one of those “once in every third generation” tantrums.  Let us look at a sampling of the books I’ve read in the last year.

• When Genius Failed - Story of the 1998 LTCM crisis.  What happens when leverage goes wrong.
• Orgins of the Crash - Covers the telecom and tech crash.  What happens when accounting goes wrong.
• The Black Swan - The unexpected random event that nobody sees coming.
• Devil Take the Hindmost - The subtitle is a “History of Financial Speculation”.

Add a few more books to that list and hundreds of articles online and you get an idea of where my head has been in the last year.  Here we are in October 2008 and it appears we have the perfect storm of leverage unwinding, fraudulent accounting, a black swan and financial speculation all hitting simultaneously.  Was there any chance I could turn off the financial news and focus on INeedCoffee?  Nope.

I got a front row seat to what could end up being the biggest financial event of my life.  The next version of INeedCoffee is going to have to wait.  I have no new timeline or estimate.  It will get done when it gets done.

Tags: ineedcoffee