back up so the other day i asserted that we have way more financial services than we need. seems obvious to me. but i've made a pretty good living doing things that everyone knows are impossible. so let me back up that assertion. which is a delightfully ambiguous phrase. it could mean i intend to prove it. or retract it. truth is. i haven't done the research yet. so we'll find out which i meant in a few moments. hee. okay. i'm going to shamelessly swipe a model of wealth accumulation proposed by a buddy of mine. the young man enters the workspace broke. the old man pays the young man from his savings. the young man saves his money. the old man spends his last nickel and dies. the young man becomes the new old man. and a new young man shows up, broke. and the cycle repeats itself. okay let's refine this. a man is born. gets a job at 20. has a kid. retires at 60. dies at 70. so at any given time there are 2 kids, 4 workers, and 1 retiree. the 4 workers do enough work to support 7 people. i calculate the worker will need to save more than 20% of their salary for 40 years in order to spend 80% of their salary for 10 years. their average savings is 4.3 times their salary. okay. the collective salary of everyone in the us is pretty much the gdp ie $15t. so our back of the envelope calculation of the collective savings, ie the net worth, of everyone in the us should be $65t. it's more like $45t. so we should have about $20t of financial services. which is a whole lot less than the $200t or so we actually have. heh. or rather, believe that we have. there! statement backed up.  ¶ 8:00 AM