Fixed Assets Quotes

Finally, Peeta turns to Pollux. "Well, then you just became our most valuable asset." Castor laughs and Pollux manages a smile. We're halfway down the first tunnel when I realize what was so remarkable about that exchange. Peeta sounded like his old self, the one who could always think of the right thing to say when nobody else could... I glance back at him as he trudges along under his guards, Gale and Jackson, his eyes fixed on the ground, his shoulders hunched forward. So dispirited. But for a moment, he was really here.

I hate debt - except when I’m the lender.

If a business borrows to buy a machine, it’s a good thing, not a bad thing. During the past six years, America—its government, its families, the country as a whole—has been borrowing to sustain its consumption. Meanwhile, investment in fixed assets—the plants and equipment that help increase our wealth—has been declining.

It's a curse to have traumas imprinted in our wiring, to accept that what we fear and grieve and impale ourselves upon from day to day defines the way we translate the chemistry of emotions into a fixed identity wired for suffering. It's also a marvelous asset, our malleability. When the imprinting experience is loving, exciting, rich and worthy of our more expansive nature, we align pleasurably with harmony and bliss. But let's face it, we're humans. Disasters entertain our brains far more than comforts, ease and joy ever will. No one straps into the ride for the smoothness of it all going well.

To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (...), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongi-form bacteria so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run over them? After all these years in the business, I still don't know.

The fact that the information platform requires an extension of sensors means that it is countering the tendency towards a lean platform. These are not asset-less companies – far from it; they spend billions of dollars to purchase fixed capital and take other companies over. Importantly, ‘once we understand this [tendency], it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand’.15 Calls for privacy miss how the suppression of privacy is at the heart of this business model. This tendency involves constantly pressing against the limits of what is socially and legally acceptable in terms of data collection. For the most part, the strategy has been to collect data, then apologise and roll back programs if there is an uproar, rather than consulting with users beforehand.16 This is why we will continue to see frequent uproars over the collection of data by these companies.

Two decades after its first democratic election, South Africa ranks as the most unequal country on Earth.1 A host of policy tools could patch each of South Africa’s ills in piecemeal fashion, yet one force would unquestionably improve them all: economic growth.2 Diminished growth lowers living standards. With 5 percent annual growth, it takes just fourteen years to double a country’s GDP; with 3 percent growth, it takes twenty-four years. In general, emerging economies with a low asset base need to grow faster and accumulate a stock of assets more quickly than more developed economies in which basic living standards are already largely met. Meaningfully increasing per capita income is a critical way to lift people’s living standards and take them out of poverty, thereby truly changing the developmental trajectory of the country. South Africa has managed to push growth above a mere 3 percent only four times since the transition from apartheid, and it has remained all but stalled under 5 percent since 2008. And the forecast for growth in years to come hovers around a paltry 1 percent. Because South Africa’s population has been growing around 1.5 percent per year since 2008, the country’s per capita income has been stagnant over the period.

the imposition of a negative real interest rate – effectively a wealth tax – on all forms of financial wealth expropriates the incomes of savers and might alter expectations of future effective rates of wealth taxes. If you are told, for example, that all your assets held in accounts fixed in money terms will be subject to a 5-percentage-point wealth tax, you might, it is true, decide to spend today, but you might well, fearful of what the government could do next year, batten down the hatches and cut spending. Households and businesses might simply conserve their resources to cope with an unpredictable and unknowable future. The

Moreover, competition for foreign markets and the necessity for larger and larger investments in raw materials, produce phenomena of concentration and accumulation. First, small capitalists are absorbed by big capitalists who can maintain, for example, unprofitable prices for a longer period. A larger and larger part of the profits is finally invested in new machines and accumulated in the fixed assets of capital. This double movement first of all hastens the ruin of the middle classes, who are absorbed into the proletariat, and then proceeds to concentrate, in an increasingly small number of hands, the riches produced uniquely by the proletariat. Thus the proletariat increases in size in proportion to its increasing ruin. Capital is now concentrated in the hands of only a very few masters, whose growing power is based on robbery. Moreover, these masters are shaken to their foundations by successive crises, overwhelmed by the contradictions of the system, and can no longer assure even mere subsistence to their slaves, who then come to depend on private or public charity. A day comes, inevitably, when a huge army of oppressed slaves find themselves face to face with a handful of despicable masters. That day is the day of revolution. "The ruin of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

Great nations which fail to meet their responsibilities are consigned to the dust bin of history. We grew from that small, weak republic which had as its assets spirit, optimism, faith in God and an unshakeable belief that free men and women could govern themselves wisely. We became the leader of the free world, an example for all those who cherish freedom. … If we are to continue to be that example -- if we are to preserve our own freedom -- we must understand those who would dominate us and deal with them with determination ... We must shoulder our burden with our eyes fixed on the future, but recognizing the realities of today, not counting on mere hope or wishes. We must be willing to carry out our responsibility as the custodian of individual freedom. Then we will achieve our destiny to be as a shining city on a hill for all mankind to see.

Buffett declared the best inflation hedge is a company with a wonderful product that requires little capital to grow. As a test, he invited each of us to look at our own earning ability. In inflation, your compensation can go up without any additional investment. As a business example, Buffett noted that when See’s Candy was purchased in 1971, it had the revenues of $25 million and sold 16 million pounds of candy annually with $9 million in tangible assets. Today, See’s sells $300 million of candy with $40 million of tangible assets. Berkshire needed to invest only $31 million to generate a more than 10-fold increase in revenues. In aggregate, Buffett noted that Berkshire has earned $1.5 billion in profits at See’s over the years. See’s inventory turns fast, has no receivables and has little fixed investment – a perfect inflation hedge. Buffett allowed that if you have tons of receivables and inventory, that’s a lousy business in inflation. The railroad and MidAmerican Energy both have these undesirable characteristics, but that is offset by their utility to the economy and subsequent allowable returns. Buffett rued that there simply aren’t enough “See’s Candys” to buy. Buffett added that being an investor has made him a better businessman and that being a businessman has made him a better investor.(125) Munger noted that they didn’t always know this inflation-business element, which shows how continuous learning is so important.

One of the issues that animated the Tea Party in South Carolina and nationally during my campaign for governor was bailouts. The debate started with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008 and signed by President Bush. The TARP bailout was a perfect example of government not understanding the value of a dollar. It was a quick fix to get everyone to calm down. But what did it actually do? The banks that received the money didn’t expand lending to businesses. They used the cash to help their own books, and the taxpayers were put on the hook as loan guarantors. No one—not the politicians who encouraged the recklessness, not the quasi-governmental entities like Fannie Mae that got rich off it, and certainly not the Wall Street firms that got bailed out—was ever held accountable. And the American people ended up worse off than they were before. As a small businessperson, I found the message government was sending incredibly offensive. In my version of capitalism, if a company succeeds, you don’t punish it by raising its taxes; and if a company fails, you don’t reward it by having the taxpayers bail it out. TARP opened the floodgates for a wave of unaccountable spending that flowed out of Washington. Soon afterward, President Obama bailed out the auto industry to rescue big labor. His allies in Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, most of them without having read it. And he forced through a trillion-dollar health-care takeover. With each bailout, more and more of us felt we were getting further and further from what America was meant to be: a free and striving people with a limited and accountable government. Instead, Washington was revealing itself to be an inside game, with the rules fixed to benefit the establishment. The rules favor the well connected, while the rest of us in flyover country pay the bills.

The manipulation of currency, throughout a feature of the colonial enterprise, reached its worst during the Great Depression of 1929–30, when Indian farmers (like those in the North American prairies) grew their grain but discovered no one could afford to buy it. Agricultural prices collapsed, but British tax demands did not; and cruelly, the British decided to restrict India’s money supply, fearing that the devaluation of Indian currency would cause losses to the British from a corresponding decline in the sterling value of their assets in India. So Britain insisted that the Indian rupee stay fixed at 1 shilling sixpence, and obliged the Indian government to take notes and coins out of circulation to keep the exchange rate high. The total amount of cash in circulation in the Indian economy fell from some 5 billion rupees in 1929 to 4 billion in 1930 and as low as 3 billion in 1938. Indians starved but their currency stayed high, and the value of British assets in India was protected.

It's all about your mindset. Successful people tend to focus on growth, solving problems, and self-improvement, while unsuccessful people think of their abilities as fixed assets and avoid challenges.

must come to the important part of my Relations to you which is that I consider you would all do well here in Texas rather than in the Ruined and Devastated States in the East and please consider the land owing to your late Mother. If you all were to return I would be happy once again in the company of my daughters and son-in-law and my grandsons, and since Elizabeth has always been enamored of the process of Law she could begin the legal Discovery and then turn it over to a lawyer adept at fixed-asset litigation. Yes I know the Spanish land has long been a Chimera in our family but indeed it is there and requires much research.

To argue this way is to miss a key point: Scranton's founders, as entrepreneurs, created something out of nothing. They created their assets and created opportunities for others when they successfully bore the risks of making America's first iron rails. Without them, almost everybody else in the region would have been poorer. The amount of wealth in a region (or a country) is not fixed; in 1870, Scranton, Platt, and Blair got the biggest piece of the economic pie, but it was the biggest piece of a much larger pie—made so by what they cooked up when they came to Pennsylvania thirty years earlier.

And what is your assessment of Lady Rosslyn?” Rafe blurted out without thinking. The vampire remained silent as he took the seat opposite Rafe. Finally, he looked up, eyes intent. “You can’t kill her. She would be too much of an asset to our people. Imagine having our own doctor for our kind. She might be able to fix Mary’s leg.” He smiled. “And I think she’s completely smitten with you.” Rafe doubted that, as much as the thought still made his chest tight. “Does your offer still stand to Change her?” Anthony’s smile dimmed. “It would, if I had not grown so weakened donating blood for your surgeries. By the time I regain my strength, the deadline for the Elders’ decree will have passed.” Rafe slammed his fist on the table. “Damn it! I should have had William open a vein before I dismissed him. At least then he could have been useful for once.” “He wouldn’t have done it. He would have quit before lifting a finger to help anyone but himself.

Spring flew by and summer quickly arrived; my belly grew right alongside the daylilies, zinnias, and tomatoes Marlboro Man’s mom had helped me plant in a small garden outside the house. For Marlboro Man, the coming of the baby proved to be an effective diversion from the aftermath of the previous fall’s market woes. More and more, it looked like Marlboro Man might have to sell some of his land in order to keep the rest of the ranch afloat. As someone who didn’t grow up on a ranch, I failed to feel the gravity of the situation. You have a problem, you have an asset, you sell the asset, you solve the problem. But for Marlboro Man, it could never be that simple or sterile. For a ranching family, putting together a ranch takes time--sometimes years, even generations of patiently waiting for this pasture or that to become available. For a rancher, the words of Pa in Gone With the Wind ring beautifully and painfully true: Land is the only thing worth working for…worth fighting for, worth dying for. Because it’s the only thing that lasts…The thought of parting with a part of the family’s ranch was a painful prospect; Marlboro Man felt the sting daily. To me it seemed like an easy fix; to Marlboro Man, it was a personal failure. There was nothing I could do to make it better except to be there to catch him in my arms every night, which I willingly and eagerly did. I was a soft, lumpy pillow. With heartburn and swollen ankles.

This formal philosophy of learning treats knowledge like a fixed asset: learn, then you have it forever! But as a modern professional, you can’t acquire knowledge this way, because the knowledge you need isn’t static—it’s always changing. Stockpiling facts won’t get you anywhere. What will get you somewhere is being able to access the information you need, when you need it.

Shortly before we closed the deal, Randy Michaels and Terry Jacobs, who were running Jacor, came to me to finance the acquisition of a Denver station. Jacor already owned one of the other FM stations in Denver, and this one was losing money and available cheap. They showed up in Chicago carrying a thick book of details, prepared to make their pitch. “This is a great deal,” Randy assured me. He thumped the book on the table, ready to take me through it. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Do you understand the scope of the deal—why we should buy it?” “Yes,” he replied. “All the details are right here in this book.” He added that he and Terry had worked feverishly night and day to prepare it. I picked up the book and tossed it into a corner of my office, where it landed with a thud. Randy and Terry stared at me wide-eyed. “If you really understand it, you don’t need a book,” I said. “You could put it on a single piece of paper.” They looked uncertain. “I assume this says things are going to be great, right?” They nodded. “What happens if you’re wrong? How do I get out of the room?” “What do you mean?” Randy asked. “How bad can it get?” “Well,” he said, “it’s pretty bad now, and if we fail to fix it you could lose some operating capital. But I don’t see a station in Denver ever being worth less than $4 million. I mean, the building, the transmitter—the physical assets alone are worth close to that.” “Okay, great. How good could it get?” The answer, in short, was very good. So I said, “Go do it.

Are Class Captains and School Prefects managers or leaders? Schools miss it when they assign a student to discipline other students. Class captains and school prefects are leaders not managers. A Leader is on A MISSION not on A DUTY. And being a leader goes beyond expecting compliance from others, which is what managers do. If your school assigns prefect to enforce compliance in any way you are doing it all wrong. For one, seeking compliance from anyone is complicated and it comes with a position that "demands" respect and thus you are putting such children at a risk of being hated by their peers. Prefect should be examples not authority figures, plus they should be trained to act like leaders should, if you also don't train them, you are doing it too wrong. Here are some of those "things" you should train your prefect: 1. Active listening 2. How to help their peers and other students find meaning in learning 3. How to make others students wellbeing and safety their priority. 4. How to inspire others and lead by example. Charity begins from school too. Your prefects can learn people skills that can guarantee their future right from your school. Your prefects should be assets to your school because of what they can learn to do now to become better in future not because of what they can do for your school now, which obviously is very little.

Ableism is discrimination against people with disabilities. It is the harboring of beliefs that devalue and limit the potential of people with physical, intellectual, or mental disorders and disabilities. For instance, people might believe that autistic people will never be an asset to society, and that they need to be “fixed” or “cured".

Why mobile app hosting is fundamental for your versatile application? Portable application hosting is fundamental for your site? Also, why it is compulsory to work? To lay it out plainly, you have constructed a versatile application. What would be the best next step? Fostering an application isn't generally so direct as tossing it in the air; it needs a spot to live, or all the more precisely, a hosting supplier. It's better assuming it's done on an outside server since your gadget won't deal with the power. An application that crashes each time won't acquire large number of clients, which youthful new businesses need. Versatile app hosting services is fundamental, with a powerful server is the best arrangement. We'll take a gander at how portable applications create and why composing code isn't the entire story. How would you foster a portable application? It's more convoluted than you likely suspect. It comprises of two sections. Utilizing a telephone or tablet, the client can explore the application's front end by clicking buttons and moving sliders. The server-side, nonetheless, should be answerable for showing buttons and sliders. When you click on the button, a data demand is shipped off the server. Subsequent to handling, you will figure out the outcomes. You ought to have another screen stacked in practically no time, so you will not lose significant clients pausing. Is it important to have a versatile application? Versatile application improvement requires something other than composing code. The client's gadget will clearly contain the whole backend if the application resembles a mini-computer with just rudimentary capacities. Notwithstanding, a backend should exist that offers more complicated capacities, and something should empower solicitations to be satisfied there. In this manner, App Hosting is fundamental. It alludes to introducing an application on the server of a supplier, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These suppliers put the application on their servers. There are basically no distinctions between Mobile App Hosting and hosting sites. In like manner, the versatile application hosting server processes a solicitation sent by the client. The client makes a move or sends a solicitation. So what precisely is Code Push? It would assist with fixing bugs when they happen toward the front. In AppStore and Google Play, an update requires an audit each time it is made. The interaction requires 30 minutes for Android and could take more time to a day for iOS. You can robotize this and pass the survey by transferring updates to Code Push. Designers can without much of a stretch update their React Native applications utilizing the App Center. Applications can demand refreshes utilizing the gave client SDK from the focal vault, which is a focal store for refreshes. Mechanizing refreshes permits us to fix blunders quicker, setting aside us time and cash. How do these administrations vary? Cloud hosting is one model. It's something we've utilized ourselves first. Then, at that point, on the grounds that a ton of organizations use it, Whence comes this? Rather than regular hosting, cloud hosting utilizes only one server rather than different servers. A virtual and actual organization of cloud servers has the application or site. How much is portable application hosting fundamental in the cloud? Reliability You would lose your item assuming something happened to the server it was facilitated. Another situation includes many machines that are associated. Information will stay on the organization regardless of whether it vanishes from one server. Efficiencies Dissimilar to a normal server, cloud hosting can increment framework assets. This is on the grounds that the server's ability should be expanded assuming the quantity of clients increments abruptly. Assuming you utilize a devoted server, the cycle is more adaptable.

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In the pandemic, however, cash is king, and cost structure is the new blood oxygen level. Strong balance sheets mean capital to get through the lean times. Companies with cash, low debt or cheap debt, high-value assets, and low fixed costs will likely survive.

30 percent—Domestic equities: US stock funds, including small-, mid-, and large-cap stocks 15 percent—Developed-world international equities: funds from developed foreign countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and France 5 percent—Emerging-market equities: funds from developing foreign countries, such as China, India, and Brazil. These are riskier than developed-world equities, so don’t go off buying these to fill 95 percent of your portfolio. 20 percent—Real estate investment trusts: also known as REITs. REITs invest in mortgages and residential and commercial real estate, both domestically and internationally. 15 percent—Government bonds: fixed-interest US securities, which provide predictable income and balance risk in your portfolio. As an asset class, bonds generally return less than stocks. 15 percent—Treasury inflation-protected securities: also known as TIPS, these treasury notes protect against inflation. Eventually you’ll want to own these, but they’d be the last ones I’d get after investing in all the better-returning options first.

Awkwardness isn't a weakness to fix. It's your greatest asset for professional and personal growth.

According to Ripley, the sketchy disclosures by International Match continued to be typical of those by leading companies. National Biscuit Company’s income statement from 1925 was just three-by-four inches, and didn’t need even that much space – it included just a single entry labeled “Earnings, Year 1925”.11 The Royal Baking Powder Company didn’t issue any financial statements at all.12 Many corporate reports contained disclaimers that the official income account “does not by any means give a clear picture of the annual earning power” or that “the balance sheet by no means discloses the true value of the company’s fixed assets.

The main components of an OP1 narrative are: Assessment of past performance, including goals achieved, goals missed, and lessons learned Key initiatives for the following year A detailed income statement Requests (and justifications) for resources, which may include things like new hires, marketing spend, equipment, and other fixed assets Each group works in partnership with its finance and human resources counterparts to create their detailed plan, which is then presented to a panel of leaders.

It’s importance, however, is bigger than that. Treasury securities are the risk-free yield curve for all of the financial markets. That’s right, the yields of Treasury Bills, Notes, and Bonds from overnight to 30 years make up a yield curve that is used to price all other fixed-income securities. The Treasury market is the reference rate for interest rates. Treasurys are a tool for pricing corporate bonds, municipal bonds, emerging market bonds, federal agencies, mortgage-backed securities, and other dollar assets. On top of that, they’re also a tool for speculation and hedging risk.

By and large, you are born into an extravaganza of fixed variables that you do not control. You must accept this. At the same time, you also must believe you are the master of your own future. You can take responsibility for the outcomes in your life. You can achieve virtually anything you set your mind to, as long as what you set your mind to is within the realms of possibility for you, based on your strengths and assets (your unfair advantages).

Depreciation is considered a non-cash expense because the money required to purchase a particular fixed asset has already been spent.

Since no one really has a fixed tolerance for risk, says psychologist Paul Slovic, it’s more helpful to think in terms of “goals, objectives, and outcomes.” How much money will you need down the road? How will you get there? What kind of result do you want to attain—or want to avoid? To answer these questions, you need to know your budget, calculate your current assets, and plan your future income and expenses. While those numbers aren’t perfectly certain, either, they are a much more reliable basis for judgment than a squishy concept like “risk tolerance.

The data bears this out. In addition to a “persistence scorecard,” S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes snapshots of how many mutual funds beat their benchmarks. Most years, a majority underperform their indices, whatever the market. Over multiple years, the data becomes progressively grimmer. As of June 2020, only 15 percent of US stock-pickers had cumulatively managed to surpass their benchmark over the last decade. In bond markets, it is a similar tale, albeit varying depending on the flavor of fixed income. The data is more favorable for fund managers in more exotic, less efficient asset classes, such as emerging markets, but on the whole the data is clear that in the longer run most fund managers still underperform their passive rivals after fees.

Let’s take a look at the five major asset classes: Alternative assets, which are usually physical assets like fine watches, real estate, collectible cars, art, and jewelry Stocks, which represent ownership of a piece of a publicly traded company Fixed-income investments such as government bonds and deposit certificates Cash, such as dollar bills, and cash equivalents such as savings accounts, retirement accounts, and 401(k)s Futures and other derivatives, which are contracts between two parties agreeing to buy and sell assets, usually commodities like gold, corn, wheat, or cows, at a future date

First, Modern Portfolio Theory only works if a portfolio has some fixed income as well as some equity. This system breaks down if you’re too tilted one way or the other. For example, during a stock market crash like the one we had, if I had been holding 100 percent equity, rebalancing wouldn’t work. As the stock market plummeted, there would have been no complementary asset that would rise, so my allocations wouldn’t have changed and I’d have had nothing to rebalance. That’s why I advise not going above 80 percent equity, even if you’re an aggressive investor.

The balance sheet told a different story. Selling for $13.38 per share at the end of 1954—an $18.8 million market capitalization—P&R traded close to its net current asset value of $9.16 per share, a figure that included significant excess inventory. While this alone was not enough to make the stock cheap, P&R also had an off-balance-sheet asset known as culm banks, a waste material accumulated from anthracite mining which was thought to have value as a fuel source. Buffett believed this asset could be worth around $8 per share.150 The net current asset value and the culm banks combined were worth $17 a share, enough to give Buffett confidence that the stock was cheap. But, as Table 2 shows, the company also had substantial property, plant, and equipment. These fixed assets were almost certainly worth less than their carrying value, as the industry had deteriorated since the company last valued them when it emerged from bankruptcy in 1945. While it wasn’t clear what they were worth, they were certainly worth something. Finally, and ultimately most importantly, Ben Graham was on P&R’s board of directors, becoming a member after purchasing the stock in 1952. Buffett, who had discovered the stock on his own, would join Graham’s firm in 1954. While Graham had not taken any significant action as a board member by then, Buffett sensed that his professor, mentor, and now boss would eventually make something happen. As he later stated, “I was just a peon sitting in the outer office… I was not in the inner circle, but I was terribly interested, knowing something was going on.

If there is one thing that we should have fixed in the new South Africa it is education. After my matric I enrolled for an A-level course in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Within the first day of studies my South African friends and I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that the South African system had well-nigh destroyed us: the Zimbabweans were far more educated, more assured and more able to grasp the advanced concepts put before us by our teachers. We were left in the dust. Today, a tour of South Africa’s banks, pension funds, asset managers, insurance companies and other financial services firms will show you that it is Zimbabweans and other black Africans who are at the top of the pile. The reason for this is not difficult to find: Zimbabwe and other newly independent nations did not fiddle with their education systems. The system worked in colonial days and under post-liberation administrations. South Africa’s education system, however, was allowed to stutter, calcify and rot by our own post-1994 administrations, including that of Nelson Mandela.

Both had started in commercial paper, probably the sleepiest, least risky part of the firm’s business. Fixed-income trading was nothing like Fuld and Gregory knew in their day: Banks were creating increasingly complex products many levels removed from the underlying asset. This entailed a much greater degree of risk, a reality that neither totally grasped and showed remarkably little interest in learning more about. While the firm did employ a well-regarded chief risk officer, Madelyn Antoncic, who had a PhD in economics and had worked at Goldman Sachs, her input was virtually nil. She was often asked to leave the room when issues concerning risk came up at executive committee meetings, and in late 2007, she was removed from the committee altogether.

The fundamental problem is that modern financial systems left to themselves inevitably create debt in excessive quantities, and in particular debt that does not fund new capital investment but rather the purchase of already existing assets, above all real estate. It is that debt creation which drives booms and financial busts: and it is the debt overhang left over by the boom that explains why recovery from the 2007–2008 financial crisis has been so anemic.

lot. In addition to the behaviour that caused the crisis, major US and European banks have been caught assisting corporate fraud by Enron and others, laundering money for drug cartels and the Iranian military, aiding tax evasion, hiding the assets of corrupt dictators, colluding in order to fix prices, and committing many forms of financial fraud. The evidence is now overwhelming that over the last thirty years, the US financial sector has become a rogue industry.

ROCE: are you getting the best return on your investment?   As mentioned above, the ROE’s weakness is that it only takes into consideration the equity of a company, not accounting for the proportion of debt.   The return of capital employed (ROCE) fixes this problem because it takes into consideration the fixed assets (i.e., the investment that is employed to produce value).

some of the structural drivers of inflation have also weakened. Trade unions have become less powerful. Loss-making state industries have been privatized. But, perhaps most importantly of all, the social constituency with an interest in positive real returns on bonds has grown. In the developed world a rising share of wealth is held in the form of private pension funds and other savings institutions that are required, or at least expected, to hold a high proportion of their assets in the form of government bonds and other fixed income securities. In 2007 a survey of pension funds in eleven major economies revealed that bonds accounted for more than a quarter of their assets, substantially lower than in past decades, but still a substantial share.71 With every passing year, the proportion of the population living off the income from such funds goes up, as the share of retirees increases.

Know your own value As a new contributor to a project, you are an invaluable asset not for your knowledge, but for your ignorance. When first starting work in FOSS, nothing seems (to you) so obvious as to be unworthy of mention. Take notes on the problems you have encountered and how they were fixed, then use those notes to update the project documentation or work with the community to prepare screen casts or other training materials for particularly tough problems. When you encounter something truly frustrating, realize you are in the spectacular position of helping make sure the next person who comes along does not encounter the same difficulties.

And, as inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default – not to mention Russia’s in 1998 – the spreads on emerging market bonds have trended steadily downwards, reaching lows in early 2007 that had not been seen since before the First World War, implying an almost unshakeable confidence in the economic future. Rumours of the death of Mr Bond have clearly proved to be exaggerated. Inflation has come down partly because many of the items we buy, from clothes to computers, have got cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia. It has also been reduced because of a worldwide transformation in monetary policy, which began with the monetarist-inspired increases in short-term rates implemented by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and continued with the spread of central bank independence and explicit targets in the 1990s. Just as importantly, as the Argentine case shows, some of the structural drivers of inflation have also weakened. Trade unions have become less powerful. Loss-making state industries have been privatized. But, perhaps most importantly of all, the social constituency with an interest in positive real returns on bonds has grown. In the developed world a rising share of wealth is held in the form of private pension funds and other savings institutions that are required, or at least expected, to hold a high proportion of their assets in the form of government bonds and other fixed income securities. In 2007 a survey of pension funds in eleven major economies revealed that bonds accounted for more than a quarter of their assets, substantially lower than in past decades, but still a substantial share.71 With every passing year, the proportion of the population living off the income from such funds goes up, as the share of retirees increases.

Summers also claimed that technology was reducing the demand for capital. Digital businesses, such as Facebook and Google, had established dominant global franchises with relatively little invested capital and small workforces. In his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin heralded the passing of traditional capitalism.16 If the Old Economy was marked by scarcity and declining marginal returns, Rikfin argued that the New Economy was characterized by zero marginal costs, increasing returns to scale and capital-lite ‘sharing’ apps (such as Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc.). The demand for capital and interest rates, he said, were set to fall in this ‘economy of abundance’. There was some evidence to support Rifkin’s claims. The balance sheets of US companies showed they were using fewer fixed assets (factories, plant, equipment, etc.) and reporting more ‘intangibles’ – namely, assets derived from patents, intellectual property and merger premiums. In much of the rest of the world, however, the demand for old-fashioned capital remained as strong as ever. After the turn of the century, the developing world exhibited a voracious appetite for industrial commodities that required massive mining investment. China embarked on what was probably the greatest investment boom in history. Before and after 2008, global energy consumption rose steadily. The world’s total investment (relative to GDP) remained in line with its historical average.17 Rifkin’s ‘economy of abundance’ remained a tantalizing speculation.

How do accountants measure the value of assets? For most fixed and long-term assets, such as land, buildings, and equipment, they begin with what you originally paid for the asset (historical cost) and reduce that value for the aging of the asset (depreciation or amortization). For short-term assets (current assets), including inventory (raw materials, works in progress, and finished goods), receivables (summarizing moneys owed to the firm), and cash, accountants are more amenable to the use of an updated or market value. If a company invests in the securities or assets of another company, the investment is valued at an updated market value if the investment is held for trading and historical cost when it is not. In the special case where the holding comprises more than 50 percent of the value of another company (subsidiary), the firm must record all of the subsidiary's assets and liabilities on its balance sheet (this is called consolidation), with a minority interest item capturing the percentage of the subsidiary that does not belong to it. Finally, you have what are loosely categorized as intangible assets. While you would normally consider items such as brand names, customer loyalty, and a well-trained work force as intangible assets, the most encountered intangible asset in accounting is goodwill. When a firm acquires another firm, the price it pays is first allocated to the existing assets of the acquired firm. Any excess paid becomes goodwill and is recorded as an asset.

The main components of an OP1 narrative are: Assessment of past performance, including goals achieved, goals missed, and lessons learned Key initiatives for the following year A detailed income statement Requests (and justifications) for resources, which may include things like new hires, marketing spend, equipment, and other fixed assets

Counterparty is a cryptocommodity that runs atop Bitcoin, and was launched in January 2014 with a similar intent as Ethereum. It has a fixed supply of 2.6 million units of its native asset, XCP, which were all created upon launch. As described on Counterparty’s website, “Counterparty enables anyone to write specific digital agreements, or programs known as Smart Contracts, and execute them on the Bitcoin blockchain.”7 Since Bitcoin allows for small amounts of data to be transmitted in transactions and stored on Bitcoin’s blockchain, it becomes the system of record for Counterparty’s more flexible functionality. Since Counterparty relies upon Bitcoin, it does not have its own mining ecosystem.

there is always a better choice than cowardice, if you have business to take care of.” Then he laughed and shook his head. “One day, long ago, my life was shaped and my fate was fixed. Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago. But how I live, and how I die, that is my choice.

But the government’s college debt was priceless on paper—because Congress could use the make-believe future repayments to balance the budget. To the Congressional Budget Office, the phantom revenue of skyrocketing loans that could never possibly be repaid became an asset and thus a form of “deficit control.

On a simple level, derivatives are financial products whose value is linked to an underlying set of assets. Derivatives can help businesses smooth out price fluctuations. For example, if a company wants to protect itself from a fall in a commodity price, it could buy a kind of derivative called a forward contract, which allows it to sell at a fixed price in the future.

An option is not a financial asset. It is a simple contract that gives its owner the right to buy (call option) or sell (put option) a certain amount (the multiplier, usually 100) of a stock, a future, or some other asset (the underlying) at a fixed price (the strike) at or before a fixed date (the expiry). Better read the previous sentence twice.

The shift from a system in which the debt notes are convertible to a tangible asset (e.g., gold and silver) at a fixed rate to a fiat monetary system in which there is no such convertibility last happened in the US on the evening of August 15, 1971. As I mentioned earlier, I was watching on TV when President Nixon told the world that the dollar would no longer be tied to gold. I thought there would be pandemonium with stocks falling. Instead, they rose. Because I had never seen a devaluation before, I didn’t understand how it works.

Years later, people would ask me, “How did you know when and what to buy?” But all I basically did was create a massive arbitrage—a fixed-rate instrument in an inflationary environment. I essentially took on $4 billion of nonrecourse debt at an average interest rate of 6 percent in an environment with inflation of 9 percent or higher. That means I was already making 3 percent returns the second the deal closed—without doing a thing to the assets. Sure, we picked some terrific properties, but every one didn’t have to be Class A.

After many years of investing, I realized that I needed to focus as much, if not more, on the company’s balance sheet. Receivables, inventory, payables, fixed assets. And most important of all, debt. Corporate finance theory has a thing for leverage. For those of you who are not familiar with it, finance academics claim that companies need to have an “optimal” level of leverage to improve returns.18 If a company can borrow money to purchase assets, its return on equity and earnings per share should improve. Mathematically, this is undoubtedly true. Realistically, this is undoubtedly dangerous.

The Case of the Swiss Franc. If a giant money supply was the cause of rising prices, you’d think Switzerland would be overwhelmed by hyperinflation. With a population of just less than nine million, that country has eight times more base money per capita than Canada, whose population is nearly four times the size at thirty-eight million. Instead, the Swiss franc has been one of the world’s most reliable currencies over the past hundred years, with less inflation than the US dollar, British pound, euro, or the preceding German mark. As a result of this track record, many people outside Switzerland are eager to hold assets denominated in Swiss francs. In other words, demand for the Swiss franc is high. To meet this expanding demand, and keep the currency from rising uncomfortably, the Swiss central bank has had to increase supply aggressively.

Environmental influences almost invariably point investors down the path to investment failure. Advertisements flog stocks at equity market peaks, with nary a mention of diversifying fixed-income assets. After stocks suffer bear-market losses, the media tout the beneficial effects of owning bonds as an important part of a well-balanced portfolio. The overwhelming bulk of messages to investors suggest owning yesterday’s darling and avoiding yesterday’s goat.

Six asset classes provide exposure to well-defined investment attributes. Investors expect equity-like returns from domestic equities, foreign developed market equities, and emerging market equities. Conventional domestic fixed-income and inflation-indexed securities provide diversification, albeit at the cost of expected returns that fall below those anticipated from equity investments. Exposure to real estate contributes diversification to the portfolio with lower opportunity costs than fixed-income investments.

The net amount for property, plant and equipment is achieved after subtracting accumulated depreciation from the fixed assets’ original cost

From a superficial perspective, tax-exempt bonds appear to offer investors the opportunity to place fixed-income assets in taxable accounts (where their special tax characteristics lessen or eliminate tax consequences), freeing capacity in tax-deferred accounts for higher-tax-burdened assets. Regrettably, the problems of credit risk and callability lessen the appeal of tax-exempt bonds to investors.

Trumpeting EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) is a particularly pernicious practice. Doing so implies that depreciation is not truly an expense, given that it is a “non-cash” charge. Imagine, if you will, that at the beginning of this year a company paid all of its employees for the next ten years of their service (in the way they would lay out cash for a fixed asset to be useful for ten years). In the following nine years, compensation would be a “non-cash” expense—a reduction of a prepaid compensation asset established this year. Would anyone care to argue that the recording of the expense in years two through ten would be simply a bookkeeping formality?

Suppose, for example, the CEO's year-end bonus is based on growth in earnings per share. Assume also that for financial reporting purposes, the corporation's depreciation schedules assume an average life of eight years for fixed assets. By arbitrarily amending that assumption to nine years (and obtaining the auditors’ consent to the change), the corporation can lower its annual depreciation expense. This is strictly an accounting change; the actual cost of replacing equipment worn down through use does not decline. Neither does the corporation's tax deduction for depreciation expense rise nor, as a consequence, does cash flow11 (see Chapter 4). Investors recognize that bona fide profits (see Chapter 5) have not increased, so the corporation's stock price does not change in response to the new accounting policy. What does increase is the CEO's bonus, as a function of the artificially contrived boost in earnings per share.

In a Balance Sheet, Liabilities represent Sources, and Assets represent Uses of funds. There are two principal sources of funds, Owners and Outsiders. Each invests in two ways. Owners make a direct contribution when they invest their money, and an indirect contribution when they leave behind the profits which they were entitled to take home. Outsiders invest by either lending money (loans) or by lending goods (suppliers’ credit). The resources so raised are deployed in two ways: towards creation of infrastructure (purchase of fixed assets) and towards working capital. Working capital has three components, namely inventory, cash and bank balances, and debtors or receivables.

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Figuring out how to allocate your assets doesn’t need to be difficult. Obviously, as my grandmother liked to remind me, you don’t want to keep all your eggs in one basket. But how do you know what proportion of your nest egg should be invested in equities vs. fixed-income securities? There are all sorts of ways to calculate this. For my part, I prefer the following simple rule of thumb. Take your age and subtract it from 110. The number you get is the percentage of your assets that should go into equities; the remainder should go into bonds or other fixed-income investments.

In the late 1970s, growth in Western economies began to slow down and returns on capital began to decline. Governments came under pressure to do something about it – to create a ‘fix’ for capital. So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors.

Anticipated receipt of a fixed amount from life insurance proceeds represents a virtual fixed-income asset, suggesting a diminished role for bonds in an investor’s portfolio.

• Besides fixed assets, an industrial company needs to manage working capital efficiently.