#all my problems solved. at least a decade of financial stability

[helpicant-stop]

i'm honestly so jealous of whoever did the 50k dollar hazbin hotel amv for that one guy. if every commissioner was like this artists would be living in paradise

[rare-yanderes]

(F/H) =favorite hobby.

I have the weirdest crush on this freaking duck and I don’t know why, so I’m taking out my confusion on this matter by making him yandere. Sorry that this is so long, boring and slow but I’m a sucker for slow burns and just dislike instant love. This went from just from headcannons to a freaking long ass story. I think I’ll make more on how the reader reacts when they find out just how mentally fucked Scrooge became.

Who knows, maybe I’ll write one for good ol’ Flinty. I have a feeling he’d just drop kick any rival he spots without much qualms about it. Meanwhile, Scrooge has a full on psychological derailment.

TW: manipulation, dependent behavior, stalking, and more.

______________

•To be honest, the likelyhood of Scrooge turning into a yandere might be higher than you think. He’s capable of self defense and can fight. He literally hunts treasure for a living. He also has a trillion dollar stockpile sitting around begging to be used for cover ups. His determination is pretty crazy, and he’s seen a lot on his adventures, things that would kind of instill a paranoia over time or an unhealthy me mentality. He can easily hide behind a professional front. Oh, and if he so wanted, he could travel and bury any evidence under a volcano. :)

•Since this is a yandere AU or, I’m gonna go with the idea that this is a what if the show had a TV-14 rating as well, so much darker themes can link and be explored.

•After pretty much a century of adventure, most of which includes violence and fighting through perils, human or not so, Scrooge is desensitized to quite a bit of violence and the dark and greedy side of the world. He’s seen the best of people and also the worst. This plays majorly in anyone who becomes a yandere; how exposed they are to people’s bad side or their own dark tendencies.

•Scrooge himself is not perfect and has demonstrated some traits of greediness, paranoia, and general distrustful behavior which is perfectly reasonable considering his work and the things he exposes himself too during it.

•Even though he loves adventure, there are a lot of bad things that happen on them that he seems to bottle up or keep to himself. Bottling up things causes a negative buildup in anyone, especially Scrooge because he expects that loving his life’s work will repair the same damage it sometimes does to him.

•Most likely, Scrooge developed an affinity with you through your similar drive for adventure. Maybe you worked for him in some way and he saw you defend someone or maybe you outsmarted one of his adversaries on an adventure he decided to bring you on. Regardless, you’ve caught his attention and this is only the beginning.

•A rival love interest’s biggest mistake is mistaking his age for a weakness. One minute he’s complaining about someone being on his lawn, the other they’re buried under it.

•Scrooge would probably connect most if he’s seen that you used to be in his shoes before, or at least a similar situation. Maybe you’re struggling financially but working your ass off to stabilize your income. As someone with the humble origins of a shoeshiner, Scrooge understands perfectly. Despite his incredible stockpile of wealth, he knows what’s it’s like to be at rock bottom.

•At first, you’re probably obviously very suprised with Scrooge’s involvement in your life. He’s from an entirely different world than yours after all, the top of the pyramid. Depending on your origins, you might react quite differently. Currently, you managed to find yourself stuck in a job you hated, working for someone you despised. It was a miserable, repetitive job that brought to your life a void of boredom.

•You craved adrenaline, even if it would get you killed, you finally figured that at least you’d go out with a spark. Putting on a smiling face, you accept a position at McDuck industries thinking that it was going to be another office job. By your luck, (or, later on, unfortunate luck), you managed to score a position that required you to be near Scrooge quite often.

•This gave both of you time to acquaint with eachother and the opportunity for him to see the potential in you as an adventurer instead of just an employee. Scrooge rarely lets people in beyond family, and is quite reserved so he himself questions what he sees in you at first, distrusting you even.

•When you are taken on your first adventure, you nearly boil over with eagerness. There’s a worry at first of the treachery involved but eventually, as you venture on more and more explorations, that fear dulls and you think the adrenaline as far more important than the possible loss of your life.

•Craving adrenaline is the main reason at first as to why you to want to stay around Scrooge. Despite his repeated attempts to brush or push you away, you find yourself excited every time you get to explore and finally get to see a world that you thought you’d never visit.

•Still, Scrooge remains cold and you can’t figure out why beyond the reason that he’s just a pessimistic old capitalist. As much as you want the adrenaline, you kinda can’t help but eventually enjoy his presence as well despite his temper and general grumpiness. Having been alone for over two decades without friends does that to someone. You needed warmth again.

•Maybe you grew attached to all the times you felt you were winning when you snubbed an artifact. Also, after collecting and sneaking a few gold coins into your own pocket, you were finally getting out of debt and on track to actually start your own business involving (F/H). You had the dream that you could travel where you wanted and finally find peace from your own mind and problems.

•Scrooge, despite his own warnings to himself not to persue, can’t help but offer you a job working for him. You made adventuring a million times better and were a great addition to the team, providing your own perspective or plan for the times he and his family would journey out. Oh, and he’d finally get the opportunity to be around you more. It was refreshing to see how optimistic you managed to remain despite your current financial predicament. (Which he contemplated solving.)

•Soon, however, Scrooge began to see that you were not as happy go lucky as you pretended to be, at least not when you weren’t on another treasure hunt. Something appeared to be gnawing at you. Deep down inside, it appeared to plague you and Scrooge began to worry for your well being and as a too curious for his own good duck, he needed to know what was going on. Especially when he had caught you quickly wiping away tears while you began to head home. What could possibly be causing you this pain?

•He had to find out and to his own realization, he had to know now. After all the times you saved and helped him, he wanted to make sure you were at least doing alright in return. He ordered Launchpad to tail you home and Launchpad, oh so very loyal, doesn’t question it much.

•Most yanderes might suffer from the constant delusion that their victims love them back or that they’re in the right but that’s not the case with Scrooge. There are times where he does try to justify himself, but this is mainly due to a fit of rage or to play innocent to you. Most of the time, he knows his actions are wrong and the burning temptation is causing a war. Very early on, he suppresses his curiosity and the growing feelings he has about you. Especially when they begin to boil into something far darker. Although he’s done this to nearly everyone, being cold to you and pushing you away seemed to be his way of trying to ensure your well being instead of his. He was finding it hard not to think about you sometimes.

•Soon enough though, he begins to grow inquisitive about your personal life as you open up to him and define yourself as a person instead of another blur. You were always quite genuine to just sit around and talk to him and despite denying it to himself, Scrooge was lonely, especially after the Spear of Selene. Sometimes you’d joke to him, sometimes you’d think philosophically. Sometimes it was just a mutual, comfortable silence.

•Scrooge might make excuses aloud to you, but doesn’t lie to himself. All the times he’s made you work later or given you an extra dose of paperwork was because he wanted to keep you around and in his line of sight. 12 hours without you was turning into a painful reminder of how isolated he was, even with Beakley around. You were a warmth, a cool, calm warmth.

• “I’ll eventually need to know her address later on in case she’s attacked by one of my adversaries anyways.” Nope, Scrooge wasn’t fooling himself with that sentiment. He knew he was invading your privacy, but he also knew that he was too nosy to care enough.

•The main problem is that although Scrooge knows a lot of what he’s doing isn’t right, he begins to care less and less. (Though this process takes quite a while.) You’re a valuable and positive part of his life, you had stayed when everyone else had abandoned him for his admittedly awful mistakes. He can’t lose another person he treasures. Especially not you. You’re becoming the shiniest yet. Losing you might mean losing himself in some sense.

•Scrooge tries to shake off the guilt but only finds that maybe it’s better to punish himself by feeling it. He’s currently following along your path to wherever your destination currently is.

•Of course, his iconic shiny limousine would be a sore thumb sticking out to both you, the media, and Duckberg in general so he makes sure to either trail far behind or to have another mode of transportation available. Regardless, Scrooge never hires another person to watch you in place.

•Scrooge doesn’t even install cameras. He’d rather experience your life from his own two eyes and not as reported from another bird or screen. He rather liked tracking you himself. It gave him a place to go and at least he’d be able to bask in your duality himself. Sometimes you cried, he found to his own breaking heart. Sometimes you’d smile, (mostly only in his presence, to his delight.)

•Most of all, though, you seem caught in the present of life. Distracted, even. It seems though, that sometimes you’re so distracted that you don’t even notice something is off. Or maybe you yourself are too unable to break the cycle of adrenaline adventure to see it. Maybe you yourself were actively creating excuses, at least at first as to why you sometimes ran into Scrooge McDuck everywhere.

•If there’s something else Scrooge is a master at other than money, it’s with keeping up the detached and reserved persona of a wealthy individual. After all, who would suspect him of such crimes like these? He’s just a selfish, greedy businessman that only cares about his wealth, right? He’d never bother with other birds unless he was shaking hands at a conference table.

•Wrong. As you and him grow to become more like mentor and student, Scrooge begins to insert himself everywhere he possible can in your life, especially after seeing the shitfest that was your social group, what little of it there was. Apparently, you’d finally made a few friends over the years working for him and there was only one out of all of them that Scrooge approved of.

•Two of them, both identical Peacock twins appeared to be fascinated with your link to him and nothing more. It made some sense. After all, who could say they were a close worker to the richest duck in the world? The other one, a tall and lanky chicken, was getting far too handsy with you, and the final, a feline male was nothing but gossip and drama.

•To add to insult, you were a pretty big pushover outside of work which meant that they would drag you to places you didn’t even want to go and pressure you to have drinks you didn’t want to taste. They were in love with the mask you put up, not the complex and amazing face behind it. The one that you were beginning to let Scrooge see.

• Scrooge watches from a distance as your laugh reverberates. The laugh appears to Scrooge as unwavered and solid, mechanical in nature like it was a reoccurring script. Gazing at your face, he could see that your smile was strained, beak scrunched. You just wanted to go home and nothing more.

•The chicken next to you he was sucking a cigarette and the smoke blew in your direction, replacing your laugh with coughing and the others cackled with drunk glee, their solo cups tipping as they did. You blew it off as an accidental push in the wind which, by the way, wasn’t even blowing.

•Out of all of them, Scrooge hated the lanky chicken, who’s name he learned was Gale, the most. You deserved far better than that. Surely you saw through his sleazy act, right? Why were you hanging around such a ratched group of birds? Just how blind were you to their usage of you?

•Almost without even realizing it himself, Scrooge had tailed you the entire way home. After having to torment himself with an hour of seeing you torment yourself, he figured that maybe you’d find something that made you happy other thanyour little flock of “friends.”

•So he was admitting to being a stalker to himself. Did that mean he’d be able to admit it to oblivious ol’ you? Well, no. At least, not for now. Not until you trust him completely. Oh well, he’ll never go further than then that, right? He was watching you, but not engaging in any way. Nothing worse could come out of it..

•Wrong.

•After a while of having you working under him at McDuck Industries, Scrooge began to realize just how much financial control he had over you. Not only did you depend on him cod for paycheck, your landlord worked for someone who worked for him. In other words, the spot of land you were living on was an apartment company that belonged to him. You were living under one of his roofs. All he’d have to do was shift some circumstances and you’d either be homeless or debt free forever. Scrooge of course, plays the benevolent route and lowers it significantly for you. Why antagonize you?

•After having taken that action, Scrooge noticed more and more of a smile on your face as you realized that you didn’t have to depend paycheck to paycheck for food on the table. He had also been aware that you had a side hobby now, involving (F/H.) sometimes you joked you’d start a business and go off parting ways with that hobby. It was source of entertainment to watch you be..Well, you. There was this genuine behavior about you that just drew him in.

•If Scrooge wasn’t adventuring with you or at a meeting also with you, he was still with you. You just didn’t know it yet. Interestingly however, you’d begun to pick up the signs that there was a presence in your life. Whereas you didn’t close the blinds before, you did now. Or maybe that was from all the adventures you’d nearly died on fighting others off. Maybe it was paranoia.

•Eventually, Scrooge managed to break into your apartment under the guise to Launchpad that he’d been invited by you. A ludicrous lie, of course, but Launchpad is gullible to a fault when it comes to Scrooge. He’s loyal like that, and his friendliness to you plays into Scrooge’s emotional manipulation later on.

•As Scrooge sneaks in while you’re still home, he makes his way behind the kitchen counter which seperated your living room. He didn’t expect you to be right there in the living room, but you were, just five feet away from him and the window he snuck in. The window was to your right. He had carefully parted the curtains. Your couch was sitting approximately five feet from the window balcony, facing a corner of the wall with the T.V off.

•Peculiarly, you hadn’t even noticed he’d entered by rigging the door. You were right there, not staring at his direction, but he should have at least appeared in your peripheral. Just what were you doing to be so disconnected to the reality around you? It was worrying.

•Now hidden behind the counter directly to the left of you, he observes your desensitized form. For a moment, Scrooge thought you were a corpse until he peered closer. You were still there, physically. Mentally you looked as if you were in a whole other dimension. In a rather bold move, Scrooge slowly stands up and positions himself in the archway, watching you from his spot.

•You were still, so very still unlike all the times you’d fidget at work or with those “friends.” You still breathed and your hands shook slightly and there was color to your eyes but you yourself didn’t even seem present whatsoever. Your eyes were glazed and far away. It was just your body sitting there in that couch. It was worrisome and yet there was a blissful smile to your face seconds later.

•It was you, daydreaming about something. Something you obviously enjoyed. Scrooge, to his own shame, hoped it involved him. For a few more moments, all you did was sigh like you were meditating. It was haunting how easily you had lost yourself within the confines of your tumbling mind. Somehow, you were blocking out the world beyond, maladaptively.

• Scrooge knew he was taking a huge risk. All you’d have to do to spot him now was swivel your head a few inches or wake up from dreamland. It would take a few inches to ruin what you thought of him.

Just then, to Scrooge’s horror, you had slowly picked yourself off the couch. Your body shuttered as your head snapped up. He knew he was taking a huge risk with this and began to think that maybe it was a terrible idea after all. (Who was he kidding, it was terrible in the first place, he knew what he was doing.)

•He quickly fell back to his crouched position behind the counter, silently and expertly as you turned around and made your way closer and closer. There was a tense moment in which Scrooge contemplated just knocking you down completely and rendering you unconscious. All it would take was a few seconds. Maybe you’d forget or maybe he’d give you the dreamland you seemed so desperate to reach. It would certainly give him peace of mind to know where you are 24/7..All he’d have to do is knock you out and take you to the manor. You’d be secure and have everything you need there…

•Your presence was setting him alight, in the good way and bad way. He loved being near you. But hated the idea of you getting any closer right now, because you getting any closer would ruin your trust in him entirely. A few more steps is all there was between the idol you saw Scrooge as and the monster he was growing to be. You were like a fire. The heat scorched his feathers. Then, when you were away, his thoughts.

•Your steps were louder than they’d ever been. Then, to Scrooge’s unbelievable luck, you turned towards the hallway away from the kitchen. Scrooge knew not to push his luck trying to follow or stay, so despite his clawing urge to figure you out, he hesitantly snuck out with unanswered questions on your concerning mental state.

•It had been a months since that incident and Scrooge was moving onto bigger and bolder actions. Sometimes he’d swipe you away from any conversations you had with your friends by calling you in for a task. Sometimes he’d eat up all your time by keeping you in late, and taking you to places far away that required days of travel.

•Sometimes he’d drive bad influences away by financially ruining their life forever.

You noticed Gale’s downfall quickly, but you didn’t have any idea it was Scrooge who was responsible. Gale lived actually, three complexes from you and oh so suddenly, rent had begun to skyrocket in the particular room he had to himself. This led to him being presented with an eviction notice. You didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye. (Not that you wanted to, though.) deep down you were glad he was gone and Scrooge knew it. Gale had to move far off to find an affordable spot. It was a mercy considering how often Scrooge had dreamed of just throwing him into the ocean tied up for the sharks to find. He was a toxic influence.

•Maybe if someone pushed his button just right, Scrooge would end up killing them, and who would care? There were seven billion fellow people on the planet. Scrooge could just get rid of any threat he wanted and no one would notice or ever suspect it was him. After all, he’s just a grumpy old man with a cane.

•It turns out, Scrooge had picked up on your plans to possibly quit your job. He had never felt his heart sink like it did now. He was fighting off his initial shock as you stood in his office, masking it with a detached face. You hadn’t even confirmed the statement. All you’d said was that maybe you’d found a company within your favorite hobby.

•It was just a small implication. But, Implications could become statements, which could turn into actions, and Scrooge couldn’t let the thought even be a presence in your mind.

•You had stayed with him throughout the years of his loneliest moments, had confessed secrets, had confided in him. You were like his pupil, learning from him and you were like his partner, fighting alongside him. Maybe you were something different altogether.

•...Was it a friend that convinced you? It had to be. Scrooge knew how much you enjoyed galavanting around the world with him. There’s no way you’d just fly off without him.-

“I promise I’ll still occasionally go with you, Scrooge. (A first name basis. This was devolving from anything normal.) I found my passion. We can still adventure together, but I found a path that also makes me happy and doesn’t ya know, get me killed.” You chuckle as if it were nothing. A light joke.

•So you were leaving. You were going to go. Why? You had a great paycheck, (an expensive one that took a lot of money,) you had the opportunity to travel the world. You had the best job you’d ever get. Who else was going to be as good as him? He won’t let you destroy your future by applying for a Mediocre position at some dumptruck company.

•As it turns out, the bird responsible for swaying you was none other than one of the peacocks, her name was Shelby. She and you laughed, and for the first time, your laugh was genuine. Genuine with her and not with Scrooge. You both shared each other’s stories, and she in return had encouraged your little dangerous fantasy of being independent.

•Now of course Scrooge realized how ridiculous this all sounded. He had willingly allowed you to go on perilous adventures with him, but at least then, you were with him. How could he keep an easy eye on you if you just moved off to some rando spot? Plus, he was plenty good as saving you. He was your hero.

•Bad influences needed to go away.

•Scrooge might lie to himself about how much it digs under his feathers, but to see you around other people really dug wrong. He itched every time you decided to take advice from other people, or confide in them instead of him. He was the one you could go to, not them. Your secrets didn’t need to be shared with anyone else but Scrooge. All those rare and precious things that made you yourself didn’t need to be snatched by thieves like Shelby or Gale or whoever else.

•He knew that his criminal actions would scare you. Even with your growing trust and dependence on him, he knew it was too early for you to want to stay with him if you knew what he’s been doing. If he wanted your presence, he’d keep it through lengths you’d find terrifying.

•Scrooge found your biggest flaw was that you always attracted the wrong crowd, and it was primarily because you were always trying to impress others when they really didn’t deserve the magnificent canvas you painted yourself to be. To his even greater detriment, you were beginning to spend your time more and more with Shelby. The canvas you painted was beautiful, as always. But it wasn’t for him, and he found that he was not happy with this new development.

•Don’t you know people take advantage of kindness? It happened to him all the time and still does. It happened to you over and over and yet you kept venturing forth giving out your trust like it was nothing. The world is a sour place if you’re not careful. Cursed kilts, you were already naive about Gale. Who knows how badly future people would hurt you, even if they were well intentioned.

Scrooge could tell that, despite him insisting otherwise, you thought leaning on his shoulder was burdening him. He wanted to make sure you knew it was anything but that. As a matter of fact, he wanted you to lean on his shoulder every moment he possibly could get you to. What was just you occasionally asking for advice on impersonal things becomes entire sessions with Scrooge encouraging you to reveal every personal detail of your life.

•You had revealed that many times, you just wanted independence. A company of your own to possibly build so you could pursue life your own way. Scrooge knew these dangerous thoughts were one of the final roadblocks. Scrooge had to prevent them. Be it through roughening you up financially or discouraging you. Be it from murdering outside influences, too. Who was going to miss the miserable miscreants that plagued your life anyways?

•It is three days before the date you had decided that you would resign. Instead of being merry, you were miserable. The opportunity you had to get the job was burned by them not even calling you for an interview. After your resume, why would they reject you? You had the word of one of the finest businessmen out there to back you up. Scrooge himself promised to put in a good word for you! You were perfectly qualified for the job you were looking for. In your days of being rejected from the position you wanted, you confide in Scrooge. You don’t know it but as he pats your shoulder, he’s thinking of the next way to sabotage your efforts of leaving him.

•Shelby ends up going missing. She was one of your closest friends and the only one who finally treated you well. Your devastation causes a major setback in any ambitious plans as you isolate yourself from anyone else but only the closest person left in your life; Scrooge.

•Currently, you were enveloped in a warm hug, the side of your face leaning in the crook of Scrooge’s neck as he calmed your crying form down, patting your back and promising you his presence would remain forever. You wept at Shelby’s funeral, so did her twin sister and their parents, who, upon seeing Scrooge, had nearly fainted in shock.

•Despite your tumultuous relationship with Shelby, she had actually begun to redeem much of her previously antagonistic actions towards you. She was in a rough place when you had developed a connection with her. So you wept in your boss’s, or rather, your best confidantes arms. You wept.

Scrooge, however, did not.

[worryinglyinnocent]

Fic: The Head That Wears The Crown

AU-gust Day Nine: Royalty AU Fandom: Stargate Universe Pairing: Nicholas Rush x Gloria Rush

Rated: G

Summary: After almost twenty years of avoiding Gloria’s heritage, a single phone call turns her and Nick’s world upside down, and they are forced to confront the fact that she is, in fact, a princess.

===

The Head That Wears The Crown

Nick knew that something was up from the moment that Gloria picked up her phone where it was innocently buzzing along the kitchen table. Having looked at the caller ID and gone as white as a ghost, her spoon dropped back down into her cereal bowl, sending milk and muesli across the table.

“Oh God.”

Nick grabbed a couple of sheets of kitchen paper to clean up. “Who is it?”

“My mother.”

Well, that was certainly a turn up for the books, and it certainly explained why Gloria had reacted the way she had. She hadn’t spoken to her mother for almost twenty years. She hadn’t spoken to anyone in her family for almost twenty years. Gloria’s family were never mentioned, the ultimate taboo between them.

“You’d probably better take it,” Nick observed. “She wouldn’t be calling you unless it was important.”

Gloria gave a slow nod, the phone continuing to vibrate in her hand as she made no move to answer it.

“Yes, I probably should.” The phone continued to buzz urgently, and Nick held out a hand.

“Do you want me to take it?”

“No, I don’t think that would help.” Gloria took a deep breath and answered just before it cut out to voicemail. “Good morning, Mother.”

Nick couldn’t hear what Gloria’s mother was saying, but since Gloria managed to go even whiter than she already was, it must have been something dramatic. When she got up from the table and vanished into the living room, closing the door firmly behind her, Nick knew that it was very, very serious. He sat back down at the table, his own breakfast completely forgotten in the knowledge that, likely as not, his entire life was about to get turned upside down.

When Nicholas Rush had first met Gloria Andrews, they’d both been studying at Oxford and had happened upon each other quite by chance at one of the rare social events that Nick had attended. A friendship had begun and turned into a relationship, and the relationship had turned into love and a proposal of marriage.

The proposal had opened a rather large can of worms, because for the previous two years of dating and sleeping together and eventually living together, Gloria had omitted to mention one very important fact, namely that she was heir to the throne of a small principality.

Nick hadn’t believed her at first, because surely if she was royalty then she’d be flanked by several bodyguards all the time and wouldn’t be hanging around in student bars in Oxford, and she certainly wouldn’t be doing something as mundane as playing the violin for a living. And surely she wouldn’t have a surname as commonplace as Andrews.

True, she had never shown any inclination for him to meet her family and he had no idea where she’d lived before going into halls of residence and then living with him. She’d always been rather vague about where she spent her holidays, and it had always been clear that she was in no way short of funds.

But the princess of a nation that he’d only vaguely heard of?

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how one looked at it, Gloria was telling the truth, and Nick found out that for the last two years he had been falling in love with Princess Gloria Catherine Anna di Marco, daughter of Prince André di Marco from whom she’d adopted her civilian surname.

Being the heir to the throne of a nation, however small that nation may have been, Gloria really wasn’t expected to marry a penniless Scottish astrophysicist, and upon the revelation of her true heritage, Nick had been fully expecting their relationship to come to an end.

He had not been expecting Gloria to go home to her father, argue with him about her life choices until he disinherited her, and then come back and marry him and live a happy and contented life as a music teacher, completely uncaring for the grandiose existence she had left behind.

Now, nearly twenty years later, that grandiose existence had suddenly made an appearance once more, reminding both of them that their lives were not as simple as they had hoped to keep them.

Nick sighed. There had been so many times over the last two decades when he had doubted his worth, knowing that he didn’t deserve someone like Gloria despite all the times she had reassured him that he was the only thing she wanted. She had given up so much to be with him and she had never once used that maliciously against him. She had never once wished for her royal life back or lamented how different things would have been if they had not stuck together. Nick knew that it was unfair to put all of the upheaval that they were about to face on Gloria. She had done her best to avoid it, and she would feel the stress of it just as much as he would.

At length – time had lost all sense of meaning – Gloria returned to the kitchen and sat back down, staring at her phone for a long time before she spoke. When she did, she didn’t meet Nick’s eyes.

“I have to go home,” she said. Her voice was measured but brittle, as if she was only keeping herself together through sheer force of will. “Actually, we both do.” She looked up at him then, and Nick could see that she’d been crying. “My father is dying, and he wants to see me. And you.”

Considering that Nick had never met any of Gloria’s family, much less her father, who was the ruler of a country, he thought that he was justified in feeling some trepidation at the prospect, and he felt guilty as he started mentally running through a thousand and one reasons why he would have to stay here.

He knew that he couldn’t. Even if none of Gloria’s family wanted anything to do with him, which was the stance they’d made clear when she’d first mentioned him to them, he needed to go with Gloria to support her whilst all this was going on. He’d lost his mother when he’d been too young to remember and his relationship with his father was strained at best, but he knew that he wouldn’t want to go through the loss alone.

“Right.”

For a long time, that was the only thing he could say. There were a hundred questions running through his head, most of them along the lines of does this mean you’ll have to run the country now and most of those followed by where does that leave us?

“I suppose I’d better start cancelling my lessons,” Gloria said. It was so practical and mundane that Nick couldn’t help but give a bark of laughter, alarming Gloria.

“I’m sorry. I think I’m still in shock.”

“Yeah.” Gloria sighed, and suddenly she looked very far away at the other end of the table. “Yeah, you and me both.”

X

Objectively, Nick knew that royal families generally had money to burn, but having lived on the breadline for most of his life and only gaining proper financial stability when he got academic tenure, the extent of wealth was difficult for him to comprehend – and he had wrapped his head around some of the most incomprehensible theoretical physics known to man.

Since getting off the plane, he and Gloria hadn’t had to lift a finger. There had been official people to meet them at every step of the way and a car waiting to whisk them away to the official family residence, and then another one waiting to take them to the hospital. Considering all he’d had to do was follow people along corridors and sit in the back of very luxurious cars, Nick was exhausted. All he wanted was to get back to his office and grade a few choice idiotic papers to take his mind off it all.

“Oh, Gloria!”

As they entered the private wing of the hospital where Prince André was receiving treatment, Gloria was bowled over by someone whom Nick recognised from photographs as her mother – twenty years older, of course, but still definitely the same woman. Even though Gloria was far more comfortable with invasions of personal space than Nick was, it was clear that she was rather taken aback by this sudden display of affection from someone she’d had no contact with for so many years. Eventually she relaxed into the hug and let her mother lead her down the corridor towards her father’s room.

Nick hung back, sitting down on one of the plush seats in the waiting area. He caught Gloria’s glance over her shoulder, almost a plea for deliverance, and he wondered what he should do. What could he do? He was the very definition of a fish out of water here, and Gloria herself wasn’t doing much better. People kept coming and asking if they could get him anything; it was the most surreal experience he’d ever had. Some kind soul sourced him some coffee and the caffeine helped him to focus a little, even if all he was focussing on was pretending to be somewhere else entirely.

It felt like an age before Gloria returned, sinking into the chair next to him.

“Gloria?” She looked blank, like she was miles away. “Gloria? Glo?”

She shook herself out of the stupor and turned to him.

“Hi. Sorry, I’m still trying to work out whether that just happened or if this is all just some weird dream.”

“What happened?”

Gloria shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not here, at least. God, I want to go home. Proper home, I mean. Our home. Oxford. Not here.” She pressed her hands over her face, leaning heavily on her knees. “I thought I’d left all this behind,” she mumbled behind her fingers. “I was happy to have left it all behind. This can’t be happening.”

No more was said on the subject until they got back to the house, and even then, Gloria spent a long time just wandering through rooms that had once been familiar. Nick trailed after her, unsure of what she needed. This wasn’t a problem that he could just apply maths to in order to solve.

“This was my bedroom when I was a kid.” She’d stopped in the doorway of a room that was at least the footprint of Nick’s entire childhood home and garden. Everything was covered in dust sheets, no sign of personalisation anywhere. Just as Gloria had made a clean break with her previous life, it seemed that her previous life had made a clean break with her as well.

“He wants to reinstate me,” she said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “He wants me to take the throne when he dies.”

Although Nick had suspected that this would be the case from the moment he’d known the situation, it was still something to hear it from Gloria herself and have it confirmed.

“Is this a situation where you can say no, or do you not really have a choice?”

Gloria shrugged. “I have no idea. The lawyer’s coming tomorrow to sort it all out, I guess I’ll find out then.”

“What happens if you don’t take it?”

“There’s a cousin in New Zealand. It’ll go to him.” Gloria sighed. “I’m so sorry, Nicholas. I don’t know who I was fooling when I thought that I could leave all this behind and it would never trouble us again. I’m an only child and my father’s not going to live forever, of course it would come back to bite me sooner rather than later. There was no way I could run from it forever. I’d just hoped that it would be over, done. He’s always been so stubborn. I thought that his first decision would be final. I never thought that he was one for deathbed regrets and trying to make amends. I suppose none of us know what we’re going to regret at the end until we get there ourselves. I’m so sorry.” She wiped away a fresh fall of tears on the back of her hand. “I’m so sorry, Nick. I know you didn’t sign up for all this.”

Nick didn’t reply. He didn’t know what to say, either to comfort Gloria or to try and make sense of his own position in the entire affair. He just put his arms around her, letting her lean in against him, holding her as she cried. He tried to reason that nothing was set in stone yet, that Gloria still had the choice to refuse the crown and everything could go back to the way it was before, that soon enough it would all be the cousin in New Zealand’s problem.

Deep down, though, he knew that it was not going to be as simple as that.

He didn’t think either of them slept that night, both of them caught up in their own thoughts. Nick stared at the ceiling, thinking about everything that he had to lose if Gloria were to take the throne and move their lives over here. The university, his professorship, his positions on all of the research committees he worked on. His office, his tenure, his students… Well, maybe he wouldn’t miss those as much.

Ultimately, though, he knew that the only thing he would really miss if he were to lose it was Gloria. He had started from scratch enough times and he had built himself up from the bare bones before. He could do it again. He could do his research anywhere. But if Gloria wanted to be here, then here was where he would be as well.

“Glo?” He reached across the bed to find her hand, squeezing tightly.

She rolled over, burrowing into his side. “Nick?”

“Whatever happens, whatever you decide, I’m right here with you. I love you. No matter what.”

She kissed him, fumbling and clumsy in the dark, and Nick felt wet on her cheeks.

“Thank you, Nick.”

[johnmauldin]

Libra Is Nothing More than a Nice Idea

What kind of money will we use in the future?

The answer might seem obvious: dollars, euros, yen, and other government-issued fiat currencies.

Most of us have never known anything else. Yet these currencies aren’t natural phenomena.

People created them. People can also abandon them for something else, just as they abandoned older currencies.

There are good reasons to think we could once again see some fiat currencies disappear. If so, what “something else” will be money in the future?

I can hear the chorus now: Fiat currencies come and go, but gold is forever. And now there is a drumbeat for cryptocurrencies.

Five years ago, I said that I expected to see a commodity-backed cryptocurrency to eventually emerge and potentially become the currency of the future.

Facebook’s recently announced Libra project may eventually be one. But at this point, it’s really just an idea, and I am not convinced it is ready for primetime.

Trust Issues

Libra is Facebook’s idea, but the company—obviously aware it has public trust issues—has assembled a consortium to manage the project.

This “Libra Association” currently has 28 members. They are mostly payment processors, tech and telecom providers, venture capital managers, and a few nonprofits. Facebook itself is represented by a newly formed subsidiary, Calibra.

Unlike Bitcoin, Libra won’t be “mined” by solving math problems. It will be fully backed by financial assets, which the association says will consist of cash in various currencies, government bonds, and similar short-term debt.

All will go into a “Libra Reserve” as users contribute money, and each Libra unit will be a share of that account. Its value will fluctuate against conventional currencies, but not by much (or so they hope).

How do you know the reserve assets are really there? This requires a lot of trust, something Facebook hasn’t exactly earned from the public it supposedly serves. But MasterCard or Visa? Since most of us have at least one of their cards, we seem to trust them.

Another problem is that Facebook uses your data in unexpected ways most of us would never consent to if it specifically asked us, which it doesn’t. Not to mention the large, profitable firm’s seeming inability to securely store our data.

With this in mind, Mark Zuckerberg is making some gestures toward segregating Libra customer information from the Facebook social network. I’m not sure it will be enough to satisfy the public, not to mention politicians and regulators around the globe.

Know Your Customer

Libra faces another challenge that may be even greater. Much of the “unbanked” economy likes being in the shadows.

People use cash and cryptocurrencies as part of tax evasion, fraud, crime, or terrorist plots. Facebook says it doesn’t want to facilitate such activity. But how to stop it?

Regulators have forced the banking industry to adopt robust “know your customer” practices. You must identify yourself to open an account. Banks report any suspicious activity to the authorities. It is a pain for legitimate businesses and investors, but a necessary one.

US and European regulators may not demand that level of scrutiny from Libra, but they will certainly impose some requirements. There is no way they will let it turn into anything like Bitcoin.

Facebook has millions of fake accounts engaged in all sorts of less-than-honest activities. That’s core to its business model, actually; more eyeballs mean more revenue. The firm is beginning to police the audience more rigorously, but its sincerity is questionable at best.

So the Libra project’s DNA, so to speak, tells it to a) collect lots of data b) not worry too much about its accuracy, and then c) use the data to make money. That is inconsistent with the way Libra will have to operate, if it is to do so legally, as Facebook and its partners say is their intent.

Security Issues

But say Libra implements whatever safeguards the various governments demand. That still leaves it holding a lot of sensitive, private information about people’s assets, spending habits, travel, and more.

Can we a) trust Libra to keep the data out of Facebook’s clutches, and b) trust Libra, Facebook, and whoever else is involved to protect it from cyberthieves?

Just look at all the data breaches that have occurred at large, supposedly sophisticated banks and other institutions that spent billions protecting their systems. Is Libra going to invest that kind of money on security? If so, where will it come from?

Where’s the Money?

Libra itself intends to make revenue from the “float” on its assets. In theory, you will give your dollars or euros to Libra and they will convert it into a basket of currencies, banking assets, and so forth.

The organization will live off the interest, paying you nothing while (you hope) not using your information to its own benefit.

Let’s go back to that stable coin concept. A basket of currencies is not very stable. Fortunately for me, my friends at Gavekal took the trouble to measure the stability of both the dollar and the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

They found that for at least US dollar holders, the dollar would’ve been more stable. It even works out that way for holders of the Indian rupee and other currencies. (Of course, if you live in a country like Venezuela, Libra may be a godsend for you, if you can figure out how to get some.)

Source: Gavekal Research

So, if Libra isn’t going to pay me any interest and it’s not really a great store of value, what’s my motivation to “invest?”

Tough Road Ahead

So, Libra has a tough row to hoe. We’ll see how it goes. But the point remains: Fiat currencies aren’t working so well, either. What would work better?

I continue to think a properly designed, well-regulated commodity-backed cryptocurrency is the best option. But it can only work if governments allow it. They don’t need to ban alternative currencies; governments have many ways to render them impractical.

For instance, in the US, the IRS considers Bitcoin an “investment.” Any change in its value between the time you acquire it and the time you spend it is a capital gain or loss.

Tracking that for every cup of coffee you buy would be a chore. Libra will likely face this same problem.

And speaking of taxes, the IRS accepts only dollars. You must have enough of them to pay your taxes.

Similarly, the government pays its millions of workers and contractors in dollars. Ditto Social Security and other benefits. An enormous part of the economy won’t use any Libra-like alternative money. This will further limit its growth.

Those barriers will fall eventually, but it won’t be tomorrow. I think we will see a lot of experimentation in the next decade. New money is coming. We just don’t know what it will be.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

All that being said, I wouldn’t bet against Libra actually making it. While I’m a tad skeptical of our privacy in Facebook’s hands, hundreds of millions if not billions of Millennials won’t even think about it.

And if you are one of the major banks that has been working on a blockchain cryptocurrency? Many are doing so.

Facebook’s just sounded the starting gun. And they are doing the banks the courtesy of running the regulatory gauntlet first. Will that give Facebook a first-mover advantage? Hard to say.

Remember MySpace? Not all first movers are created equal.

The Great Reset: The Collapse of the Biggest Bubble in History

New York Times best seller and renowned financial expert John Mauldin predicts an unprecedented financial crisis that could be triggered in the next five years. Most investors seem completely unaware of the relentless pressure that’s building right now. Learn more here.

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: ‘Our Work Is Not Finished.’ Nancy Pelosi Is Trying to Save America’s Economy—Again

Nancy Pelosi was getting impatient. It was mid-March, and the House Speaker and her staff were working around the clock to draft urgent legislation to address the coronavirus pandemic. But the White House was dragging its feet: she hadn’t heard back from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, her negotiating partner, in more than 12 hours.

Pelosi told Mnuchin the delay was unacceptable, and he got the message. The next morning, he boasted to Pelosi that his staff had been up until 4 a.m. putting the finishing touches on the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, providing funding for free testing, paid leave and expanded food stamps.

“I’m not impressed,” Pelosi replied. “We do it all the time.”

As the pandemic takes tens of thousands of lives and tens of millions of jobs, a Congress known for dysfunction has kicked into gear. Four massive bills with a price tag of nearly $3 trillion have sought to aid the sick, shore up the health care system, and ease the burden on workers and businesses. It’s the biggest federal outlay in history, dwarfing the response to the 2008 financial crisis, and as Speaker, Pelosi is naturally at the center of it. Before the ink was dry on the latest $484 billion small-business rescue package, she was on the phone trying to make the next deal to aid state and local governments whose budgets have been ravaged by the crisis. As Representative Karen Bass, a California Democrat, told Politico recently, “Quiet as it’s kept, she’s the one leading the country right now.”

Precisely because it required a frozen government to act, the pandemic has put Pelosi’s legislative talents on urgent display. It’s a fitting capstone to her historic three-decade career. Many congressional scholars consider Pelosi the most adept lawmaker of the past half-century, measuring her record of society-shaping legislation against the backdrop of the most partisan and gridlocked Congress in decades. While Republicans accuse her of obstruction, and some on the left accuse her of giving away the store, Pelosi believes she’s maximized her leverage at a time when inaction is not an option.

The legislative prowess Pelosi has exhibited during the crisis was honed in years of negotiations, often with the fate of the economy hanging in the balance. As Speaker from 2007 to 2011, she was instrumental in the U.S. response to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. As minority leader from 2011 to 2017, she forged deals in the high-stakes budget battles between President Obama and congressional Republicans.

For my new biography, Pelosi, I spent more than two years researching the Speaker’s life and career. I conducted more than 100 interviews with critics and supporters, activists and operatives, current and former staff, and dozens of current and former members of Congress from across the political spectrum. It’s the first biography the Speaker has cooperated with, offering extensive access to Pelosi and her inner circle. I found her to be someone everybody has an opinion about but few really know. Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade caricaturing her as a “San Francisco liberal,” while Democrats who once fought for her ouster have embraced her as a Resistance queen.

The woman who ripped up Trump’s State of the Union speech and led the most partisan impeachment in history is a loyal Democrat, but deep down she’s a dealmaker–an old-school legislator whose primary focus is getting things done through negotiation and compromise. Pelosi’s lodestar is securing the votes to deliver results. “Who would have thought Congress could pass four major pieces of legislation in the span of a month with overwhelming bipartisan support?” says former Representative Donna Edwards of Maryland, a onetime Pelosi lieutenant. “You can see it both in her command of the substance and also her command of the process. She’s not a politician; she’s a lawmaker.”

Since Pelosi arrived in Congress in 1987, America has embraced and endured massive change. But no one has ever dealt with anything quite like this–a double-barreled public-health and economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. In what’s likely the twilight of Pelosi’s historic career, a lot is riding on her ability to deliver the votes once again.

Sarah Silbiger—Bloomberg/Getty Images Pelosi, addressing the media on March 27, has been at the center of a rare burst of bipartisan legislation

This is not the first time Nancy Pelosi has been called on to help a Republican President save the U.S. economy from collapse. On Sept. 18, 2008, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson called Pelosi with panic in his voice. “A very serious situation is developing,” he said. The investment bank Lehman Brothers had declared the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history. The Federal Reserve and the Administration had done all they could, Paulson said. They needed help from Congress–fast.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) would allow the Fed to buy up banks’ “toxic assets,” stabilizing their debt loads so they wouldn’t go broke. The plan would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It was odious to both parties: Republicans hated the idea of government meddling so drastically in the economy (and spending so much taxpayer money to do it), while Democrats were loath to clean up the mess they blamed President George W. Bush for causing.

Over a week of intense negotiations, Congress and the Administration hammered out a bill. Pelosi and her GOP counterpart, John Boehner, made a deal: Boehner would come up with 100 Republican votes, and the Democrats would make up the rest–at least 118. Pelosi did her part: 140 of the 235 Democrats voted yes. But on the Republican side, just 65 of 198 were in favor, and the bill went down. The Dow’s 778-point fall was the biggest one-day loss in history at the time, wiping out $1.2 trillion in wealth.

A week later, Pelosi brought a new bill to the floor, a compromise worked out in the Senate. It passed, 263-71, with 172 Democrats and 91 Republicans in favor. She had played a pivotal role in saving the U.S. economy from catastrophe–and bailed Bush out, for the good of the country, at enormous political risk.

After Barack Obama won the election a few weeks later, the economy was still reeling, shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs every month. Obama wanted the House to put together a stimulus bill he could sign on his very first day in office. The price tag would be huge. The White House sought about $800 billion in stimulus–bigger than TARP. As a share of GDP, it would be the largest public investment in U.S. history.

Obama tried to reach out to the GOP, even though Pelosi warned he was being naive. Charlie Dent, a moderate from Pennsylvania, was among the Republicans invited to watch the Super Bowl at the White House, where his wife chatted with Michelle and his kids played with Sasha and Malia Obama. In the end, Dent voted against the bill–and blamed Pelosi. “I believe the President was absolutely sincere in looking for a bipartisan outcome,” he told Newsweek. “But the White House lost control of the process when the bill was outsourced to Pelosi.”

Every single House Republican voted against the stimulus, as did 11 Democrats. But it still passed by a healthy margin. The key to Obama’s triumph had been not his ability to reach across the aisle, but Pelosi’s skill at holding her caucus together.

Over the ensuing two years, Pelosi helped Obama pass the Affordable Care Act, providing universal access to health insurance–something Democrats had been trying and failing to achieve for the better part of a century. In the 2010 midterms, Republicans cast her as the villain, spending $70 million on ads that tied Democratic candidates to her. The chairman of the Republican National Committee embarked on a 117-city “Fire Pelosi” bus tour. It worked: in November, the GOP won 63 seats and the majority.

Pelosi stayed on as minority leader as Obama and the new Speaker, Boehner, tried to figure out a way to strike a grand bargain to balance the country’s books and restore Americans’ trust in government. When Pelosi found out about the talks, she was publicly critical of Obama’s willingness to cut entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, totemic achievements of past Democratic administrations that had rescued millions from penury and sickness. Privately, she assured Obama that if he needed her, she would be there. But who, she wanted to know, was counting votes? Republicans, she suspected, were just going through the motions, waiting to blame it on the President when the deal fell apart. Within a couple of weeks, that was exactly what happened.

On the eve of a national default that could have shaken the market and sent the fragile economy spiraling, Congress took over the talks. The solution congressional leaders came up with wasn’t pretty: no entitlement reform, no new taxes, but the formation of a bipartisan “supercommittee” that would have 10 weeks to come up with more than a trillion dollars in cuts and revenue. Failure to do so would trigger automatic across-the-board cuts to the entire federal budget. Pelosi, now at the table, secured important concessions: the trigger would hit defense spending just as hard as domestic spending, and there would be no changes to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Democrats hated the deal–Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a pastor from Kansas City, Mo., called it a “sugar-coated Satan sandwich”–but the bill passed with 95 Democratic votes.

This pattern would define the remainder of the Obama presidency: a cycle of crisis, featuring marginalized Democrats, recalcitrant Republicans, a White House unwilling or unable to strategize around them, and a government that could barely keep the lights on, much less solve any of the nation’s pressing problems. Another recurring feature of this depressing cycle: Pelosi, the congressional leader with the longest track record of reaching across the aisle, was routinely cast aside. When she forced her way into the room, problems generally got solved. But it didn’t seem to occur to the men in charge to invite her in the next time.

Pelosi’s current efforts have a political goal: as the November election nears, she wants to show that Democrats are focused on governing responsibly. It’s why she’s urged the party’s candidates to focus on kitchen-table issues and realistic plans; it’s also why she resisted impeachment for the better part of a year, then pushed for a short and simple process.

“The message has to be one that is not menacing,” she told me in December, when both impeachment and the presidential primary were in full swing. “People love change, but they also are menaced by it.” The liberal platform that resonates in her San Francisco district, she said, may not go over as well in swing states like Michigan that Democrats need to win the Electoral College. She cited single-payer health care as an example: “I think it’s menacing to say to people, in order to get this tomorrow, we’re taking away your private insurance.”

Pelosi’s political future isn’t something she talks about–when I mentioned the idea of the “twilight” of her career, she snapped at me–but in 2018, she accepted a term-limit agreement that would force her to step down in 2022. Privately, as I reveal for the first time in the book, she told confidants at the time that she expected the current term to be her last.

The legacy she leaves will be a complex one. As the first female Speaker, she shattered the “marble ceiling,” but her dreams of a woman President were dashed in 2016 and 2020, and she leaves no obvious female successor. She cites the Affordable Care Act as her greatest achievement, but Republicans have succeeded in undermining it and Democrats argue it doesn’t go far enough. Despite her willingness to deal, Congress is a gridlocked mess with dismally low approval ratings.

When I asked Pelosi what she still wants to accomplish, she pointed to the problem of income inequality and the “existential threat” of climate change. Pelosi’s House passed a cap-and-trade bill in 2009, but it never advanced in the Senate; save for a resolution last year in favor of the Paris Agreement, it remains the only major climate legislation ever to pass a house of Congress.

“Our work is not finished,” she said, “when it comes to improving the lives of the American people.”

Adapted from PELOSI by Molly Ball. Published by Henry Holt and Company May 5th 2020. Copyright © 2020 by Molly Ball. All rights reserved.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[kennethherrerablog]

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money

In highschool, my best friend and I looked through a giant book of jobs and their salaries.

We immediately flipped to the end to find the one that paid the most money.

It was an investment banker.

Without a second thought, we both declared we were going to be investment bankers.

Did we have any clue what an investment bank actually did? Nope! We just wanted the highest pay.

I wish I had known how many options I really had. I could have focused on a path that would have been a better fit right from the beginning.

Turns out, there’s a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money. Whether you’re still in highschool or making a career change, you have a lot of options.

Here are the top 12 jobs that potentially can make a lot of money for you.

Accountant

An accountant will perform financial calculations for individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. Accountants must know how to examine and prepare a variety of financial reporting forms, helping customers or businesses remain in compliance with accounting rules and laws. Accountants may need to work long hours at certain times of the year, such as during tax calculation time.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs;,some licensing and certification

Average annual salary: $70,500

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Some of the work is pretty dull. It’s also rare to reach a seven figure salary compared to other jobs on our list

Business Executive

A business executive could hold a multitude of jobs at a company, including CEO, CFO, or COO. A founder of a business could end up being a CEO, because he or she knows the industry and the business. On the other hand, someone with a formal business degree and business training could move into an executive role to help any business run more efficiently and profitably. With bonuses included, business executives can earn huge annual salaries.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $104,980

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Highly stressful jobs, may require decades or more to reach a lucrative business executive position

Computer System and IT Manager

A computer system manager or IT manager will oversee all computer related systems and processes in a company or organization. This can include things like planning out hardware purchases, installing computing software, managing a network, and performing troubleshooting. IT managers need quite a bit of education, including ongoing education, to stay up to date on new techniques and tech products.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, ongoing education

Average annual salary: $142,530

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Can require long working hours, extensive education, and rare to reach a seven figure salary

Engineer

Engineers can design things like aircraft, cars, boats, spacecraft, satellites, large buildings, bridges, computers, and infrastructure. Chemical engineers will work with fuel and drugs to solve problems in the use of these substances. Other types of engineers may try to solve environmental problems or help people perform jobs more efficiently and safely. Engineers rely on math, physics, biology, and chemistry to perform their work.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $80,170

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Requires a high level of mathematical ability, rare to reach a seven figure salary in this profession versus others on our list

Entertainment Professional

Jobs like actor, musician, TV or radio show host, producer, and writer can all fit in the entertainment industry. For the most successful professionals in these areas, this job can be extremely lucrative. However, a job in the entertainment industry rarely has a lot of stability. You’re often on your own, working from contract to contract. You’ll also have to hire an agent to negotiate contracts and help you find work. It can also be extremely difficult to break into the industry.

Requirements: Mix of schooling and on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $40,000

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Highly competitive industries, jobs don’t have much stability, agent fees will eat a percentage of your earnings

Investment Banker

It may not be the most exciting job, and it may not be all that well understood, but an investment banker can make a lot of money each year. In general terms, an investment banker is someone who brokers deals, such as company mergers and acquisitions. Those who broker the largest financial deals receive the largest compensation amounts.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, FINRA licenses

Average annual salary: $64,120, plus performance bonuses

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Regular 80+ hour weeks, a lot of stress because of the heavy reliance on performance bonuses

Lawyer

If your idea of a lawyer is someone who is dramatically arguing cases in a courtroom, as happens on TV, this is only a small part of the work. Most of it is spent in research, document review, filing motions,  and editing contracts. Lawyers can work in criminal, tax, patent, corporate, or other types of law, so a lot of specialties exist. Lawyers do have an easier time becoming politicians than other professions, if that appeals to you.

Requirements: Tons of extra education, including a law degree, must pass a state bar examination

Average annual salary: $120,910

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extremely competitive profession that requires several years of advanced schooling

Pharmacist

A pharmacist works in a hospital, a medical facility, or a retail store, dispensing prescription medication for customers. A pharmacist needs quite a bit of training in how different medications work, including understanding side effects and interactions with other medications. Pharmacists require formal education and licensing to be able to legally dispense prescription medication.

Requirements: Doctor of pharmacy degree, licenses in the state in which they work

Average annual salary: $126,120

Top annual earners: $250,000 plus

The downside: Pharmacists have little chance of earning a seven figure salary unless they own a business, requires quite a bit of on-going education

Physician and Surgeon

Doctors in the American medical system have the ability to make huge salaries, but it can take a while to hit that level. A physician or a surgeon needs tons of education and on-the-job training. The learning never ends for doctors. When starting out, doctors can work some long, strange hours. But once they reach a certain level of expertise, this job is rewarding financially.

Requirements: Long years of extra education including a medical degree and a residency, licenses required

Average annual salary: $208,000

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Making life and death decisions on a daily basis is stressful especially in a highly competitive industry with long hours

Professional Athlete

This is one job that kids dream about having that actually also makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, it’s probably the job they have the least chance of achieving. People need some natural talent to succeed in almost any job, but pro athletes may rely the most on natural talent. Beyond receiving millions to play the game, the most well-known pro athletes may receive just as much money for endorsements.

Requirements: Being selected after a physical tryout, constant on-the-job training and physical workouts

Average annual salary: $50,650

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extreme physical stress and injuries can take their toll on long term health, professional sports careers don’t last more than a few years for most people

Real Estate Developer

A real estate developer will purchase property and develop it with lucrative commercial and residential projects. These purchases are a bit of a gamble, as a mistake can lead to huge financial losses. You may start as a real estate agent, learning how the markets work, before making your own investments or investing on behalf of others.

Requirements: Knowledge of real estate markets and laws through on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $50,300

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: High rewards come with high risks, choosing the wrong project or making a judgment error about a particular project’s viability could lead to bankruptcy

Software Developer

A software developer will write software, or code, that controls computers and other personal electronics devices. App developers also can be software developers. In fact, someone who develops a highly popular app could make millions off one app. This is another fast growing profession that will need employees in the future.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree optional

Average annual salary: $105,590

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Long hours, especially stressful when trying to complete a project

Picking the Best High Paying Job

Having a list is one thing, picking the right job is a lot harder.

If I was giving “highschool me” some advice, I’d tell him to find a high paying job that’s the best fit. Some jobs are extremely stressful like an investment banker. Others are more routine like an accountant. There’s dozens of different criteria that make up a true dream job.

The best way to figure out which job is the best fit is to develop friendships with people in that field. If you genuinely enjoy spending time with them, that’s a promising sign.

Also look for entry-level roles in those fields to try them yourself. Most of these jobs can be started later on if you discover that a particular path won’t work out.

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money published first on https://justinbetreviews.tumblr.com/

[andrewdburton]

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money

In highschool, my best friend and I looked through a giant book of jobs and their salaries.

We immediately flipped to the end to find the one that paid the most money.

It was an investment banker.

Without a second thought, we both declared we were going to be investment bankers.

Did we have any clue what an investment bank actually did? Nope! We just wanted the highest pay.

I wish I had known how many options I really had. I could have focused on a path that would have been a better fit right from the beginning.

Turns out, there’s a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money. Whether you’re still in highschool or making a career change, you have a lot of options.

Here are the top 12 jobs that potentially can make a lot of money for you.

Accountant

An accountant will perform financial calculations for individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. Accountants must know how to examine and prepare a variety of financial reporting forms, helping customers or businesses remain in compliance with accounting rules and laws. Accountants may need to work long hours at certain times of the year, such as during tax calculation time.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs;,some licensing and certification

Average annual salary: $70,500

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Some of the work is pretty dull. It’s also rare to reach a seven figure salary compared to other jobs on our list

Business Executive

A business executive could hold a multitude of jobs at a company, including CEO, CFO, or COO. A founder of a business could end up being a CEO, because he or she knows the industry and the business. On the other hand, someone with a formal business degree and business training could move into an executive role to help any business run more efficiently and profitably. With bonuses included, business executives can earn huge annual salaries.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $104,980

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Highly stressful jobs, may require decades or more to reach a lucrative business executive position

Computer System and IT Manager

A computer system manager or IT manager will oversee all computer related systems and processes in a company or organization. This can include things like planning out hardware purchases, installing computing software, managing a network, and performing troubleshooting. IT managers need quite a bit of education, including ongoing education, to stay up to date on new techniques and tech products.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, ongoing education

Average annual salary: $142,530

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Can require long working hours, extensive education, and rare to reach a seven figure salary

Engineer

Engineers can design things like aircraft, cars, boats, spacecraft, satellites, large buildings, bridges, computers, and infrastructure. Chemical engineers will work with fuel and drugs to solve problems in the use of these substances. Other types of engineers may try to solve environmental problems or help people perform jobs more efficiently and safely. Engineers rely on math, physics, biology, and chemistry to perform their work.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $80,170

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Requires a high level of mathematical ability, rare to reach a seven figure salary in this profession versus others on our list

Entertainment Professional

Jobs like actor, musician, TV or radio show host, producer, and writer can all fit in the entertainment industry. For the most successful professionals in these areas, this job can be extremely lucrative. However, a job in the entertainment industry rarely has a lot of stability. You’re often on your own, working from contract to contract. You’ll also have to hire an agent to negotiate contracts and help you find work. It can also be extremely difficult to break into the industry.

Requirements: Mix of schooling and on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $40,000

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Highly competitive industries, jobs don’t have much stability, agent fees will eat a percentage of your earnings

Investment Banker

It may not be the most exciting job, and it may not be all that well understood, but an investment banker can make a lot of money each year. In general terms, an investment banker is someone who brokers deals, such as company mergers and acquisitions. Those who broker the largest financial deals receive the largest compensation amounts.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, FINRA licenses

Average annual salary: $64,120, plus performance bonuses

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Regular 80+ hour weeks, a lot of stress because of the heavy reliance on performance bonuses

Lawyer

If your idea of a lawyer is someone who is dramatically arguing cases in a courtroom, as happens on TV, this is only a small part of the work. Most of it is spent in research, document review, filing motions,  and editing contracts. Lawyers can work in criminal, tax, patent, corporate, or other types of law, so a lot of specialties exist. Lawyers do have an easier time becoming politicians than other professions, if that appeals to you.

Requirements: Tons of extra education, including a law degree, must pass a state bar examination

Average annual salary: $120,910

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extremely competitive profession that requires several years of advanced schooling

Pharmacist

A pharmacist works in a hospital, a medical facility, or a retail store, dispensing prescription medication for customers. A pharmacist needs quite a bit of training in how different medications work, including understanding side effects and interactions with other medications. Pharmacists require formal education and licensing to be able to legally dispense prescription medication.

Requirements: Doctor of pharmacy degree, licenses in the state in which they work

Average annual salary: $126,120

Top annual earners: $250,000 plus

The downside: Pharmacists have little chance of earning a seven figure salary unless they own a business, requires quite a bit of on-going education

Physician and Surgeon

Doctors in the American medical system have the ability to make huge salaries, but it can take a while to hit that level. A physician or a surgeon needs tons of education and on-the-job training. The learning never ends for doctors. When starting out, doctors can work some long, strange hours. But once they reach a certain level of expertise, this job is rewarding financially.

Requirements: Long years of extra education including a medical degree and a residency, licenses required

Average annual salary: $208,000

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Making life and death decisions on a daily basis is stressful especially in a highly competitive industry with long hours

Professional Athlete

This is one job that kids dream about having that actually also makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, it’s probably the job they have the least chance of achieving. People need some natural talent to succeed in almost any job, but pro athletes may rely the most on natural talent. Beyond receiving millions to play the game, the most well-known pro athletes may receive just as much money for endorsements.

Requirements: Being selected after a physical tryout, constant on-the-job training and physical workouts

Average annual salary: $50,650

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extreme physical stress and injuries can take their toll on long term health, professional sports careers don’t last more than a few years for most people

Real Estate Developer

A real estate developer will purchase property and develop it with lucrative commercial and residential projects. These purchases are a bit of a gamble, as a mistake can lead to huge financial losses. You may start as a real estate agent, learning how the markets work, before making your own investments or investing on behalf of others.

Requirements: Knowledge of real estate markets and laws through on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $50,300

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: High rewards come with high risks, choosing the wrong project or making a judgment error about a particular project’s viability could lead to bankruptcy

Software Developer

A software developer will write software, or code, that controls computers and other personal electronics devices. App developers also can be software developers. In fact, someone who develops a highly popular app could make millions off one app. This is another fast growing profession that will need employees in the future.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree optional

Average annual salary: $105,590

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Long hours, especially stressful when trying to complete a project

Picking the Best High Paying Job

Having a list is one thing, picking the right job is a lot harder.

If I was giving “highschool me” some advice, I’d tell him to find a high paying job that’s the best fit. Some jobs are extremely stressful like an investment banker. Others are more routine like an accountant. There’s dozens of different criteria that make up a true dream job.

The best way to figure out which job is the best fit is to develop friendships with people in that field. If you genuinely enjoy spending time with them, that’s a promising sign.

Also look for entry-level roles in those fields to try them yourself. Most of these jobs can be started later on if you discover that a particular path won’t work out.

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Finance https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/jobs-that-make-a-lot-of-money/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[paulckrueger]

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money

In highschool, my best friend and I looked through a giant book of jobs and their salaries.

We immediately flipped to the end to find the one that paid the most money.

It was an investment banker.

Without a second thought, we both declared we were going to be investment bankers.

Did we have any clue what an investment bank actually did? Nope! We just wanted the highest pay.

I wish I had known how many options I really had. I could have focused on a path that would have been a better fit right from the beginning.

Turns out, there’s a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money. Whether you’re still in highschool or making a career change, you have a lot of options.

Here are the top 12 jobs that potentially can make a lot of money for you.

Accountant

An accountant will perform financial calculations for individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. Accountants must know how to examine and prepare a variety of financial reporting forms, helping customers or businesses remain in compliance with accounting rules and laws. Accountants may need to work long hours at certain times of the year, such as during tax calculation time.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs;,some licensing and certification

Average annual salary: $70,500

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Some of the work is pretty dull. It’s also rare to reach a seven figure salary compared to other jobs on our list

Business Executive

A business executive could hold a multitude of jobs at a company, including CEO, CFO, or COO. A founder of a business could end up being a CEO, because he or she knows the industry and the business. On the other hand, someone with a formal business degree and business training could move into an executive role to help any business run more efficiently and profitably. With bonuses included, business executives can earn huge annual salaries.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $104,980

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Highly stressful jobs, may require decades or more to reach a lucrative business executive position

Computer System and IT Manager

A computer system manager or IT manager will oversee all computer related systems and processes in a company or organization. This can include things like planning out hardware purchases, installing computing software, managing a network, and performing troubleshooting. IT managers need quite a bit of education, including ongoing education, to stay up to date on new techniques and tech products.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, ongoing education

Average annual salary: $142,530

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Can require long working hours, extensive education, and rare to reach a seven figure salary

Engineer

Engineers can design things like aircraft, cars, boats, spacecraft, satellites, large buildings, bridges, computers, and infrastructure. Chemical engineers will work with fuel and drugs to solve problems in the use of these substances. Other types of engineers may try to solve environmental problems or help people perform jobs more efficiently and safely. Engineers rely on math, physics, biology, and chemistry to perform their work.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $80,170

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Requires a high level of mathematical ability, rare to reach a seven figure salary in this profession versus others on our list

Entertainment Professional

Jobs like actor, musician, TV or radio show host, producer, and writer can all fit in the entertainment industry. For the most successful professionals in these areas, this job can be extremely lucrative. However, a job in the entertainment industry rarely has a lot of stability. You’re often on your own, working from contract to contract. You’ll also have to hire an agent to negotiate contracts and help you find work. It can also be extremely difficult to break into the industry.

Requirements: Mix of schooling and on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $40,000

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Highly competitive industries, jobs don’t have much stability, agent fees will eat a percentage of your earnings

Investment Banker

It may not be the most exciting job, and it may not be all that well understood, but an investment banker can make a lot of money each year. In general terms, an investment banker is someone who brokers deals, such as company mergers and acquisitions. Those who broker the largest financial deals receive the largest compensation amounts.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, FINRA licenses

Average annual salary: $64,120, plus performance bonuses

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Regular 80+ hour weeks, a lot of stress because of the heavy reliance on performance bonuses

Lawyer

If your idea of a lawyer is someone who is dramatically arguing cases in a courtroom, as happens on TV, this is only a small part of the work. Most of it is spent in research, document review, filing motions,  and editing contracts. Lawyers can work in criminal, tax, patent, corporate, or other types of law, so a lot of specialties exist. Lawyers do have an easier time becoming politicians than other professions, if that appeals to you.

Requirements: Tons of extra education, including a law degree, must pass a state bar examination

Average annual salary: $120,910

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extremely competitive profession that requires several years of advanced schooling

Pharmacist

A pharmacist works in a hospital, a medical facility, or a retail store, dispensing prescription medication for customers. A pharmacist needs quite a bit of training in how different medications work, including understanding side effects and interactions with other medications. Pharmacists require formal education and licensing to be able to legally dispense prescription medication.

Requirements: Doctor of pharmacy degree, licenses in the state in which they work

Average annual salary: $126,120

Top annual earners: $250,000 plus

The downside: Pharmacists have little chance of earning a seven figure salary unless they own a business, requires quite a bit of on-going education

Physician and Surgeon

Doctors in the American medical system have the ability to make huge salaries, but it can take a while to hit that level. A physician or a surgeon needs tons of education and on-the-job training. The learning never ends for doctors. When starting out, doctors can work some long, strange hours. But once they reach a certain level of expertise, this job is rewarding financially.

Requirements: Long years of extra education including a medical degree and a residency, licenses required

Average annual salary: $208,000

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Making life and death decisions on a daily basis is stressful especially in a highly competitive industry with long hours

Professional Athlete

This is one job that kids dream about having that actually also makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, it’s probably the job they have the least chance of achieving. People need some natural talent to succeed in almost any job, but pro athletes may rely the most on natural talent. Beyond receiving millions to play the game, the most well-known pro athletes may receive just as much money for endorsements.

Requirements: Being selected after a physical tryout, constant on-the-job training and physical workouts

Average annual salary: $50,650

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extreme physical stress and injuries can take their toll on long term health, professional sports careers don’t last more than a few years for most people

Real Estate Developer

A real estate developer will purchase property and develop it with lucrative commercial and residential projects. These purchases are a bit of a gamble, as a mistake can lead to huge financial losses. You may start as a real estate agent, learning how the markets work, before making your own investments or investing on behalf of others.

Requirements: Knowledge of real estate markets and laws through on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $50,300

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: High rewards come with high risks, choosing the wrong project or making a judgment error about a particular project’s viability could lead to bankruptcy

Software Developer

A software developer will write software, or code, that controls computers and other personal electronics devices. App developers also can be software developers. In fact, someone who develops a highly popular app could make millions off one app. This is another fast growing profession that will need employees in the future.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree optional

Average annual salary: $105,590

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Long hours, especially stressful when trying to complete a project

Picking the Best High Paying Job

Having a list is one thing, picking the right job is a lot harder.

If I was giving “highschool me” some advice, I’d tell him to find a high paying job that’s the best fit. Some jobs are extremely stressful like an investment banker. Others are more routine like an accountant. There’s dozens of different criteria that make up a true dream job.

The best way to figure out which job is the best fit is to develop friendships with people in that field. If you genuinely enjoy spending time with them, that’s a promising sign.

Also look for entry-level roles in those fields to try them yourself. Most of these jobs can be started later on if you discover that a particular path won’t work out.

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Surety Bond Brokers? Business https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/jobs-that-make-a-lot-of-money/

[mcjoelcain]

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money

In highschool, my best friend and I looked through a giant book of jobs and their salaries.

We immediately flipped to the end to find the one that paid the most money.

It was an investment banker.

Without a second thought, we both declared we were going to be investment bankers.

Did we have any clue what an investment bank actually did? Nope! We just wanted the highest pay.

I wish I had known how many options I really had. I could have focused on a path that would have been a better fit right from the beginning.

Turns out, there’s a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money. Whether you’re still in highschool or making a career change, you have a lot of options.

Here are the top 12 jobs that potentially can make a lot of money for you.

Accountant

An accountant will perform financial calculations for individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. Accountants must know how to examine and prepare a variety of financial reporting forms, helping customers or businesses remain in compliance with accounting rules and laws. Accountants may need to work long hours at certain times of the year, such as during tax calculation time.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs;,some licensing and certification

Average annual salary: $70,500

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Some of the work is pretty dull. It’s also rare to reach a seven figure salary compared to other jobs on our list

Business Executive

A business executive could hold a multitude of jobs at a company, including CEO, CFO, or COO. A founder of a business could end up being a CEO, because he or she knows the industry and the business. On the other hand, someone with a formal business degree and business training could move into an executive role to help any business run more efficiently and profitably. With bonuses included, business executives can earn huge annual salaries.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $104,980

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Highly stressful jobs, may require decades or more to reach a lucrative business executive position

Computer System and IT Manager

A computer system manager or IT manager will oversee all computer related systems and processes in a company or organization. This can include things like planning out hardware purchases, installing computing software, managing a network, and performing troubleshooting. IT managers need quite a bit of education, including ongoing education, to stay up to date on new techniques and tech products.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, ongoing education

Average annual salary: $142,530

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Can require long working hours, extensive education, and rare to reach a seven figure salary

Engineer

Engineers can design things like aircraft, cars, boats, spacecraft, satellites, large buildings, bridges, computers, and infrastructure. Chemical engineers will work with fuel and drugs to solve problems in the use of these substances. Other types of engineers may try to solve environmental problems or help people perform jobs more efficiently and safely. Engineers rely on math, physics, biology, and chemistry to perform their work.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $80,170

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Requires a high level of mathematical ability, rare to reach a seven figure salary in this profession versus others on our list

Entertainment Professional

Jobs like actor, musician, TV or radio show host, producer, and writer can all fit in the entertainment industry. For the most successful professionals in these areas, this job can be extremely lucrative. However, a job in the entertainment industry rarely has a lot of stability. You’re often on your own, working from contract to contract. You’ll also have to hire an agent to negotiate contracts and help you find work. It can also be extremely difficult to break into the industry.

Requirements: Mix of schooling and on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $40,000

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Highly competitive industries, jobs don’t have much stability, agent fees will eat a percentage of your earnings

Investment Banker

It may not be the most exciting job, and it may not be all that well understood, but an investment banker can make a lot of money each year. In general terms, an investment banker is someone who brokers deals, such as company mergers and acquisitions. Those who broker the largest financial deals receive the largest compensation amounts.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, FINRA licenses

Average annual salary: $64,120, plus performance bonuses

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Regular 80+ hour weeks, a lot of stress because of the heavy reliance on performance bonuses

Lawyer

If your idea of a lawyer is someone who is dramatically arguing cases in a courtroom, as happens on TV, this is only a small part of the work. Most of it is spent in research, document review, filing motions,  and editing contracts. Lawyers can work in criminal, tax, patent, corporate, or other types of law, so a lot of specialties exist. Lawyers do have an easier time becoming politicians than other professions, if that appeals to you.

Requirements: Tons of extra education, including a law degree, must pass a state bar examination

Average annual salary: $120,910

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extremely competitive profession that requires several years of advanced schooling

Pharmacist

A pharmacist works in a hospital, a medical facility, or a retail store, dispensing prescription medication for customers. A pharmacist needs quite a bit of training in how different medications work, including understanding side effects and interactions with other medications. Pharmacists require formal education and licensing to be able to legally dispense prescription medication.

Requirements: Doctor of pharmacy degree, licenses in the state in which they work

Average annual salary: $126,120

Top annual earners: $250,000 plus

The downside: Pharmacists have little chance of earning a seven figure salary unless they own a business, requires quite a bit of on-going education

Physician and Surgeon

Doctors in the American medical system have the ability to make huge salaries, but it can take a while to hit that level. A physician or a surgeon needs tons of education and on-the-job training. The learning never ends for doctors. When starting out, doctors can work some long, strange hours. But once they reach a certain level of expertise, this job is rewarding financially.

Requirements: Long years of extra education including a medical degree and a residency, licenses required

Average annual salary: $208,000

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Making life and death decisions on a daily basis is stressful especially in a highly competitive industry with long hours

Professional Athlete

This is one job that kids dream about having that actually also makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, it’s probably the job they have the least chance of achieving. People need some natural talent to succeed in almost any job, but pro athletes may rely the most on natural talent. Beyond receiving millions to play the game, the most well-known pro athletes may receive just as much money for endorsements.

Requirements: Being selected after a physical tryout, constant on-the-job training and physical workouts

Average annual salary: $50,650

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extreme physical stress and injuries can take their toll on long term health, professional sports careers don’t last more than a few years for most people

Real Estate Developer

A real estate developer will purchase property and develop it with lucrative commercial and residential projects. These purchases are a bit of a gamble, as a mistake can lead to huge financial losses. You may start as a real estate agent, learning how the markets work, before making your own investments or investing on behalf of others.

Requirements: Knowledge of real estate markets and laws through on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $50,300

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: High rewards come with high risks, choosing the wrong project or making a judgment error about a particular project’s viability could lead to bankruptcy

Software Developer

A software developer will write software, or code, that controls computers and other personal electronics devices. App developers also can be software developers. In fact, someone who develops a highly popular app could make millions off one app. This is another fast growing profession that will need employees in the future.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree optional

Average annual salary: $105,590

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Long hours, especially stressful when trying to complete a project

Picking the Best High Paying Job

Having a list is one thing, picking the right job is a lot harder.

If I was giving “highschool me” some advice, I’d tell him to find a high paying job that’s the best fit. Some jobs are extremely stressful like an investment banker. Others are more routine like an accountant. There’s dozens of different criteria that make up a true dream job.

The best way to figure out which job is the best fit is to develop friendships with people in that field. If you genuinely enjoy spending time with them, that’s a promising sign.

Also look for entry-level roles in those fields to try them yourself. Most of these jobs can be started later on if you discover that a particular path won’t work out.

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Money https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/jobs-that-make-a-lot-of-money/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[theconservativebrief]

In his 2003 presidential address to the American Economics Association, Robert Lucas, a distinguished practitioner of the field and a Nobel laureate, proclaimed that “macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression,” and that he was able to say confidently “that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.”

This was, of course, untrue.

Just four years later, in 2007, the United States began to tip into recession. About a year after that, the recession triggered a financial crisis that led to a much more rapid collapse of demand — setting off a period that we don’t formally refer to as a “depression” but that certainly had most of the relevant characteristics of one. And that Great Recession became, though not strictly universal, certainly a global phenomenon, striking Britain, Japan, and the European Union, with spillover effects to South Africa, most of Latin America, and beyond.

And though 10 years later the American labor market has largely recovered, the same cannot be said for Europe. What’s more, the output lost during the crisis is in a sense never coming back — trillions in human wealth are simply gone forever. The United States alone lost somewhere on the order of $5 trillion to $10 trillion worth of economic output, with much more damage accruing abroad.

Even worse, the world continues to struggle with the political consequences of the crisis. Around the world, progress toward freer trade and more economic integration has halted, anti-immigration parties are on the rise, and the prestige of liberal democracy has eroded around the world.

The field of policy that Lucas derided as a solved problem is known technically as “macroeconomic stabilization.” It’s mainly done by central banks like the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan, which routinely manipulate short-term interest rates. When pressed by the severity of the 2008 crisis, they tried more exotic methods like quantitative easing — basically bulk purchases of long-term government bonds — as well. But it goes beyond the central banks. National legislatures also play a role in fighting downturns by enacting (or not) fiscal stimulus programs.

There’s nothing inevitable about how things played out in 2008. Australia hasn’t had a recession in 30 years, and in theory, equally skillful governments of bigger countries could produce the same result. The goal of macroeconomic stabilization is to make sure that recessions are rare, shallow, and short. And 15 years ago, policymakers were convinced that they had it all figured out.

The Great Recession made it clear that they had not. The uncontroversial tool of short-term interest rates wasn’t powerful enough, and the other options are the subject of both academic and political disagreement. Meanwhile, with the crisis in the rearview mirror, politicians have moved on to discussing other things. But though policymakers in Japan appear to have finally hit on a formula that works to stimulate a deeply depressed economy — a mixture of large budget deficits, direct central bank setting of long-term as well as short-term interest rates, and even printing money to buy shares of stock — these ideas remain controversial, untested, and in some cases illegal in the West.

Depressions, however, are extraordinarily damaging. And though the most recent global downturn largely spared the world’s poorest people, that was much more a matter of good luck than policy design. Crafting a science and technology of macroeconomic stabilization that can reliably prevent depressions could alleviate the suffering of millions, while simultaneously minimizing the odds of political catastrophes unleashed by economic mismanagement.

The Congressional Budget Office routinely publishes estimates of the “potential output” of the United States — how much goods and services could be produced if the available stock of human labor and capital goods were fully utilized, as they would be in a system of perfect macroeconomic stabilization. If actual output exceeds potential output by too much, inflation will result. When it falls short, we have elevated unemployment and sluggish wage growth.

A chart that simply subtracts actual GDP from potential GDP reveals the striking fact that since the dot-com crash of 2000, America has had below-potential output every single year of the 21st century.

This has given us, in the aggregate, $5.5 trillion less of total goods and services than we would have had in a properly stabilized economy.

But even that is a significant underestimate of the aggregate cost of poor macroeconomic management to the country. That’s because potential output is in part a function of past actual output. When the stock of capital goods — that’s buildings, machines, and business equipment — is fully employed, then there are strong incentives to invest in making new capital goods that raise potential output in the future. Similarly, when people are working rather than unemployed, they are building on-the-job skills that make them more valuable workers in the future.

In 2017 and 2018, we are only falling slightly below our economy’s ability to produce things. But that closing of the gap largely reflects a steady shrinking of our expected capacity — in other words, we’re likely underestimating just how much economic damage we’ve suffered because our forecasts for expected output have fallen steadily over time.

This means the real cost of poor macroeconomic management in the 21st century could easily be twice as high as my numbers. But worse, if you take the implications of falling potential output fully seriously, the implication is that we will forever be at least somewhat poorer than we otherwise could have been. And of course, those are only the costs to the United States of America. The impact in the eurozone — whose total output is somewhat larger than America’s — has been, if anything, more severe.

And in some respects, the next recession could be even worse.

Though the Great Recession ravaged hundreds of millions of people around the world, it didn’t impede global progress toward reductions in steep absolute poverty. This was good news, but it led, in some ways, to an unfortunate tendency in humanitarian circles to characterize the economic calamity as a kind of distraction from the real good news about the global economy. The truth is that the global poor got lucky and, unless the world’s understanding of macroeconomic stabilization improves, they may not be so lucky next time.

The two most important pieces of good luck are that China and India entered the recession with the ability to fight the downturn via massive fiscal stimulus (in China’s case) and conventional interest rate cuts (for India), which not only had a large direct impact on poverty but also managed to sustain growth in most of sub-Saharan Africa, which was exporting a lot to China.

But not all developing countries were so lucky. Places like South Africa and much of Latin America and the Caribbean were more economically linked to the US and Europe than to China and suffered massively. And Africa’s strong performance despite a global recession was exceptional by historical standards. Prior to the 2008-’09 business cycle, relatively mild recessions in the rich world (the recessions so mild that they prompted Lucas to proclaim the whole problem irrelevant) had more severe impacts on Africa’s commodity-oriented economies than they did on the countries that originally set them off.

Of course, if China and India somehow never have a recession again, then perhaps global poverty can continue falling indefinitely no matter how poorly the US and European economies are managed. But the risk is that as China and India continue to converge economically with the developed world, they will increasingly face the exact same policy challenges as the developed world — meaning the question of effective macroeconomic stabilization should be seen as a fundamentally global problem.

Deep recessions, meanwhile, also have the unfortunate consequence of pushing rich countries’ economic policy in directions that are harmful to the world’s most vulnerable people.

The core problem of the knock-on political consequences of bad macroeconomic policy is that during a recession, the objective facts of economic policy change. When the labor market is healthy, then policies that boost productivity and growth make the vast majority of people better off even if they do displace some workers. People who lose jobs just find new ones.

When the labor market is unhealthy, people tend to feel differently about politics and policy. But those feelings are rooted in objective reality. It’s genuinely true that technological advancement, openness to trade, immigration, and other growth-promoting policies can be damaging to many people.

Consider trade. Paul Krugman spent much of the downturn years arguing that restricting trade with China would help boost the American economy, given the high unemployment rate. Gauti Eggertsson of Brown University and the New York Fed has a fairly convincing paper arguing that during the New Deal, policies to form cartels and reduce agricultural output actually improved economic growth because higher prices broke the cycle of deflation. Similarly, but going in the other direction, low unemployment and labor scarcity create a strong constituency for openness to immigrant workers who become objectively necessary for growth when there’s no reserve army of domestic unemployed.

Japan, for example, is becoming increasingly welcoming toward immigrants even as the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction precisely because Japan has gotten ahead of other rich countries in its macroeconomic management. Japan’s labor force participation rate is at an all-time high, which is great news for Japanese people but also makes more immigration objectively desirable, which is in turn creating enormous new opportunities for residents of poorer countries. If every rich country could get as good at recession-fighting as Japan, the entire global political climate would be much more benign.

The core problem of the Great Recession, looking back, is precisely that Lucas’s complacent forecast really did seem sensible at the time. It appeared for a span of decades that central banks had learned how to successfully manipulate short-term interest rates in a predictable and reliable way that, while not avoiding recessions altogether, made them relatively short and painless.

That era came to a crashing halt in 2007-’08. Interest rates were already low by the time the downturn struck, so further cuts in short-term rates — the Fed’s traditional main tool — was not much help. The Federal Reserve cut them all the way down to zero, but that wasn’t low enough. And neither the Fed nor other major central banks had a clear game plan for what to do once you get to zero.

When we needed a robust response to the Great Recession, we were ill-equipped both as a matter of politics and policy. Congress tried fiscal stimulus and the Fed tried several rounds of quantitative easing, and the best evidence suggests that they both helped. But neither was enacted on a scale sufficient to actually cure the problem, and both were the subject of massive political backlash.

At the moment, Fed policymakers and professional staff have a somewhat clearer view of the technical issues than they did pre-recession, but they still have no specific game plan for what to do next time, and there’s zero political consensus about what they should do.

Over the past decades, a range of countries have experimented with some different approaches that seem to work — massive quantitative easing in Japan, exchange rate manipulation in Switzerland, credit policy in China — but none of them are clearly understood or universally accepted. Most importantly, the biggest and most influential central banks in the world — the Fed and the European Central Bank — haven’t clearly embraced any of these solutions as its game plan for the next time around. Nor have the American or European political systems reached any kind of consensus on the use of discretionary fiscal policy as an alternative to relying on central banks.

An underrated option that probably deserves more consideration is to dispense with a lot of the complexity and simply have the central bank print money and give directly to citizens as a kind of combined fiscal/monetary stimulus. There is, however, a wide variety of possible solutions, and it’s not particularly important which one is picked as long as something is picked.

But instead, everyone is left standing around essentially hoping that the problems that afflicted us a decade ago won’t arise again, even though almost nothing has been done to try to prevent their recurrence. Whether or not that changes in time is one of the biggest issues facing the future of humanity and deserves to be taken more seriously.

Original Source -> The Great Recession was awful. And we don’t have a plan to stop the next one.

via The Conservative Brief

[nebris]

(Why) The Future is a Choice Between Two Socialisms

Why Capitalism’s Collapse Feels Weirdly a Lot Like Communism’s

Here’s a funny observation. Soviet style communism was always marked by chronic, predictable shortages. Especially for luxuries. The line for jeans, sweaters, boomboxes, and TVs, which stretched around the block, always leaving people empty-handed — while decadent Westerners simply trundled down to the store and bought them by the truckload.

But capitalism is collapsing now in a weirdly similar way. It’s marked by chronic, persistent shortages for just the opposite. Not for luxuries — but for life’s basic necessities. Medicine, hospitals, education, good schools, income, decent media, a home to live, income, jobs. Even potable drinking water (see: Flint) and decent food. In America, for example — there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to get these things, because they’re always in short supply. In fact, life seems to be designed precisely so that some people must always be at threat of going without them. How ironic, when you think about it, no — capitalism and communism both failing, in mirror images of each other? Why is that? And what does it mean?

It suggests to me that the future is a choice between two socialisms. Or it won’t be much of a future at all. The good kind of socialism — and the bad kind. And that’s because capitalism has proven to be a ruinous failure as the sole (or highest) organizing principle of a society — which is what it’s been for the last thirty years or so now. I’ll make my case — and you judge if it carries any water.

Unless you believe in cosmic coincidences, the reason that ultranationalist movements have popped up, seemingly overnight, is straightforward: economies are stagnant and so people’s lives aren’t improving, . But what does that really mean? It means life has become governed by artificial scarcity. Middle and working classes are on the brink — because capitalism makes things artificially scarce, so that it can maximize profits. What things? Healthcare. Affordable education. A mortgage an average person can pay off in a lifetime. Decent jobs themselves. For young people, marriage, having kids, and homes of their own. When insulin costs thousands, though we all know it can and should cost pennies — that’s artificial scarcity.

And yet those are the lives the middle and working classes live now — everything is artificially, not really scarce. Societies throw out tons of food. Newly built homes go to waste — while young people live with their parents. Billionaires shoot off space rockets, while young diabetics die without insulin. Society can easily afford it but it’s forbidden, under the terms of neoliberal capitalism, to allow decent lives for everyone because then profits would stop growing and “growth” might come to a halt. Someone must suffer — and suffer badly. That is how you get to the weird paradox of a “growing” economy in which life expectancy, income, trust, meaning, and happiness are all falling. There isn’t enough to go around — but keeping things at just that razor’s edge of artificial scarcity is the only way now capitalism can raise its profit margins.

Hence, for large chunks of the middle and working class, their lives are worse in many ways than a few decades ago. Unless you believe that a bigger TV is a substitute for a stable job, a raise, savings, a mortgage you can pay off, healthcare you can afford, and stability that you can depend on. The rich have grown astronomically richer — but life below the line of being super rich is something between precarious and implosive, and that is because artificial scarcity keeps the basics of a decent life just out of reach, endlessly. That’s not a bug — it’s a feature of predatory capitalism. And that is why the future is a choice between of two kinds of socialism.

(If you understand that above, then you will also see that capitalism — at least in its current incarnation, something like monopolistic, financialized, mega capitalism — has failed precisely because it is making a tiny number of people ultra rich, but only at the expense of the middle class and working class, for whom artificial scarcity is used as both a carrot and a stick. Such an economy “grows” by generating more profits — but only through maximizing artificial scarcities for things like insulin, hospitals, and decent jobs which makes life itself implode. While that bargain surely works for elites and the rich, it is ruinous for society as a whole, because no one sensible will consent to it for very long — turning instead to fascists, authoritarians, and extremists.)

So capitalism the way we practice it ends in implosive stagnation. Artificial scarcities eating aaway at life: chronic and persistent shortages, of all the basics of a decent life. Yet these ongoing shortages are ever-present, things which never get “fixed” — because they are exactly what capitalism must maximize on one side, to maximize profits on the other.

And that’s why socialism is the future now. But not all socialisms are created equal. Think of opposite poles of a spectrum. On one side, lies social democracy. On the other, lies national socialism. Which of these should we desire? Which is good, and why?

Let’s start with national socialism. What is it, really? American thinkers will dispute it even really exists — but they are not known for thinking well. National socialism is very as a form of socialism. It is simply something like “socialism for the true people” or a little more accurately, “only those with pure blood, from pure soil, deserve to share in the fruits of society’s labours.”

Think of the “good German.” He was very much a beneficiary of national socialism. He was provided a stable job, a regular income, savings, a home, healthcare, safety, security, the ability to take care of his family and children — all for the first time, really, in decades. But there was a price. Maybe his day job was a lawyer — drafting laws to take homes from Jews. Whom did those homes go to? Well, loyal Party members, of course. Maybe he was a Gestapot officer, making sure Jews wore yellow stars. He was rewarded with money to buy things, a home, healthcare, a decent life — but only if he took all that away from the wrong people, too. Do you see the mirror image, which is the problem, yet?

The good German was playing a zero-sum game. I can have a decent life, finally — but only if I take away yours. The “work” that the good German was doing was really the work of repression. Of subjugating Jews, gays, and immigrants. Of dismantling the equality, freedom, and democracy. Of perverting the rule of law, and using it as a weapon to seize people’s belongings and money and savings and possesions and homes — which then belonged to the good German. That was what the new “jobs” in Nazi Germany really were. A zero sum game of taking life away from some, to give it back to others.

That is national socialism: one tribe decides to take all that belongs to a society, and distribute it amongst itself. Perhaps that is the answer to the “mystery” of why the good German turned a blind eye. The cost of receiving the basics of a good life from the Party was that he did the very work of seizing those basics from another, a lesser human being, in the Party’s eyes.

(How else is the problem of stagnation to be solved? Do you see the link here? That is the crucial thing, and if you understand it, so you also understand the future. A society can solve stagnation — shortages of basic goods — in only two ways. The first is to dispossess some of its own people — and then give those things, that medicine, that money, those homes, to others. But who will be dispossessed, and who will possess? The impure — and the pure. Hence, national socialism is structured along lines of racial supremacy. But it is at root a way to solve the problem of stagnation, by taking from those who don’t belong, and giving that to those who do. In that way, an illusory kind of “growth,” a sense of stability, purpose, meaning, belonging, and prosperity, are produced. But the price is that such a society will never be one that is free, democratic, equal, or fair. National socialism requires people to do the work of subjugating and repressing each other — that is its price. As a zero-sum game, that becomes a negative-sum game, it can’t take societies anywhere)

Don’t we already see just that happening in America? What is ICE, really? What are all these weird new government agencies, whose sole job appears to be to repress and subjugate and harm those who are “impure,” who don’t belong, who aren’t part of the right tribe? They are effectively welfare programs for the pure, aren’t they? They are ways for a good member of the tribe, today’s good American, to get income, a job, healthcare, savings, a home — all the things that are in shortage today in America. But the price is that he must exclude, punish, and hurt little children. That is a nascent kind of national socialism — if you can do the job of dispossessing others, then the Party will reward you with all the things that you need to live a decent life. That’s a very real kind of socialism, too.

It should go without saying that national socialism is the bad choice. The one we shouldn’t want. Because it is self-destructive. It “solves” the problem of stagnation in a foolish, small, and ruinous way. When we take from some, to give what was theirs to ourselves, we have kicked off a vicious cycle that must — must — end in war, genocide, and our own sure ruin — because we cannot do that to the whole world.

Then there is social democracy. What’s the difference? In a word, everything. The fundamental way it solves the problem of stagnation is different. Not by taking money, jobs, homes, possessions, and savings, from some, and giving them to the pure, strong, and powerful. But by a society choosing to invest in itself. To build more hospitals, highways, roads, schools, universities, labs, studios, homes. To ensure everyone can have an education, an income, healthcare, insurance, safety nets. Do you see the difference? National socialism operates through expropriation — I take what was yours, and now it’s the Party’s, to reward the most cruel and vicious with. But social democracy operates through the exactly the opposite: investment — we all pool our hard-won savings, and invest them in things which benefit us all, because they are things we cannot have any other way. Even a billionaire can’t really set up a cutting-edge hospital, and keep it running for more than a few years — it takes a society to do that.

So for social democracy, “socialism” isn’t a way to merely “redistribute” things. It is a way to change what can be distribution at all — not just who gets what, but what can be had in the first place. It’s a way to expand the basic goods available in a society — to the point that they’re available to everyone. In that way, it’s a mechanism to solve the problem of predatory capitalism operating according to the law of artificial scarcity as a tool to skyrocket profits — which costs lives, at this point. Socialism is a way for a society to address shortage of basic, fundamental goods, like healthcare, education, transport, media, safety nets, retirement, pensions — which capitalism has made artificially scarce.

National socialism, on the other hand, is a way to solve predatory capitalism’s problem of artificial scarcity by making it impossible for some people, the impure, to have many things at all. Which things? Well, usually, it begins with jobs. Then it’s the right to buy thing, to go into stores. Then it’s homes. Then it’s savings. Then it’s the right to live in certain neighborhoods — ghettoes rise. Then it’s the right to live in cities — camps rise. Then, finally, it’s life itself.

Do you see the vicious spiral at work? National socialism solves the problem capitalism leaves society with, which is shortages of basic goods, in a harmful and destructive way — one must take more, from the impure, in more and more savage ways. Jobs, careers, incomes, savings, homes, neighborhoods, citizenship — life itself. That is what it takes to keep “growth” going under the terms of national socialism, because it has always been operating by taking from some, and giving it others, according to the Party’s judgment of who is purest.

But social democracy solves the problem capitalism leaves society with, shortages of basic goods, in a much more intelligent, civilized, and sustainable way. It invests, so that those shortages are turned into surpluses. Hospitals, highways, schools, universities — abundant enough for all to have access, at a relatively low price. And the “work” done is very different too. The good German, whether the lawyer, the police officer, or the accountant, was doing the work of harming others — but the social democrat, whether the doctor at the hospital, the professor at the university, or the builder of the bridge, is doing work that helps others genuinely realize themselves. And in that way, because it unlocks our higher possibilities, social democracy is the far, far better choice.

Now. This essay has been far too long already. You might say, at this point, “But all that’s obvious!!” Ah, my friend. If it were would the world be where it is today?

Umair July 2018

https://eand.co/why-the-future-is-a-choice-between-two-socialisms-fde3ca6383cc

[torontotravelblog]

IS TORONTO THE NEW MANHATTAN?

If you are not already a homeowner in Toronto, maybe now is the time

The mortgage industry in Canada has experienced some big changes in the last few months. Add the recently increased interest rates to that mix, and you have a good recipe for a conspiracy theory.

The first question that comes to mind is this: does the U.S. election have anything to do with these changes? Especially for people from our part of the world who are experts in conspiracy theories, right?

And while we wait and see how Trump’s administration will affect the American economy, and indirectly the Canadian one, let us analyze the situation north of the border… The history of the last 10 or so years, the reason for the changes, circumstances, consequences, and so on.

One of the biggest “problems” in the Canadian real estate market of the last few years (let’s say decade) was the so-called uncontrolled real estate value increase. That growth most affected Toronto and Vancouver. Both cities proved themselves to be good destinations for foreign investors because of some of their natural advantages (more details to follow), and also because of the relative stability of an economy that withstood (still questionable) the financial crisis much better than the rest of the world.

One of the biggest reasons why the Canadian economy fared better than our American neighbours or many other countries in the western hemisphere is because of its monetary economics, at least the part that directly affects interest rates.

The Bank of Canada has always been very conservative, particularly after a big crisis in the 1980s when interest rates reached a record 18%. Around ten years ago, while our southern friends were approving mortgages for people who were not able to afford them, while people without any real job security were multiple property owners, the approval conditions were much stricter in Canada. In other words, if someone was not able to afford credit, they would not get it. Because of this, when the 2008 subprime housing crisis hit America, the owners of these properties began returning their keys to the bank; the number of properties increased, and the prices dropped. In Canada, this was not the case. Only a very small amount of people was not able to pay off their credit, since it was originally given to them on the basis of realistic qualifications.

In the last few years, the Bank of Canada, along with the Ministry of Finance, has striven to stay conservative and to enact regulations and restrictions that would not allow the price of real estate to go up, nor for people who pay their mortgages to lose their homes because they can no longer afford them. We have seen various changes. The amortization period has dropped from 40 years to 25 years for certain mortgages; the qualifying rate for some mortgages has nearly doubled; the mortgage approval program not based on income, regardless of the percentage of down payment, has practically vanished, etc.

We saw that these changes had a big effect on the purchasing power of many applicants; we saw the speculators decrease their purchases of investment properties; we saw some other results. However, what we did not see was the decrease of real estate prices, at least in Vancouver and Toronto.  

Let’s go back to these two cities.

Vancouver is a city surrounded by mountains and ocean and that physically cannot grow, except in height. Therefore, the value of land is understandably high. Add to that the fact that a large percentage of its population is of Asian descent and you will conclude that it is an exceptional investment destination for rich Asians, be they from Hong Kong or Mainland China.  

For that reason, foreign investors greatly influenced the value of real estate in Vancouver. When the demand is great, the prices rise. And when the Canadian dollar dropped a few years back, it looked as if Canadian real estate came with a 20% discount compared to the United States. Of course, an increase in demand comes with an increase in price.

The changes implemented by the Bank of Canada in the past few years did not have a big effect on controlling the value of real estate in Vancouver, since it was not average applicants who were raising the prices. It was mainly rich investors who were buying these properties in cash—properties that were mainly empty throughout the year.

At that point, all three levels of government (municipal, provincial, and federal) agreed that Vancouver’s problems would have to be solved with solutions specific to that region, more specifically by taxing foreign investors. The change was felt overnight. Purchases drastically decreased, and the investors shifted their interests to cities like Toronto, Portland, and Seattle.  

Why did the prices in Toronto continue to increase, and what did the Bank do to stop it?

First of all, I am sure that you have seen that every single square foot of downtown (and not-so-downtown) Toronto is being used to its maximum potential. Parts of town that until recently were considered bad have turned overnight into neighbourhoods first settled by hipsters, then millenials, and then families with children. A Starbucks sprouts on every corner, and if not them, then other smaller cafés that serve—in my opinion—much better coffee.

Buildings sprout on every corner. People who live downtown have less and less desire to travel, and can run more and more errands close to their homes. They go grocery shopping close to where they live, and in the evenings they go out to local spots. Recently, I was speaking to the person who rents our apartment and for whom I am getting a mortgage for a property she intends to buy. When I asked her in what part of town she wishes to buy, she said she was looking at a townhouse in the Trinity Bellwoods area. That did not surprise me. What did surprise me was when I suggested that they look at, for example, Long Branch (Etobicoke) and for a little bit more money buy a house, she answered, “Where is that?”

For someone who works for the provincial government, I doubt that it was a question of not knowing the geography of the city, but simply the fact that she wants to live in the city, to bike to work, to buy organic groceries in the local supermarket. For them, everything west of High Park is not the city anymore, but rather the suburbs. For her—and many other millenials who live in Toronto—it is much more important to stay in the city even if it means living in a smaller place that has its limitations. Maybe their opinions will change once the kids grow up and they no longer have space for all the bikes and hockey equipment. But in the meantime, it is exactly these kinds of buyers who are pushing up the demand, which is pushing up the prices of real estate in Toronto’s downtown core.

Lately, it is becoming more and more common to hear the phrase “the Manhattanization of Toronto”—the idea that downtown Toronto is slowly turning into Manhattan.  There is less and less land available, the population is growing, families are not moving out of the circus but rather staying in it. All of this influences the strong demand for apartments in downtown Toronto, which in turn influences the price of real estate. And why would it not? When you look at it, in what other city in the world can you get an apartment for $300,000 and then walk to the financial district as influential as that of Toronto? Where the crime rate is the lowest in the world for this kind of metropolis, and where there is a job for everyone who wants to work?

Maybe the increase in real estate prices in Toronto does not have so much to do with earlier lax mortgage approval conditions. Maybe it is a restructuration of the city.  Maybe, now that the value of houses has gone up, future buyers will look for the next best alternative, but still in Toronto. Is it a townhouse downtown? Is it a two-bedroom apartment?

Either way, the new rules are in place. Let us examine the two most important segments.  

Firstly, there is a new rule that all mortgages where the down payment is less than 20% must be qualified using the Bank of Canada posted rate, no matter the product. Until recently, anyone who applied for a 5-year closed fixed mortgage had the opportunity to use that interest rate as the qualifying interest rate. Under today’s circumstances, suppose that the rate is 2.69%. The new rule requires that 4.74% be used as the qualifying rate, which practically lowers the purchasing power by 25-30%. In other words, someone who would have qualified for a mortgage of $650,000 can now borrow around $500,000.

The second change is related to whether or not the mortgage transaction is insured by CMHC, Genworth, or Canada Guaranty. What most Canadians do not know is that many Canadian institutions insure all their mortgages, even if it means paying the insurance premiums out of pocket. The new rules control which kinds of mortgages can or cannot be insured, and this is where the situation becomes complicated. Every mortgage becomes unique depending on whether it is a purchase or a refinancing, the purchase price, the property purpose, the amount of down payment, and so on, and as such comes with a price. In other words, if you see a promotional interest rate of 2.79% in a bank, that interest rate can be accessible to people buying property valued at less than $1 million, for example, but not to someone who wishes to refinance an existing mortgage.

Do I personally think that these changes will lead to a price decrease in Toronto? Absolutely not! I think that it will definitely be much harder for our children, the so-called millenials, to buy freehold houses in Toronto one day. I think real estate will continue to rise, since Toronto remains a top and secure destination for foreign investors.

In this age of globalization as we are experiencing it, I think that Toronto will reach the level of London, San Francisco, Moscow, or Paris, where the price of real estate vastly exceeds the purchasing power of its residents.  

Which leads us back to Donald Trump…

First of all, I doubt that the increase in interest rates is a direct consequence of Trump’s victory. In fact, it is, but not in the long run.

As is well known, the market can react well or badly to unexpected news. For example, if the profits of a company end up being lower than expected, its shares can fall, since they were originally based on the expected (higher) profit. Or, if someone unexpectedly wins the presidential election, there are signs of insecurity; of what happens next, and how. This is what happened when Trump won: the market practically went crazy, but quickly stabilized.  

The interest rates for mortgages are not based on the same principle. They are based on the economic situation of the country, the (un)employment rate, inflation, the predictions of all these factors, and so on.

We witnessed that interest rates in Canada went up quickly after the election. Many connect that to the presidential election, but I do not think it is the case. It is not news that the economic situation before elections can be fairly stable. Maybe it was the last try of the previous administration to leave a positive effect on voters. In our part of the world, it would sometimes happen overnight before an election—the paving of some parts of towns or villages that were waiting on infrastructure for years. That is why many people say over coffee, “Let’s wait for this election to pass and see what is really going on.” That was the case with interest rates as well. I think they were bound to go up in the U.S., but some important indicators were ignored until the curtain finally went down. In the words of Djordje Balašević, “The circus is leaving our small town…”

Let us put aside, for a moment, the support that many people from the homeland have for Trump, for obvious reasons…  

Although only time will show the true intentions of his administration, the fact remains that Trump’s protectionist climate precisely makes Toronto an even more attractive destination for foreign, non-white investors.

This post " IS TORONTO THE NEW MANHATTAN?" was first seen on San Magazine

Intravenous Hydration Clinic Toronto Ontario - Dr. Amauri Wellness Centre - Dr. Amauri Caversan

[funnythingshere0-blog]

The best comedies on Amazon Prime

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/the-best-comedies-on-amazon-prime/

The best comedies on Amazon Prime

It’s not easy finding the best comedies on Amazon Prime. The service’s search function needs serious work, and keeping track of what’s available can be a futile effort for casual viewers. Movies often come and go without notice or jump from one platform to the other. The days of adding movies to your queue or My List and being able to work through them at your own pace are gone. To make matters worse, with every streaming outlet producing and distributing their own original content, the selection of non-affiliated content is dwindling.

But fear not: We’ve tracked down all of the good funny movies on Amazon Prime, and we’re going to update this list monthly, so you can count on it. Here are the best comedy movies on Amazon Prime you can watch right now.

The best comedies on Amazon Prime

1) Superbad

The first time I watched Superbad I laughed as often and as hard as I have laughed at any movie in theaters. A decade and numerous viewings later, the comedy is showing its age, but it’s still funny, if you’re into Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s work. But the aspect of the film that endures is the friendship between Evan and Seth (Michael Cera and Jonah Hill). That’s the key ingredient to the success of these kinds of movies. If you buy the friendship, then everything else is gravy. It’s crazy to think that ten years after its release the core cast of Superbad would have a three Academy Awards nominations for acting under its belt (and one win courtesy of Emma Stone), but Superbad has more going for it than most high school comedies.

Movieclips Classic Trailers

2) Landline

Jenny Slate and Gillian Robespierre, star and director of the acclaimed Obvious Child, respectively, reteam on Landline, a ‘90s-set family drama. It’s about sisters who uncover their father’s affair and the effects of that news coming to light. It’s a plotline straight out of the indie movie starter pack, but it’s elevated by strong work from the cast. Abby Quinn makes a noteworthy debut playing Slate’s sister, and Edie Falco, John Turturro, Finn Wittrock, and Mark Duplass are all terrific.

3) Mystery Team

The simple pitch of 2009’s Mystery Team is The Wire meets Encyclopedia Brown. It stars Donald Glover, Dominic Dierkes, and D.C. Pierson (who also wrote the script) as three high school seniors who continue the mystery-solving business they started as kids. The Mystery Team gets their biggest case to date when a young girl hires them to figure out who killed her parents. The barrage of jokes is relentless, and the hit rate is high. The cast is packed with tons of now-familiar faces (Aubrey Plaza, Ellie Kemper, Kay Cannon, Bobby Moynihan, and Matt Walsh all pop up) and energetic directing by Dan Eckman.

4) The Foot Fist Way

The Foot Fist Way is the rawest, purest form of Danny McBride. He plays a brash tae kwon do instructor, Ben Simmons, who shares his considerable lack of skills with kids. Fists and foul-mouthed barbs fly as Simmons trains the kids for a tournament. Simmons is a rough draft version of Kenny Powers, and it’s worth watching to see McBride and co-writer and director Jody Hill before they blew up. If you’re a fan of McBride’s style, you owe it to yourself to catch up with The Foot Fist Way.

YouTube Movies

5) The Big Sick

The real-life relationship between Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon provides the basis for this charming romantic comedy. An Amazon original movie, The Big Sick deals with the dynamic of the couple’s interracial relationship and how it affects their families, his family more than hers as well as Gordon’s hospital stay and medically induced coma. Nanjiani and Gordon wrote the script, with Nanjiani playing himself and Zoe Kazan playing Gordon. The movie is an honest, hilarious reminder that our differences are the best things about us. The Big Sick is one of 2017’s best films.

Amazon Studios/YouTube

READ MORE: 

6) The Little Hours

If you like your comedies on the dirty side, then you need to add The Little Hours to the top of your queue. From writer-director Jeff Baena, The Little Hours follows a man on the run who takes refuge in a convent and sets the nuns a tizzy. He must maintain his cover as a deaf man while also managing the nuns’ sexual advances. The cast is packed with all your favorites and recognizable faces from TV (Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Nick Offerman, Aubrey Plaza, and Adam Pally). Basically, if you like any of the 2010’s best TV comedies, The Little Hours is almost custom made for you.

7) Kingpin

The Farrelly brothers’ Kingpin stands alongside The Big Lebowski as one of the preeminent bowling movies of the ‘90s. Over the years, Kingpin’s reputation has grown substantially, and it’s now viewed as one of the decade’s best comedies. Any movie with Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray is worth your time, and Kingpin will reward your investment. The Farrelly brothers lost their touch over years, but Kingpin stands alongside Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary as their best work.

8) His Girl Friday

This pitch-perfect screwball comedy captures the classic Hollywood era at its finest. Cary Grant stars as a hard-nosed New York City newspaper editor trying to win back his ex-wife and star investigative reporter, played by Rosalind Russell, and still get the paper out the door. Based on the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, 1940’s His Girl Friday takes place almost entirely in a newsroom, which gives the movie a certain intensity, while Howard Hawks (the titan behind The Big Sleep, Red River, and Bringing Up Baby, another Grant essential) ensures the dialogue and laughs come faster than print deadlines. —Austin Powell

YouTube/Movieclips

9) Election

Here’s the thing about Election: You need to watch it at least twice, preferably several years apart. How you feel about the sad sack high school teacher played by Matthew Broderick, the ambitious overachiever student played by Reese Witherspoon, and their escalating feud might change depending on how old you are. But even if you find out you are always Team Broderick or always Team Witherspoon, it’s worth re-watching just for the laughs, which, in classic Alexander Payne style, are born from familiar humiliation and recognizable human folly.

Movieclips Classic Trailers/YouTube

10) Daddy’s Home

Will Ferrell plays a buttoned-up step-dad competing for the affection of his stepkids with the kids’ father, played by Mark Wahlberg. The game of one-upmanship grows increasingly silly, as those kinds of things are wont to do, and Ferrell and Wahlberg sell the jokes as best they can. Daddy’s Home isn’t the funniest movie you’ll see with Wahlberg or Ferrell, but it gets the job done.

Movieclips Trailers/YouTube

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11) What We Do in the Shadows

This is one of the funniest movies of the Amazon Prime and it deserves a much larger fanbase than the small and passionate one it has now. Co-written and co-directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, this New Zealand set romp follows the daily lives of a quartet of vampires. Shot mockumentary style, the movie is packed to the fangs with so many jokes that it makes repeat viewings a necessity. Whether hunting for prey, fighting with werewolves, or reuniting with old loves, Waititi and Clement have crafted a pitch-perfect comedy that riffs on well-known mythology and newly created lore with equal cleverness.

Madman Films/YouTube

12) Barbershop: The Next Cut

The third entry in Ice Cube’s Barbershop series might be its best. The movie, like the barbershop itself, has a looseness to it that makes you want to linger in the shop longer than you need to. The conversation is alternately fun and fierce. The ball-busting goes both ways, with everybody cracking wise and getting cracked on but always in a way that’s good-hearted. If that were all the movie had going, that would be enough for a fun time. But The Next Cut tackles larger issues, most notably the changing racial makeup and growing crime problems of Chicago. In a movie with the central idea of people hashing out the day-to-day of their lives, the thornier societal issues flow naturally out of the conversation, and the movie is consistently entertaining. The cast, including stalwarts Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer, Eve, Sean Patrick Thomas, Anthony Anderson, and newcomers Lamorne Morris, Nicki Minaj, and Common, have an easy chemistry and the film’s two hours just fly by.

JoBlow Movie Trailers/YouTube

13) Love & Friendship

Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Jane Eyre’s Lady stars Kate Beckinsale as a widow on a mission to find husbands who offer the most financial stability for her daughters. Love & Friendship is hilarious and refreshingly self-aware. The film earned a great deal of acclaim, with Beckinsale and Tom Bennett singled out amongst a strong cast. If you’re new to Stillman’s work, this is a great introduction.

Movieclips Trailers/YouTube

14) Paterson

Every day for bus driver Paterson (Adam Driver) is exactly the same, and every day is also sublimely unique. Making wonderful use of repetition and recurring imagery, indie legend Jim Jarmusch’s latest shows how beauty can be found everywhere, if only you bother to look. Anchored by Driver’s understated performance, Paterson is a celebration of the creative impulse, and its ability to impart mystery and import to even the most innocuous of things. —David Wharton

FilmTrailerZone/YouTube

15) Jeff Who Lives at Home

The hyper-prolific brothers Jay and Mark Duplass delivered one of their best films with this 2011 dramedy. Jeff (Jason Segel) is a slacker who spends a day with his brother Pat (Ed Helms). What starts out as a simple errand turns into the brothers sneaking around to see if Pat’s wife is having an affair. Along the way, the day turns out to be a major turning point in Jeff’s life. It’s not surprising that the Duplass brothers would find great, success in a movie centered on brothers.

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16) Young Adult

Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody rekindled their Juno magic with the acerbic and darker Young Adult. Charlize Theron stars as Mavis, an author, who returns home after her divorce and sets out to win back her married ex. Mavis is a tough, compelling character, and Theron gives one of her best performances. Movies about characters struggling to grow up have become a cliché at this point, but Young Adult is sharp enough to offer an insightful and pretty funny approach.

17) Logan Lucky

Steven Soderbergh returned to feature films after his four-year hiatus with this NASCAR heist film. Toplined by a great cast (including Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Katie Holmes, Riley Keough, and Katherine Waterston), Logan Lucky channels the easy energy and breezy fun of Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films. The movie won’t blow you away with its originality, but when everyone is operating at this level, the joy becomes infectious.

18) Deadheads

This horror comedy movie about two self-aware zombies on a road trip delivers more laughs than scares. Deadheads wears its silliness like a badge of honor. It is relentlessly goofy, and its sense of fun is highly infectious. The road trip hits a bump when the guys realize they’re being chased by mysterious men. But even when the story shifts toward action, it never loses its sense of humor.

19) Dance Flick

If you need a funny movie and want something you can watch on autopilot, the Wayans family has you covered. Between cast and crew, no less than 11 Wayans family members combine to bring us 85 minutes of buffoonery. In the vein of Scary Movie (before the Wayans left the series), Dance Flick riffs off the slew of cheesy but awesome dance movies that flooded the market during the ‘00s.

20) The Replacements

The Replacements combines two of America’s favorite things, Keanu Reeves and football, and pairs them with the great Gene Hackman. When a strike hits pro football, amateur players are recruited to play until the strike ends. Reeves leads the replacement player squad as quarterback Shane Falco. No doubt Reeves’ prior fictional football experience with Johnny Utah played a role in Falco’s success. Even though the players in The Replacements may be scabs, the cast and laughs are all starting caliber.

READ MORE:

21) The King of Comedy

Martin Scorsese’s movie about a mentally unstable man, Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro), who dreams of being a famous comedian. Pupkin goes as far as kidnapping his idol Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). The King of Comedy is still relevant today for its fame-obsessed protagonist’s at-all-costs mentality. There’s a sense of danger and sadness to Pupkin, and DeNiro threads the needle to make him a sympathetic character without sugarcoating anything. The King of Comedy isn’t as well-known as other Scorsese-DeNiro collaborations, but it is on par with Raging Bull and Goodfellas.

Pauleymack/YouTube

22) What If

Daniel Radcliffe’s post-Harry Potter movies have been all over the map in terms of quality, but they’ve all been interesting. What If stands out for being a low-key anti-romcom romcom. Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan star as the central duo. They’re happy being friends but have too much chemistry to stay that way forever. Radcliffe and Kazan make for an adorable pair, and their chemistry drives What If’s success.

23) The Lobster

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos tells his satirical stories in such a deadpan, straight-faced way that it’s easy to (wrongfully) write him and his work off as detached nihilism. His style is an acquired taste, but if you’re willing to take the chance I find his films to be worth the investment. The Lobster is about a single man (a schlubby, sad-sack, terrific Colin Farrell) who is forced by the government to check in to a hotel, wherein he’ll have 45 days to find a mate or be turned into an animal of his choosing. The first half of the film takes down every aspect of modern-day courtship, while the second half shifts into something more optimistic and, dare I say, romantic. Farrell does some of his best work to date, and the rest of the cast (Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly, Olivia Colman, and Lea Seydoux, among others) is uniformly excellent.

Movieclips Trailers/YouTube

24) Swiss Army Man

It’s a damn shame that so few people saw this movie in theaters. The premise is kitschy enough that most people dismissed it outright, but now that Swiss Army Man is streaming, hopefully it will find the audience it deserves. It’s about a man (Paul Dano) and the dead body he befriends (Daniel Radcliffe). The friendship that blossoms between the two is hilarious, charming, and far more emotionally involving than you expect. The story is laced with enough juvenile humor to appeal to the inner kid in everyone, but the ace in the hole is its highly affecting emotional drama. The movie is a celebration of life anchored by truly great performances from Dano and Radcliffe.

A24/YouTube

25) Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed

Scooby-Doo 2 is easily the best live-action Scooby-Doo. Monsters Unleashed is much more fun than the first movie. All of the key players are back as the gang saves Coolsville from monsters that have previously been unmasked.

YouTube Movies/YouTube

Still not sure what to watch on Amazon? Here are the best Amazon original series, the best documentaries on Amazon Prime, what’s new on Amazon, the best movies you can watch in stunning 4K Ultra HD, and the sexiest movies you can stream right now.  

Editor’s note: This article is regularly updated for relevance. 

[newstfionline]

He ran North Korea’s secret money making operation. Now he lives in Virginia.

By Anna Fifield, Washington Post, July 13, 2017

American and multilateral efforts to sanction North Korea into submission won’t work because there are too many ways around them, Ri Jong Ho says.

He should know.

For about three decades, Ri was a top moneymaker for the Kim regime, sending millions of dollars a year back to Pyongyang even as round after round of sanctions was imposed to try to punish North Korea for its nuclear defiance.

“We were never in pain or hurting in our trade business because of the sanctions. Instead, we conducted our first nuclear test in 2006,” Ri said in an interview near Tysons Corner.

The 59-year-old, whose job had been to raise money for the North Korean regime, and his family now live in Northern Virginia, having defected to South Korea at the end of 2014 and moved to the United States last year.

“I used to be sanctioned, as a North Korean who led trade at the front line, but I never felt any pain from the sanctions. The sanctions were perfunctory,” Ri said.

He described being able to send millions of U.S. dollars to North Korea simply by handing a bag of cash to the captain of a ship leaving from the Chinese port city of Dalian, where he was based, to the North Korean port of Nampo, or by giving it to someone to take on the train across the border.

In first the nine months of 2014--he defected in October that year--Ri said he sent about $10 million to Pyongyang this way.

For more than two decades, the United States has been trying to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program, alternating between inducements and punishments.

In both cases, American policy has relied on China, North Korea’s erstwhile patron, using its economic power over its cash-strapped neighbor. But Beijing’s implementation of sanctions, even those it backed through the United Nations, has been patchy at best. China’s overwhelming priority is ensuring stability in North Korea.

President Trump has repeatedly called on China to support his policy of putting “maximum pressure” on Pyongyang to stop its nuclear and missile programs.

Efforts have not changed North Korea’s behavior. This is partly because multilateral sanctions imposed through the United Nations must be watered down to avoid being vetoed by China or Russia, traditional backers of North Korea, and partly because other countries don’t implement the tougher but unilateral U.S. sanctions.

“Unless China, Russia and the United States cooperate fully to sanction North Korea, it will be impossible to hurt them,” Ri said.

China’s interest in North Korea is well known, but Russia’s role in supporting the former Soviet client state is often overlooked. Amid calls for China to limit oil exports to North Korea, Russia has dramatically increased the amount of oil it has sent--some reports suggest exports have quadrupled--to North Korea this year.

North Korea’s financial networks, moreover, are intentionally murky. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned more and more North Koreans and North Korean companies by name to try to cut them off from the American financial system, but few, if any, have any exposure to the United States.

For this reason, Ri’s insights are widely sought after in Washington, where successive administrations have been trying to find North Korea’s pressure points.

Ri worked for three decades in Office 39, the Workers’ Party operation responsible for raising money for the North Korean leader. The office has long been associated with both legal trade and illicit activity, including counterfeiting dollars and drug smuggling.

Ri said he worked as president of a shipping company and was chairman of Korea Kumgang Group, a company that formed a venture with Sam Pa, a Chinese businessman, to start a taxi company in Pyongyang. Ri suppled a photo of him and Pa aboard a jet to Pyongyang.

He was awarded the title “hero of labor” in 2002 for his efforts, and said he lived the good life in Pyongyang, with a color TV and a car. “I was very loyal to Kim Jong Il, so I was rewarded by him,” he said. “I was rich.”

His last position was running the Dalian branch of Daeheung, a trading company involved in shipping, coal and seafood exports, and oil imports. The company was given targets to meet in terms of profits, he said, declining to go into details.

But in 2014, Ri grew increasingly disillusioned after Kim Jong Un suddenly denounced his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, as a “traitor for all ages” and had him executed at the end of 2013.

Jang had been leading economic cooperation efforts with China, and dozens of people who worked for him were also purged at the time, Ri said. He worried that his family would be next. They escaped to South Korea before moving to the United States, where his two children, now in their 20s, plan to go to college.

Ri said North Korea has repeatedly found ways to circumvent whatever sanctions are imposed on it.

“North Korea is a 100 percent state enterprise, so these companies just change their names the day after they’re sanctioned,” he said. “That way the company continues, but with a different name than the one on the sanctions list.”

Ri’s Chinese counterparts weren’t bothered, either, he said.

“My partners in China also want to make a profit, so they don’t care much about sanctions,” he said. “When the Chinese government orders them to stop, they stop for a few days and then start up again.”

The former money man advocates an approach that combines Trump’s “maximum pressure” with another idea that the president has at least flirted with: talks.

“I think there should be top-level talks between the U.S. and North Korea, so that they can both work together to solve the problem,” Ri said.

At unofficial talks in Oslo in May, a North Korean delegation signaled to American representatives Kim’s interest in talking, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.

Previous diplomatic efforts to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons have failed, and there is a great deal of skepticism in Washington about negotiations.

But that shouldn’t stop the current administration trying, Ri said: “Like they say in politics, yesterday’s enemy can be today’s friend.”

[samuelfields]

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money

In highschool, my best friend and I looked through a giant book of jobs and their salaries.

We immediately flipped to the end to find the one that paid the most money.

It was an investment banker.

Without a second thought, we both declared we were going to be investment bankers.

Did we have any clue what an investment bank actually did? Nope! We just wanted the highest pay.

I wish I had known how many options I really had. I could have focused on a path that would have been a better fit right from the beginning.

Turns out, there’s a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money. Whether you’re still in highschool or making a career change, you have a lot of options.

Here are the top 12 jobs that potentially can make a lot of money for you.

Accountant

An accountant will perform financial calculations for individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. Accountants must know how to examine and prepare a variety of financial reporting forms, helping customers or businesses remain in compliance with accounting rules and laws. Accountants may need to work long hours at certain times of the year, such as during tax calculation time.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs;,some licensing and certification

Average annual salary: $70,500

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Some of the work is pretty dull. It’s also rare to reach a seven figure salary compared to other jobs on our list

Business Executive

A business executive could hold a multitude of jobs at a company, including CEO, CFO, or COO. A founder of a business could end up being a CEO, because he or she knows the industry and the business. On the other hand, someone with a formal business degree and business training could move into an executive role to help any business run more efficiently and profitably. With bonuses included, business executives can earn huge annual salaries.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $104,980

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Highly stressful jobs, may require decades or more to reach a lucrative business executive position

Computer System and IT Manager

A computer system manager or IT manager will oversee all computer related systems and processes in a company or organization. This can include things like planning out hardware purchases, installing computing software, managing a network, and performing troubleshooting. IT managers need quite a bit of education, including ongoing education, to stay up to date on new techniques and tech products.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, ongoing education

Average annual salary: $142,530

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Can require long working hours, extensive education, and rare to reach a seven figure salary

Engineer

Engineers can design things like aircraft, cars, boats, spacecraft, satellites, large buildings, bridges, computers, and infrastructure. Chemical engineers will work with fuel and drugs to solve problems in the use of these substances. Other types of engineers may try to solve environmental problems or help people perform jobs more efficiently and safely. Engineers rely on math, physics, biology, and chemistry to perform their work.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $80,170

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Requires a high level of mathematical ability, rare to reach a seven figure salary in this profession versus others on our list

Entertainment Professional

Jobs like actor, musician, TV or radio show host, producer, and writer can all fit in the entertainment industry. For the most successful professionals in these areas, this job can be extremely lucrative. However, a job in the entertainment industry rarely has a lot of stability. You’re often on your own, working from contract to contract. You’ll also have to hire an agent to negotiate contracts and help you find work. It can also be extremely difficult to break into the industry.

Requirements: Mix of schooling and on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $40,000

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Highly competitive industries, jobs don’t have much stability, agent fees will eat a percentage of your earnings

Investment Banker

It may not be the most exciting job, and it may not be all that well understood, but an investment banker can make a lot of money each year. In general terms, an investment banker is someone who brokers deals, such as company mergers and acquisitions. Those who broker the largest financial deals receive the largest compensation amounts.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, FINRA licenses

Average annual salary: $64,120, plus performance bonuses

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Regular 80+ hour weeks, a lot of stress because of the heavy reliance on performance bonuses

Lawyer

If your idea of a lawyer is someone who is dramatically arguing cases in a courtroom, as happens on TV, this is only a small part of the work. Most of it is spent in research, document review, filing motions,  and editing contracts. Lawyers can work in criminal, tax, patent, corporate, or other types of law, so a lot of specialties exist. Lawyers do have an easier time becoming politicians than other professions, if that appeals to you.

Requirements: Tons of extra education, including a law degree, must pass a state bar examination

Average annual salary: $120,910

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extremely competitive profession that requires several years of advanced schooling

Pharmacist

A pharmacist works in a hospital, a medical facility, or a retail store, dispensing prescription medication for customers. A pharmacist needs quite a bit of training in how different medications work, including understanding side effects and interactions with other medications. Pharmacists require formal education and licensing to be able to legally dispense prescription medication.

Requirements: Doctor of pharmacy degree, licenses in the state in which they work

Average annual salary: $126,120

Top annual earners: $250,000 plus

The downside: Pharmacists have little chance of earning a seven figure salary unless they own a business, requires quite a bit of on-going education

Physician and Surgeon

Doctors in the American medical system have the ability to make huge salaries, but it can take a while to hit that level. A physician or a surgeon needs tons of education and on-the-job training. The learning never ends for doctors. When starting out, doctors can work some long, strange hours. But once they reach a certain level of expertise, this job is rewarding financially.

Requirements: Long years of extra education including a medical degree and a residency, licenses required

Average annual salary: $208,000

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Making life and death decisions on a daily basis is stressful especially in a highly competitive industry with long hours

Professional Athlete

This is one job that kids dream about having that actually also makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, it’s probably the job they have the least chance of achieving. People need some natural talent to succeed in almost any job, but pro athletes may rely the most on natural talent. Beyond receiving millions to play the game, the most well-known pro athletes may receive just as much money for endorsements.

Requirements: Being selected after a physical tryout, constant on-the-job training and physical workouts

Average annual salary: $50,650

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extreme physical stress and injuries can take their toll on long term health, professional sports careers don’t last more than a few years for most people

Real Estate Developer

A real estate developer will purchase property and develop it with lucrative commercial and residential projects. These purchases are a bit of a gamble, as a mistake can lead to huge financial losses. You may start as a real estate agent, learning how the markets work, before making your own investments or investing on behalf of others.

Requirements: Knowledge of real estate markets and laws through on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $50,300

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: High rewards come with high risks, choosing the wrong project or making a judgment error about a particular project’s viability could lead to bankruptcy

Software Developer

A software developer will write software, or code, that controls computers and other personal electronics devices. App developers also can be software developers. In fact, someone who develops a highly popular app could make millions off one app. This is another fast growing profession that will need employees in the future.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree optional

Average annual salary: $105,590

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Long hours, especially stressful when trying to complete a project

Picking the Best High Paying Job

Having a list is one thing, picking the right job is a lot harder.

If I was giving “highschool me” some advice, I’d tell him to find a high paying job that’s the best fit. Some jobs are extremely stressful like an investment banker. Others are more routine like an accountant. There’s dozens of different criteria that make up a true dream job.

The best way to figure out which job is the best fit is to develop friendships with people in that field. If you genuinely enjoy spending time with them, that’s a promising sign.

Also look for entry-level roles in those fields to try them yourself. Most of these jobs can be started later on if you discover that a particular path won’t work out.

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Finance https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/jobs-that-make-a-lot-of-money/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[samuelfields]

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money

In highschool, my best friend and I looked through a giant book of jobs and their salaries.

We immediately flipped to the end to find the one that paid the most money.

It was an investment banker.

Without a second thought, we both declared we were going to be investment bankers.

Did we have any clue what an investment bank actually did? Nope! We just wanted the highest pay.

I wish I had known how many options I really had. I could have focused on a path that would have been a better fit right from the beginning.

Turns out, there’s a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money. Whether you’re still in highschool or making a career change, you have a lot of options.

Here are the top 12 jobs that potentially can make a lot of money for you.

Accountant

An accountant will perform financial calculations for individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. Accountants must know how to examine and prepare a variety of financial reporting forms, helping customers or businesses remain in compliance with accounting rules and laws. Accountants may need to work long hours at certain times of the year, such as during tax calculation time.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs;,some licensing and certification

Average annual salary: $70,500

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Some of the work is pretty dull. It’s also rare to reach a seven figure salary compared to other jobs on our list

Business Executive

A business executive could hold a multitude of jobs at a company, including CEO, CFO, or COO. A founder of a business could end up being a CEO, because he or she knows the industry and the business. On the other hand, someone with a formal business degree and business training could move into an executive role to help any business run more efficiently and profitably. With bonuses included, business executives can earn huge annual salaries.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $104,980

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Highly stressful jobs, may require decades or more to reach a lucrative business executive position

Computer System and IT Manager

A computer system manager or IT manager will oversee all computer related systems and processes in a company or organization. This can include things like planning out hardware purchases, installing computing software, managing a network, and performing troubleshooting. IT managers need quite a bit of education, including ongoing education, to stay up to date on new techniques and tech products.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, ongoing education

Average annual salary: $142,530

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Can require long working hours, extensive education, and rare to reach a seven figure salary

Engineer

Engineers can design things like aircraft, cars, boats, spacecraft, satellites, large buildings, bridges, computers, and infrastructure. Chemical engineers will work with fuel and drugs to solve problems in the use of these substances. Other types of engineers may try to solve environmental problems or help people perform jobs more efficiently and safely. Engineers rely on math, physics, biology, and chemistry to perform their work.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $80,170

Top annual earners: $500,000 plus

The downside: Requires a high level of mathematical ability, rare to reach a seven figure salary in this profession versus others on our list

Entertainment Professional

Jobs like actor, musician, TV or radio show host, producer, and writer can all fit in the entertainment industry. For the most successful professionals in these areas, this job can be extremely lucrative. However, a job in the entertainment industry rarely has a lot of stability. You’re often on your own, working from contract to contract. You’ll also have to hire an agent to negotiate contracts and help you find work. It can also be extremely difficult to break into the industry.

Requirements: Mix of schooling and on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $40,000

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Highly competitive industries, jobs don’t have much stability, agent fees will eat a percentage of your earnings

Investment Banker

It may not be the most exciting job, and it may not be all that well understood, but an investment banker can make a lot of money each year. In general terms, an investment banker is someone who brokers deals, such as company mergers and acquisitions. Those who broker the largest financial deals receive the largest compensation amounts.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree for highest paying jobs, FINRA licenses

Average annual salary: $64,120, plus performance bonuses

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Regular 80+ hour weeks, a lot of stress because of the heavy reliance on performance bonuses

Lawyer

If your idea of a lawyer is someone who is dramatically arguing cases in a courtroom, as happens on TV, this is only a small part of the work. Most of it is spent in research, document review, filing motions,  and editing contracts. Lawyers can work in criminal, tax, patent, corporate, or other types of law, so a lot of specialties exist. Lawyers do have an easier time becoming politicians than other professions, if that appeals to you.

Requirements: Tons of extra education, including a law degree, must pass a state bar examination

Average annual salary: $120,910

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extremely competitive profession that requires several years of advanced schooling

Pharmacist

A pharmacist works in a hospital, a medical facility, or a retail store, dispensing prescription medication for customers. A pharmacist needs quite a bit of training in how different medications work, including understanding side effects and interactions with other medications. Pharmacists require formal education and licensing to be able to legally dispense prescription medication.

Requirements: Doctor of pharmacy degree, licenses in the state in which they work

Average annual salary: $126,120

Top annual earners: $250,000 plus

The downside: Pharmacists have little chance of earning a seven figure salary unless they own a business, requires quite a bit of on-going education

Physician and Surgeon

Doctors in the American medical system have the ability to make huge salaries, but it can take a while to hit that level. A physician or a surgeon needs tons of education and on-the-job training. The learning never ends for doctors. When starting out, doctors can work some long, strange hours. But once they reach a certain level of expertise, this job is rewarding financially.

Requirements: Long years of extra education including a medical degree and a residency, licenses required

Average annual salary: $208,000

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Making life and death decisions on a daily basis is stressful especially in a highly competitive industry with long hours

Professional Athlete

This is one job that kids dream about having that actually also makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, it’s probably the job they have the least chance of achieving. People need some natural talent to succeed in almost any job, but pro athletes may rely the most on natural talent. Beyond receiving millions to play the game, the most well-known pro athletes may receive just as much money for endorsements.

Requirements: Being selected after a physical tryout, constant on-the-job training and physical workouts

Average annual salary: $50,650

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: Extreme physical stress and injuries can take their toll on long term health, professional sports careers don’t last more than a few years for most people

Real Estate Developer

A real estate developer will purchase property and develop it with lucrative commercial and residential projects. These purchases are a bit of a gamble, as a mistake can lead to huge financial losses. You may start as a real estate agent, learning how the markets work, before making your own investments or investing on behalf of others.

Requirements: Knowledge of real estate markets and laws through on-the-job training

Average annual salary: $50,300

Top annual earners: $10 million plus

The downside: High rewards come with high risks, choosing the wrong project or making a judgment error about a particular project’s viability could lead to bankruptcy

Software Developer

A software developer will write software, or code, that controls computers and other personal electronics devices. App developers also can be software developers. In fact, someone who develops a highly popular app could make millions off one app. This is another fast growing profession that will need employees in the future.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree optional

Average annual salary: $105,590

Top annual earners: $5 million plus

The downside: Long hours, especially stressful when trying to complete a project

Picking the Best High Paying Job

Having a list is one thing, picking the right job is a lot harder.

If I was giving “highschool me” some advice, I’d tell him to find a high paying job that’s the best fit. Some jobs are extremely stressful like an investment banker. Others are more routine like an accountant. There’s dozens of different criteria that make up a true dream job.

The best way to figure out which job is the best fit is to develop friendships with people in that field. If you genuinely enjoy spending time with them, that’s a promising sign.

Also look for entry-level roles in those fields to try them yourself. Most of these jobs can be started later on if you discover that a particular path won’t work out.

12 Jobs That Make a Lot of Money is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

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