Man Page Writing: Life/Times of Man Page Writer

I confess to doing a double take when I read the fixed rate for May-Oct 08 period for I-Bonds:

Nada. I.e., zero percent.

That means the small saver will get nothing above the rate of inflation (CPI-U) for the life of bonds purchased in May-Oct. That, I think, is truly extraordinary.

I hope anyone with money to add to the fixed income portion of their portfolio took advantage of the Nov 07-Apr 08 fixed rate.

At this point, an investor seeking inflation protection would do better to wait for the 10- or 20-year TIPS auctions, which occur in mid-year. It used to be that you had to buy such securities in increments of $1000, but I believe the Treasury has relaxed that restriction, for TIPS and for all other T-notes and bonds.

Today's bothersome usages are "absolutely" and "unacceptable", which are sometimes used together, producing, for me, an exponentially bad effect.

"Unacceptable" is usually used in the phrase, "That is unacceptable", often uttered in a stern tone of voice. As far as I can tell, the phrase has two meanings:

• "I find that unacceptable" or "That is unacceptable to me".
• "Everyone knows that this is unacceptable" or, the long-winded variation, "As one who is in conformity with and has extensive knowledge of the manners and morals of our society, I declare that this is, as something in conflict with those manners and morals, unacceptable."

If the person's meaning is the first one, they should just say that. If it's the second, they should be called on the validity of their credentials as the arbiter of ethics. A more honest usage might be, "I believe most people would find this unacceptable."

A similarly misused word is "appropriate". This word has a sexual/moral dimension that is more pronounced than "acceptable". E.g., if you walk into your boss's office with a schedule that has you taking ten weeks to write a device driver from scratch--ten weeks when he wants eight--he might respond, "That is unacceptable." If you walk in with your schedule, wearing skin-tight and/or revealing clothing (male or female; this is an equal opportunity blog), the boss might respond (nodding at your attire), "That is inappropriate."

"And I still find your schedule unacceptable."

I'm actually OK with the use of "inappropriate" to mean "what most people would say is not appropriate for this setting", even if it would be more honest to say, "Your clothing is suggestive (or too sloppy or casual or are you color blind?)" I guess my resistance is worn down.

Now "absolutely"--I can't escape my years at a Jesuit High School. I mean I had drummed into me that for absolutes you had things like God, death, the point at which all molecular activity ceases. Not, I'll absolutely get the hot peppers with my burrito.

As I write, the real interest rate on a 5-yr. TIPS is minus .14%. This is almost unfathomable. This means that the market's expectation of inflation is such that a buyer is required to pay (embedded in the price of the bond), rather than receive, a real interest rate. The return on the nominal 5-yr T-Note is 2.51%, so the market's inflation expectation over the life of these instruments is 2.65%--lower than I'd predict. Another datum: the 10-yr. TIPS is currently paying 1.04% real.

So here's my little-guy arbitrage play: I-Bonds are paying 1.2% real, through the end of April. I like to think of I-Bonds as 5-yr. TIPS, with an option to go out longer. That's because if you sell an I-Bond before you've held it for five years, you pay a 6-mo. interest penalty. (You can sell the bond after you've held it for a year.)

The Treasury recently announced a $5000/yr. limit on the purchase of Saving Bonds (I-Bonds and the not-too-rewarding EE Bonds). I believe this announcement and the divergence between the market return on 5- and 10-yr TIPS and the I-Bond fixed return is no coincidence.

The limit is actually $5000 each, for bonds purchased in electronic and paper form.

You might compare I-Bonds with a traditional IRA, with fewer encumbrances. Interest accrues on a tax-deferred basis. (You pay tax only when you cash in.) And, of course, as an instrument of the US Government, interest is state-tax-free, of great interest (pun intended) to residents of relatively high tax states, such as Calif. and NY.

Last Friday night, a friend of my son's who's a Google employee invited my wife and me to visit Google's Mt. View campus. As we drove there along Garcia Ave., I noted with a twinge the number of former Sun and Silicon Graphics buildings that are now occupied by the big G.

Our first impression: Everyone is the age of our children. Get me out of here! Just kidding, of course. My kids are welcome home anytime. But it was fun. There is an exuberance about youth that is impossible to fake. I don't care how excited you are about your job, at some level, the everyday aspect of a job can be a grind. Well, when you're young even that grind is new and it's kinda cool.

Our host, who, I must digress to say, is the foremost under-30 Argentine economist working in the Bay Area, shared a meal with us in one of the dining rooms. The food was terrific. My wife and I had a beer (free, of course), sat in a rather scary massage chair, and used the rest room. I'd ordinarily not report on such matters, but this, at least for my wife, was special. It was the first time she'd ever encountered a heated toilet seat. The device was also equipped with water jets that would cleanse a lady's "front and back seats".

Enough anatomy.

Sprinkled throughout each building are kitchen areas with high tech espresso machines and cabinets and refrigerators stocked with all manner of goodies. It was the sort of stuff you see in a fancy grocery store and consider buying but would never allow yourself to be that extravagant.

All free.

Some other impressions: Google is big, borderline huge. I think they're going to have to give up the notion of being the Peter Pan of companies and decide what kind of big company they want to be. GE? They've been very profitable for a very long time. Johnson & Johnson? They too are successful and have the reputation of treating their employees well. 3M? Another possibility. Pre-Carly HP? A worthy model. Microsoft? Please. IBM? Could happen.

I gotta wonder, too, about all the perquisites--notably the food and drink. It's gotta cost a bundle to serve all that wonderful, fresh, often organic food, three meals a day, every day. It's tough to go backwards. I wonder whether the people running Google are setting the bar too high.

What do you do when you're on top? Sun never achieved the heights achieved by Google, but at the crest of the Internet boom we rode high for a period of 2-3 years. What should we have done then to keep the party going or, at least, prevent a precipitous drop-off? We were extravagant in our spending. That's one thing I could identify even then. But that's not a completely satisfying answer. I'll leave that topic for a future note.

For now, Google looks like a fun place to work, but I expect some growing pains in the near future. That's a cultural, not a financial, prediction.

Occasionally it strikes me how much less I do on my cars than I did when I was a young man. Then and now I change bulbs, wiper blades, and, generally, reattach most things that fall off. But, then, the list would look something like:

• Change engine oil and filter.
• Change transmission oil (manual).
• Change oil in air filter (you remember VW engines, don't you?).
• Replace spark plugs and wires.
• Adjust valves.
• Set dwell (spark duration).
• Advance or retard timing (onset of spark).
• Adjust idle.
• Change brake pads.
• Rotate tires.
• Drain and flush radiator.

There were numerous one-time tasks:

• Replaced brake rotors in front.
• Replaced starter motor.
• Installed new valve cover gasket.
• Helped my son install a new flywheel pulley on a 72 El Camino with a 283 with 4B carburetor. (You could watch the gas gauge move to the left when you stomped on that thing.)

Now, I change the engine oil and filter, rotate the tires, and that's about it. The interesting thing though is how many of the tasks of my youth have gone the way of, I don't know, the Rambler. With computer controls on air and fuel intake, spark timing and dwell, and emissions, there's no more of the tune-up type tasks. The spark plugs on my 2002 Honda Civic get changed at 105,000 miles. (I'm not there yet.) There may be a few cars that use mechanical valve lifters, which could get out of adjustment, but I think 90% of cars today use hydraulic (or solenoid-type) lifters.

Mechanically, brakes are pretty similar to what was present in, say, the late 70s. The lining materials and fluid are better today. And there's the ABS stuff, but I don't think that gets in the way of a brake job. Then, it was mainly the foreign cars that had front disks; now a lot of cars have four-wheel disks.

I'm sure, on more than one occasion, I flushed a gallon or more of used antifreeze-water mixture down the drain, the thought of which makes me cringe. What can one say about the stupidities of one's youth?

It's almost too easy to pick on the financial services industry. So let me start by praising some positive trends:

• The price of buying and selling stocks has declined dramatically. I don't have precise numbers, but, in my own experience, I've paid a couple of hundred dollars on a six thousand dollar transaction (early 80s dollars). This was before Charles Schwab came along. (Though we no longer have an account with Chuck, I give them big-time props for pioneering the discount brokerage business.) Now what do you pay? Ten bucks a transaction? And it'll probably decline from there.
• I think even the full-service guys are (generally) less apt to push only individual stocks and will at least mention index funds. All the notions about efficient markets and asset allocation have become the conventional wisdom, and the big brokerage houses have adapted. Acknowledging this change, individual practitioners have changed their titles to "financial advisor", or something like that. Of course, they never were and still are not titled correctly. That would be "salesperson".
• There is a trend toward the use of fee-only (rather than commission-based) financial advisors, whose use is appropriate for people with significant tax, trust, and estate planning needs. (IOW, those prized high net worth individuals.)
• Load funds are dying out. I have no idea if this is true. If it's not, it should be.

Still, there are things like variable annuities, which might have an appropriate place in someone's portfolio. I just have a hard time conjuring up who that person might be. Also on the list of financial devices that tend toward the criminal is whole life insurance.

Even here, though, there is progress. I hear more and more about immediate annuities (a legitimate and important instrument) and term life (ditto).

But the continuing, widespread use full-service brokers (under any title) is a puzzle to me. I would not consider this an abuse, because people clearly want the service. But I don't know why people don't read one of John Bogle's many books or follow David Swenson's template and be done with it.

Even with technical, highly numerate people, I observe this reliance on full-service brokers. I understand that people are busy and are just as happy to turn things over to a man or woman who is probably pleasant and might even be knowledgeable. OTOH, such service has significant costs. Also, it's a realm where you can, if you want, maintain a bit of control over your own life, countering the trend where we are increasingly dependent on institutions (government, large corporate employers, utilities, agribusiness, etc.) beyond our control.

Though the usage is fading, it still remains almost mandatory that someone talking about a new pertubation in their corporate or civic life is "excited", or better, "really excited".

"Madam Superintendent and Distinguished board members, I'm really excited to be here as chairman of the City of Akron's Green Means Go committee."

"Thanks, Chuck. I'm really excited about the this new Trade Away HP program for our OEMs."

Now if Bob Barker, dressed in the raiment of the Archangel Gabriel, were to burst into my office and offer me a free trip to meet myself--on many levels, I'd be excited. I might say something like, "Bob, I'm really excited that you've burst into my office today." Short of that, we're talking "pleased" or "happy" or even "honored". Not excited.

To what extent does our economy benefit from (at least, statistically) more financially sophisticated, perhaps more highly educated persons taking advantage of the less sophisticated, less well-educated? Let's make a list of industries/economic activities where this dynamic is at work:

• anything sold on TV infomercials
• (related to the preceding) exercise machines (with special mention for any device that includes the word "ab")
• many financial services (a huge segment that deserves its own note)
• exotic mortgages (special subset of preceding)
• contract-based cell phones
• paycheck loans
• tax services that offer "immediate refunds"
• diet books, diet programs, anything that has "diet" in its name

Is there more of this stuff going on now than in previous periods of our history? It might be easier to conduct such a business in age of instant communication than it was before radio, TV, and the internet became common.

Maybe it's not fair to include the "diet" category, because the overeating/dieting seesaw does not discriminate by education, income, or some nebulous trait such as sophistication. But my larger point is that we, in the US, and probably in the other wealthy nations, generate a lot of money from situations where there is asymmetric information.

A number of the items above would require further qualification. E.g., cell phones are an enhancement to the lives of many, but how many people are paying more than they need to (or can afford) for such service? OTOH, some segments are pretty close to being categorical stinkers: I can't make the case for a low-income person paying to have their taxes done when there are services out there that will do it for free.

At the end of his career, veteran hockey enforcer Marty McSorley took an ill-advised swing with his stick and struck fellow enforcer (and far less illustrious player) Donald Brashear in the head. If you look at the video, it appears that McSorley might have been aiming at Brashear's shoulder, as McSorley claimed, but it was a pretty stupid act, however one looks at it. Brashear recovered and resumed playing. Fairly or not, that one impulsive act pretty much ended McSorley's career.

I think of McSorley when I, no longer young, do dumb things--do things that should be beneath my maturity. It makes me think of the question: Which is the greater contributor to maturity, age (accumulated experience) or proximity to death? More and more, I think it's the latter. For one thing, simply having maintained a metabolism for X years does not bequeath one anything. I might extend this principle to claims of having performed a certain job for a number of years, as if that lends authority to a person. It very well might, but it very much depends on the individual.

That age is not an invariable predictor of maturity is consistent with my experience of those young people who seem mature beyond their years--the "old souls".

Hundreds of millions of our fellow travelers grow up in societies in which death is an ever-present shadow. In wealthy nations, we can kind of tuck the subject away in the desk drawer. While some of us (I among them) postpone cozying up to our common destination for a pretty long time, reality inevitably intrudes. Pretty soon, you lose parents, and start losing contemporaries, maybe develop chronic health problems. The evidence achieves a weight of non-deniability.

It's at this point where courage and integrity and all those qualities you were able to name and sort of able to describe become like: "Oh. That's what courage is." I stand in utmost admiration of those persons, of any age, who can come to terms with our common fate with equanimity and maybe even a positive attitude.

A co-worker buddy is involved in his condo homeowner's association and periodically has to deal with complaints about teenagers who live in the complex. When he approaches the parents about a problem, he often finds that their first reaction, even before he finishes a sentence, is: "My kid didn't do it," or, if the evidence is incontrovertible, "My kid should not be punished, for these reasons..."

My friend asked me, "When your kids got in trouble [my three sons are now 27, 25, and 21], did you automatically take their side?". I would say, as I said to him, not just "No", but "Hell, no", and not because my boys were particularly saintly (they weren't). I had and have no problem being objective about my children. And I'm not bragging. This is about as praiseworthy as my penchant for not screaming curses at old ladies.

My wife, who teaches high school, observes the same unquestioning advocacy of children on the part of their parents. This advocacy has bequeathed to these kids a distinct sense of entitlement. Teachers at that school talk about the "B+ syndrome". Give a student a B and you'll get away with it. Give a B+ and prepare to do battle. This, at a school where one student in four is from a family in which one parent is an attorney. (Here, "lawyering up" may mean no more than speed-dialing Mommy and/or Daddy.)

Each year, my wife publishes guidelines for getting specific grades. Only the getting-an-A part is of real interest. For the college-bound, that's the only grade that matters. For the rest, their parents are probably not involved in their lives to the same degree (or in the same way) as their fast-track brothers and sisters. On several occasions, my wife and I have had to refine these guidelines, based on "cases" my wife has had to present, before parents and administrators, to make a grade stick. Sometimes it's changing an "a" to a "the". Sometimes it's adding a dependent clause, to make things even more precise or to lend emphasis. But language is inherently ambiguous and you give a smart person enough time (they certainly have the motivation), she or he will find a loose thread.

There is such a thing as unreasonable authority (isn't that what the 60's were about?). And there are condo association managers and schoolteachers of bad faith and intentions. But, I'd submit that such people are 1) a distinct minority and 2) identified very easily. It's a parent's duty to help her/his child avoid such people or, if avoidance is impossible, help the child deal with them. But when dealing with a reasonable authority, a parent does a child no favors by not allowing him/her to face the consequences of their behavior.

What is the meaning of "So...", when prepended to a person's opening statement? Just listen in a meeting:

Meeting leader: Well, we've gotten some pushback from the field on this. Stew assures me that he can win them over. Response from ISVs has been good. Our tech guy in Manila tells me their government is almost finished with their trials. Jonathan?

Jonathan: So...several things to address. On the Phillipine government...

It's usually smart people who use this. It makes them sound a little smarter. It's meaning, as far as I can tell, is something like, "Give my prodigious mental powers a moment to gather themselves..." It's not necessarily as vain as that, but close.

The other usage I notice is "sort of". Educated people use this in the way that uneducated people use "um" or "like". On a basic level, it provides a pause and can improve the rhythm of a sentence. In terms of meaning, well, it varies. Often, it's something like, "The statement that follows is a useful approximation. I don't have the multiple, double-blind studies at hand to substantiate the statement, but it is accurate enough for present purposes."

You can hear numerous examples of these verbal mannerisms in this video of Paul Krugman.

Each time I power up our Windows XP/Dell tower system (cost: about $1200) at home, I'm reminded of my tendency toward numbness of the brain. What I want to do: access the internet for email or to pay a bill. What I need to do to achieve that: Fire up this steam locomotive and wait till the steam reaches a certain pressure before I can give it throttle. As long as the system is up, I'm in peril of various malware and viruses, in acknowledgment of which I've got to spend considerable time in preventive measures. I've got some nice graphics card and a ton of disk space and RAM and, of course, XP. The whole shebang will be obsolete in three years, which period would've been shorter but for the clunkiness of and slow surrender to Vista.

What I should've bought: Mac Mini. About half the cost (about $650 with employee discount), so creeping obsolescence is less painful. It has everything I need and less of what I don't. In contrast to the Dell's periodic hard-disk moaning, the Mini is... silent. It's about about one-twentieth the size of the Dell box, virus-type threats (while existing) are less, and it's a Mac. In the competition between delight on one side and cessation of pain on the other, that's the rough equivalent of saying: it's not Windows!

What I really need: The ability to connect to internet with an inexpensive device that has the bare minimum of local storage, with a decent graphics display (what I have now is fine), that allows me to get out of the virus-prevention, driver-download business. For financial transactions (e.g., doing my taxes), I'd need secure storage and, for all files, simple (preferably automatic) backup. Of course, for this we'd need a much-improved internet infrastructure, probably beyond what our current phone networks (and maybe cable networks) are capable of.

Postscript: My remark about "slow surrender" to Vista was incorrect. In Microsoft's earning announcement yesterday, they indicated that Vista adoption was proceeding according to plan. Mothers, raise your children to be monopolists.

The other day we had snow in the Santa Cruz Mountains (a fairly rare occurrence), where a friend of mine lives. I was watching the news and heard that Highway 9, a principal avenue to those mountains, had closed. I stepped over to our computer and sent an email to my friend, asking about the snow. Within five minutes, he'd responded with a picture taken on his iPhone from outside his house, showing a beautiful winter scene of house and trees with a light blanket of snow. He was fine and, as was evident from the photo, the snow was nothing more than picturesque.

I am stubbornly resistant to "personal tech", but vignettes like this give me pause. Some of this stuff is truly remarkable.

Thinking about the role of technology in our lives is much like discussing the present age in historical terms: we're too much in the middle of things to have any perspective on long-term effects and on which way we're headed. Still, as creatures who love a good story, we try to make sense of our lives.

I still pitch the microwave oven as the most overlooked star in the modern technology firmament, that and ABS brakes. But I have to admit, the internet, with all its attendant applications, is right up there. For the contemporary American of a certain socioeconomic status, it has become an integral, and nearly indispensable, part of life.

Given the utility-like characteristic of the internet, it makes a lot of sense that companies, including Sun, are seeking to provide a utility-like infrastructure for 'net. Further, it makes sense that cloud computing should supersede locally-based resources.

For years I'd thought that I'd live to see the decline and, perhaps, a near total eclipse of pro sports in the US. My thinking was that the owners and players would price themselves to a point beyond the reach of their customers. Concomitant with this, there'd be "excitement overload", wherein the volume and frequency of sporting events would exceed fans' capacity to absorb them.

While large segments of the population (at least in the US) have been priced out of attending pro sports events, and I still see pro sports declining, the industry has surprised me with its tenacity. Pro sports have become part of the fabric of the US economy, as part of our entertainment industry.

I guess it's that old devil, greed, that is doing in pro sports, causing the industry to lose its indispensable magic. That magic was the vicarious pleasure of watching people in the prime of their physical lives playing children's games in the same spirit (or so we allowed ourselves to think) as we played those games ourselves. Now, try as we might to keep the veil of "love of the game" in place, it's torn away at every turn.

By the way, I'm a lifelong sports fan, so I have no predisposition to wish for the extinction of pro sports. And when I speak of "magic", I hope I am something more than an old guy indulging himself in nostalgia. While I'd assert, there was more genuine passion in the games in the period before, say, the early 80's, I'd also acknowledge that the athletes in my "good old days" were indentured servants, were not morally superior to today's athletes, and that, most importantly, there are a million better things to do with your time than spectating. The last point was as true then as now.

Now, when you talk about individual players in a major sport, the size and duration of his contract is as much a part of the conversation as batting average, points per game, or save percentage. Every major sports web site has a "business of sports" section. The athletes themselves, at least the stars, have become corporations unto themselves.

Our obsession with celebrities spoils things, too. Who knew that Mickey Mantle was a drunk? Who needed to know?

I noted with interest that my own children, who all played high school sports, were not the sports fanatics I was at their age. Of the three of them, only one of them is a big fan now and he, only of baseball.

A given sport can't make it pitching only to the dedicated fan. I infer this from the presence at every pro game of various distractions--overly loud p.a. announcer, cheerleaders, jumbotron, deafening music. It's an admission that the game itself is not enough.

Btw, under the rubric "pro sports", I'd have to include college football and basketball (mens, Div. 1). While the athletes are not paid (usually), there is such a quantity of money sloshing around (for schools, coaches, and various hangers-on), that the lucre plays a major role in how the sports are conducted.

Pro football deserves a special mention here because, with their gigantic TV revenue, they've gotten around the outpricing-the-live-audience problem. Still, at some point, you can't completely do away with the roar of the crowd. The NFL has some dud franchises (including two right here in the Bay Area). It can afford only a distinct minority of these, beyond which the entire sport--industry segment--is dragged down.

Where I thought before that pro sports would be a leading indicator in any economic retrenchment, my guess now is that they'll decline in tandem with the economy as a whole.

I'm cool--I would never actually say that, but I'll write it--with my supposition that most people in the money management business are politically conservative and, likely, members of the Republican Party. (Question: If the Democratic Party is now the "Democrat Party" do the Republicans now make up the "Republic Party"?) Though I might not agree with their political philosophy, I don't see a problem with their running my money.

This is my build-up to a quote from the semi-annual report from Western Asset Funds, an outfit that runs a bond fund in our 401K. Just got the report in the mail yesterday; it covers the 2007 through Sept. 30, so it's a bit dated. (Incidentally, Sun offers a very good menu of low-cost 401K options, with the Western fund being among the good alternatives.) In these periodic reports, managers (or their ghost writers) get to expound on macroeconomic themes like they were back in college. I enjoy reading them because I like to get a feel for the way a guy (or gal) who's managing my money thinks and because I occasionally learn a thing or two. Here's the quote:

Looking ahead, there are two new things to worry about: higher taxes and a weaker dollar. Democrats are pushing hard for higher taxes, at a time when the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world and many countries are discovering that lower and flatter taxes can attract new business investment. This is a genuine threat to future growth, but higher taxes, if they happen, are still on the distant horizon.

Fine to worry about higher taxes, though higher taxes' negative consequence to bond performance is not obvious to me. I infer that the writer believes that, at this time in our economic history, higher taxes would be a brake on growth. Generally, bonds do better in periods of slow growth, so I'm left unsure as to the basis of the writer's worry, but, hey, he's worried. I worry a lot. I'm OK with worrying.

It's really with the rest of the quote ("Democrats are pushing hard...") that I have a gripe. The "official" Democratic proposal was published by Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Ways and Means committee. The proposal does increase taxes on families with incomes greater than $200,000, to what the top rates were during the Clinton years. It keeps the estate tax, with higher exclusions than were in effect in the Clinton years. It lowers the top corporate tax rate from 35 to 30 percent. Further, Rangel wants to take the corporate rate even lower and has discussed eliminating it altogether.

In fairness to the writer of the quote, the Rangel plan might not have been published at the time of publication. However, if it were not, who are these Democrats that are pushing and what are they pushing?

I love the phrase, "...many countries are discovering that lower and flatter taxes can attract new business investment." Where are these countries on whose soil, until recently, no economist had ever set foot? Certainly no nation on the planet Earth. Is the writer referring to low-wage, developing nations, using tax breaks to compete with their peers for big factories, much as states in the US do? Maybe he's thinking about France, where Sarkozy wants to create a more business friendly environment. I just can't tell.

I don't have a quarrel with an assertion like "lower taxes can attract new business investment". It's the "countries are discovering" that comes out of left field.

I'm also scratching my head over the "flatter" bit: lower, sure, but why would a prospective investor care about the progressivity of a country's tax rates? I understand that the marginal rate is the key piece of data and, with a flat tax, the flat rate is the marginal rate. But a country could have progressivity with an overall tax burden that is lower than the tax burden in a country with a flat tax.

Finally, to the last sentence:

This is a genuine threat to future growth, but higher taxes, if they happen, are still on the distant horizon.

To this I'd say: given current entitlement levels (especially Medicare) and current military commitments (Iran and Afghanistan), there will be some combination of spending cuts and tax increases over the next decade--or, well, the US goes into default.

The comments are signed, "Western Asset Management Company". No individual writer is identified.

As I said at the top, I have no problem with an enthusiastic partisan (Republican or Democrat) running my money. I wouldn't want, though, that person's ideology determining his/her investment decisions.