Bling Bling and the Optimist (Part II)

As regular readers will recall, our Summer 2006 Blue Sheets recorded a meeting that veteran Wall Street money manager George Murphy held in his offices in lower Manhattan with two old friends of very different investment persuasions. Murph had invited his astute buddies to help him discern a safe path through the jungle of opportunities and risks in a tumultuous new era of global commerce.

In “Bling-Bling and the Optimist (Part I)”, available on our website, we heard the views of Bling-Bling (BB) Graff, a libertarian gold bug and classic glass-half-empty observer of the economic scene. BB focused our attention on the likelihood that all paper currencies will steadily lose value; that Asian demand is colliding with peaking world oil production to drive energy prices to the moon; that the U.S. manufacturing base is sliding into the Pacific while our national retirement obligations remain hopelessly under-funded. Not surprisingly, BB’s ideal portfolio is larded with gold bullion, oil stocks, mining companies, short-term Treasuries and short positions in U.S. stocks.

Now, in Part II we’ll listen in as Murph’s other, somewhat younger and vastly more optimistic buddy, Joel (Rosy) Rosen, holds forth on the messianic promise of technology, the storied resilience of the US economy and the unstoppable improvement of the human condition.