Trump, and Clason’s five laws of gold
FINANCIAL LITERACY: What the incoming US president might mean for your money and what you should do about it
ILEARNT the cool term POTUS — President of the United States — from watching The West Wing on television. Well, now that Donald Trump is POTUS-in-waiting and because many people are worried about this development, I recommend we all pray hard for our planet!
It will be a wild ride.
Along the way, American politics will morph into the most entertaining reality show we’ve ever seen. For the record, I wrote repeatedly many months ago about my stupefaction and grave misgivings when The Donald lined up with better qualified candidates vying for the Republican Party’s nomination. Trump won that race and then proceeded to trounce Hillary Clinton because the US’ complicated electoral system permitted him to do so even though he actually garnered about one million fewer votes than did Mrs Clinton.
One reason I paid close attention to what was happening in the US was that I am fortunate enough to have visited the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC in 1994 when Bill Clinton was president. It wasn’t my first trip to the US and it wasn’t my last.
All in all, I have visited the US eleven times over a span of 29 years, from the summer of 1987 to two months ago in September. I love the people, tolerate the sometimes testy customs and immigration officers and detest the disturbing levels of gun violence and prisoner incarceration.
Clearly, no place is perfect; Malaysia isn’t and neither is the US. Still, we should remember the US is the only nation to have landed men on the moon and brought all 12 of them safely back home to Earth. Also, it’s the US that gave us all Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood and Disneyland! Any way we look at it, the US is hugely relevant.
That is why I am convinced Trump’s victory will affect everyone on Earth somehow, some way over the next four years.
They will be difficult, challenging and heart-wrenching years. But, they will also be joyous, fun and uplifting ones.
After all, that’s how life always plays out across our interconnected world, regardless of who sits on the throne at the apex of power.
Nonetheless, to tip the scales of probable success in our favour, each of us should make it a major life goal to improve how we manage our money.
For all my reservations about Trump — and I have many — I realise there is at least a decent chance with a billionaire businessman in the White House ( Forbes estimated Trump’s net worth at US$3.7 billion, or RM16.3 billion), his anticipated pro-business measures will improve the economic climate in the US and, thus, eventually worldwide. That’s good but, as you well know, when aggregate planetary wealth levels rise, the distribution of that wealth will be supremely uneven. Therefore, to benefit more, rather than less, we should position ourselves to thrive on market volatility.
Towards that end, the “five laws of gold”, meaning wealth, in George S. Clason’s book, The Richest Man in Babylon, are useful. I suggest you buy yourself a copy to savour Clason’s clear writing style. For now though, here is my reworded version of those great laws:
OUR wealth pile can start with just a 10 per cent monthly savings rate;
WEALTH grows if our money saved is subsequently invested wisely;
WEALTH is protected when it is invested in line with sound advice from experts;
W E A LT H dissipates gradually when it is unwisely invested in schemes that are complicated and difficult to understand; and,
WEALTH vanishes quickly when irrationally high returns are pursued by the greedy and the naive in getrich-quick schemes.
We are all entering the Age of Trump. That’s a given. But whether our prosperity levels soar or shrink in the Trump years ahead will depend a lot more on us and on what we choose to do to prosper than on anything the so-called leader of the free world does. rajen@RajenDevadason.com
Twitter@RajenDevadason
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