Post 33Weeks of training complete: 22 weeks, 5 days
Time until Ironman: 9 weeks, 2 days
Miles swam: 94.571
Miles biked: 1,545.22
Miles run: 375.39
Goal: $5,000
Total raised: $1,615All is well here. It's late. I finished another long bike ride today (about 60 miles), followed up by a 4.5 mile run, in which I held a 9:05/mile pace after the long bike ride. It's further evidence of much stronger I'm getting.
And I'm doing all this still with the tail end of a cold. I've been sick on and off this week - couldn't get my swims in.
Tonight Beck and I stayed up and watched Scooby-Doo 2. It was fun. Phelma's hot.
I need to give a big, big shout out to my boy Bang, who stepped up with a big, big donation towards the cause. We're closing in on the $2,000 mark and with the Bocce tournament next weekend, we should surpass that. Bang and I go back many a year here in Tempe and our stories of mayhem throughout the state are legendary - from our admission into Cluck-U; the mighty destruction of Truckasaurus and the many, many beers consumed. And, of course, baseball ...
In other thoughts, the financial world is getting a little scary right now. The economy is clearly a mess and what's even stranger is that the government is openly panicking right now. That's strange to watch. The government is beginning to behave in a bipartisan manner again - it makes you aware of the severity of what's happening.
I'm no economic expert, but I fancy myself as something of a hobby economist. I follow market trends, study commodities and try to understand global currencies - purely becuase I'm interested in the way financial systems work. I don't even do it to profit it off it oddly enough - as often as I correctly predict the movement of markets, I don't have the stomach to bet on them except in very long-term strategies I understand.
That said, I'm nervous about the US dollar. I'm worried about the risk the government has exposed itself, too. And I don't understand enough about the liquidity of the government - how can it spend when it's already running a massive deficit - to fully grasp the impact of these humungous bailouts.
If I'm uncertain about it - it means a lot of other people are, too. Uncertainty is bad for economies.
Just something I've been thinking about ... One thing's for sure, the 2000s have been significantly different than the 1990s.
I need to get to bed. Big run tomorrow ... and football. ASU plays Georgia. Big game. I think, I really think, we can win it.
Go Devils!
- Ed
2 comments:
Glad to hear you're feeling better. I'm getting interested in the financial world too, mostly because I want to know when it'll kill me.
I'm starting a blog about "the engagement"...stay tuned.
The US government stands to make about 100billion (yes billion) off of these "bad debts" if just 50% of the best of them pay off. The taxpayers are paying 30 cents on the dollar to buy this paper so do the math and you can see that the taxpayers should be able to sell at a minimum of 50 cents on a dollar (as compared to present worth not future). So while I don't agree on this bailout (I'm a let the market rule kind of guy) mainly because on the market I could buy for under 5 cents what the government is paying 30 cents for, the government probably will make a killing on these loans ( which probably 60 or 70 % are good).
As far as liquidity, the total worth of the housing market and the people in it is estimated at 50 trillion dollars. So the 700 billion is maybe 3% of the net worth.
Worry about the dollar though because the easiest way to get out of a recession is to spend your way out through government projects which usually devalues the dollar quickly. Our present inflation is mainly attached to rising energy costs, which is going overseas and therefore not devaluing the dollar the way it could by being here only.
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