WWDCII (What Would Dick Cheney Invest In?)

Note: I'm a little over my head in attempting the intro here. If drowsiness occurs, just skip it all and hit the link at the bottom. It's an excellent story based on a eerie article in Kiplinger Magazine.

Investing. It's a weighty concept that reeks of sober, chessboard calculating. So very... adult. Or at least that's the impression one gets from the advertisements on TV. Lifestyle branding is never more evident than when pandering to the gambler's self-image. You've seen it on casino ads (if those Jack Binion spots don't fill you with gutsy confidence, perhaps you're better off with baseball cards and barbies, kido) and lotto ads and, of course, there's the Wall Street ads.

Maybe it's a black and white tracking shot of wrinkled and ink-stained fingers sifting through painfully small lines of newsprint. Or perhaps it's a well-know actor who we've grown to trust because of his role as a strict but impassioned public prosecutor on a very popular legally-themed, hour-long TV drama. Or maybe you're a bit of a youngster and more inclined to respond to the new breed of DIY Personal Finance Options (Trademark Pending, you betcha). The slickly edited jobs, where some husky rock-n-roll voiceover promises that no duff-headed, creaky-assed broker or manager will cramp your own personal, inimitable style by telling you where you ought to put your hard-earned dough. Nuh-uh, bubba. You know what's what.

No matter which way you're driving down Wall Street, the fundamental nut is that investing your money is just another way of gambling. No different than playing blackjack in Monte Carlo or craps in Hackensack. And, in turn, the fundamental nut of gambling is, essentially, predicting the future for profit. You're rewarded for correctly predicting what the next card or dice roll will bring as you are for correctly predicting what will become of a company or industry's perceived value over a given period of time. It's obviously a hair more complicated that that (they give doctorates to those who can explain the process with any degree of clarity), but the reference is sound enough, right?

So it must stand to reason that if someone's got some serious clout in the direction of industries with far-reaching implications, that they would have a better vantage point than you, the average market player, from which to see the future. And being the wise investor you are, it would certainly be a wise move to mirror the personal investment strategies of someone in such a position. Someone like... United States Veep and ranking Supercreep, Dick Cheney. The guy's got a bunch of friends in very high places, after all.

With that winning (if ill-explained) strategy in mind, buzz over to Counterpunch for Mike Whitney's startling coverage of what investor/citizen Dick Cheney sees on the horizon. Read, The Veep's Curious Investment Portfolio: Is Cheney Betting On Economic Collapse?

From the article:

Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are loosing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in "Old Europe". As Blackburn sagely notes, "Not all bad news' is bad for everybody."