Investments for Inflationary and Deflationary Environments Essay Example for Free

Investments for Inflationary and Deflationary Environments Essay Inflation is the raise of a price level of good and services over a period of time. When there is an inflation each unit of currency buys fewer goods than it was possible before. Inflation affects can be both positive and negaive. Positive effect inclule ensuring that central banks will ajust real interest rates and encaurage investment in non-moneaty capital projects and the negative side is that people hav uncertainty over future and can damage investments and savings. Inflation can be cosed because of big amount of money supply. So now what are the best investments during inflation? The good thing is that there are some places there money investments will be secured. Important during inflationary environment is to avoid having cash, it is good not to hold cash for long time and allocate it into other assets and investments. It is very good to invest cash into gold or other precious meas. It always casts a lot after the inflation or crises. Gold is seen as a hedge against uncertainty and store of value. Investing into gold is possible to buy gold or just to invest into company which are mining gold. It is profitable to invest in crude oil, a lot of people invest into it as a protection against inflation. Oil is inelastic supply, so any decrease or increase in price would not result the increase or decrease in supply. There is many ways investing into crude oil with its con and pros. If you want to invest in short fixed income, you should avoid the US treasure because they may underperform. When yields start to raise bond price will fall. This investment provides a return in the form of fixed periodic payments and eventual return of principal at maturity. Investing into technology is also very good both at deflationary and inflationary environment. Does not matter on an environment technology is in demand and will continue to evolve. It is good and profitable to buy treasure protected securities so called TIPS, it gives a safety of the government bonds during inflation. Deflation is the opposite of inflation, decrease in the general price-level of goods and services. Deflation occurred when inflation rate falls below 0%. Deflation increases the real value of money. While deflation cash is â€Å"king†. It the rule number one, cash is one of the best and the most safety investment at the deflationary environment. Pay off debts is also very good while deflationary time. It is a period when every single dollar matters, each dollar can be profitable in future. Companies may have problems while deflation, so it is very good to invest in companies which have ideal short selling targets. Buy also high quality dividend paying stocks. While most of the firms will lose pricing power large cap high quality companies will dominate their industries and will be able to maintain pricing power. Seek companies with pristine balance. While deflation, house prices fall, as such it is better or rent rather than own. While deflation technology will still be in demand. The technology was announces as one of the best areas to allocate capital in high quality equities. As we already know TIPs are long-term protection while inflationary environment. But there is an opinion that deflation will lead to inflation after a period of time. This is an early protection in deflationary environment to avoid problems in future.

The Mexican War by Otis A. Singletary Essay -- essays research papers

This book by Otis A. Singletary deals with different aspects of the Mexican war. It is a compelling description and concise history of the first successful offensive war in United States military history. The work examines two countries that were unprepared for war. The political intrigues and quarrels in appointing the military commanders, as well as the military operations of the war, are presented and analyzed in detail. The author also analyzes the role that the Mexican War played in bringing on the U.S. Civil War. The Mexican-American War of the 1840s, precipitated by border disputes and the U.S. annexation of Texas, ended with the military occupation of Mexico City by General Winfield Scott. In the subsequent treaty, the United States gained territory that would become California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. Mr. Singletary has been remarkably successful, despite the brevity of his book, in describing with important details the Mexican War. The book can be break into two main parts. The first part gives background which explains different reasons that played a decisive role for the break out of the war, and it relates the different campaigns that allowed the invasion of northern Mexico and the city of Mexico. The second half of the book deals with the way politician and generals behave during the war, and the book ends touching the role played by diplomacy in this war. The book has been organized in chronological order, which g...

The road to polyamory

Will same-sex matrimony extend marriage's stabilizing effects to homosexuals? Will gay marriage undermine family life? A lot is riding on the answers to these questions. But the media's reflexive labeling of doubts about gay marriage as homophobia has made it almost impossible to debate the social effects of this reform. Now with the Supreme Court's ringing affirmation of sexual liberty in Lawrence v. Texas, that debate is unavoidable. Among the likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and â€Å"polyamory† (group marriage).Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in every conceivable combination of male and female. A scare scenario? Hardly. The bottom of this slope is visible from where we stand. Advocacy of legalized polygamy is growing. A network of grass-roots organizations seeking legal recognition for group marriage alre ady exists. The cause of legalized group marriage is championed by a powerful faction of family law specialists.Influential legal bodies in both the United States and Canada have presented radical programs of marital reform. Some of these quasi-governmental proposals go so far as to suggest the abolition of marriage. The ideas behind this movement have already achieved surprising influence with a prominent American politician. None of this is well known. Both the media and public spokesmen for the gay marriage movement treat the issue as an unproblematic advance for civil rights.True, a small number of relatively conservative gay spokesmen do consider the social effects of gay matrimony, insisting that they will be beneficent, that homosexual unions will become more stable. Yet another faction of gay rights advocates actually favors gay marriage as a step toward the abolition of marriage itself. This group agrees that there is a slippery slope, and wants to hasten the slide down. To consider what comes after gay marriage is not to say that gay marriage itself poses no danger to the institution of marriage.Quite apart from the likelihood that it will usher in legalized polygamy and polyamory, gay marriage will almost certainly weaken the belief that monogamy lies at the heart of marriage. But to see why this is so, we will first need to reconnoiter the slippery slope. Promoting polygamy DURING THE 1996 congressional debate on the Defense of Marriage Act, which affirmed the ability of the states and the federal government to withhold recognition from same-sex marriages, gay marriage advocates were put on the defensive by the polygamy question.If gays had a right to marry, why not polygamists? Andrew Sullivan, one of gay marriage's most intelligent defenders, labeled the question fear-mongering–akin to the discredited belief that interracial marriage would lead to birth defects. â€Å"To the best of my knowledge,† said Sullivan, â€Å"there is no p olygamists' rights organization poised to exploit same-sex marriage and return the republic to polygamous abandon. † Actually, there are now many such organizations. And their strategy–even their existence–owes much to the movement for gay marriage.Scoffing at the polygamy prospect as ludicrous has been the strategy of choice for gay marriage advocates. In 2000, following Vermont's enactment of civil unions, Matt Coles, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, said, â€Å"I think the idea that there is some kind of slippery slope [to polygamy or group marriage] is silly. † As proof, Coles said that America had legalized interracial marriage, while also forcing Utah to ban polygamy before admission to the union.That dichotomy, said Coles, shows that Americans are capable of distinguishing between better and worse proposals for reforming marriage. Are we? When Tom Green was put on trial in Utah for polygamy in 2001, it played like a dress rehearsal for the coming movement to legalize polygamy. True, Green was convicted for violating what he called Utah's â€Å"don't ask, don't tell† policy on polygamy. Pointedly refusing to â€Å"hide in the closet,† he touted polygamy on the Sally Jessy Raphael, Queen Latifah, Geraldo Rivera, and Jerry Springer shows, and on â€Å"Dateline NBC† and â€Å"48 Hours.† But the Green trial was not just a cable spectacle. It brought out a surprising number of mainstream defenses of polygamy. And most of the defenders went to bat for polygamy by drawing direct comparisons to gay marriage. Writing in the Village Voice, gay leftist Richard Goldstein equated the drive for state-sanctioned polygamy with the movement for gay marriage. The political reluctance of gays to embrace polygamists was understandable, said Goldstein, â€Å"but our fates are entwined in fundamental ways. â€Å"Libertarian Jacob Sullum defended polygamy, along with all ot her consensual domestic arrangements, in the Washington Times. Syndicated liberal columnist Ellen Goodman took up the cause of polygamy with a direct comparison to gay marriage. Steve Chapman, a member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board, defended polygamy in the Tribune and in Slate. The New York Times published a Week in Review article juxtaposing photos of Tom Green's family with sociobiological arguments about the naturalness of polygamy and promiscuity.The ACLU's Matt Coles may have derided the idea of a slippery slope from gay marriage to polygamy, but the ACLU itself stepped in to help Tom Green during his trial and declared its support for the repeal of all â€Å"laws prohibiting or penalizing the practice of plural marriage. † There is of course a difference between repealing such laws and formal state recognition of polygamous marriages. Neither the ACLU nor, say, Ellen Goodman has directly advocated formal state recognition. Yet they give us no reason to suppose that, when the time is ripe, they will not do so.Stephen Clark, the legal director of the Utah ACLU, has said, â€Å"Talking to Utah's polygamists is like talking to gays and lesbians who really want the right to live their lives. † All this was in 2001, well before the prospect that legal gay marriage might create the cultural conditions for state-sanctioned polygamy. Can anyone doubt that greater public support will be forthcoming once gay marriage has become a reality? Surely the ACLU will lead the charge. Why is state-sanctioned polygamy a problem?The deep reason is that it erodes the ethos of monogamous marriage. Despite the divorce revolution, Americans still take it for granted that marriage means monogamy. The ideal of fidelity may be breached in practice, yet adultery is clearly understood as a transgression against marriage. Legal polygamy would jeopardize that understanding, and that is why polygamy has historically been treated in the West as an offense against s ociety itself. In most non-Western cultures, marriage is not a union of freely choosing individuals, but an alliance of family groups.The emotional relationship between husband and wife is attenuated and subordinated to the economic and political interests of extended kin. But in our world of freely choosing individuals, extended families fall away, and love and companionship are the only surviving principles on which families can be built. From Thomas Aquinas through Richard Posner, almost every serious observer has granted the incompatibility between polygamy and Western companionate marriage. Where polygamy works, it does so because the husband and his wives are emotionally distant.Even then, jealousy is a constant danger, averted only by strict rules of seniority or parity in the husband's economic support of his wives. Polygamy is more about those resources than about sex. Yet in many polygamous societies, even though only 10 or 15 percent of men may actually have multiple wive s, there is a widely held belief that men need multiple women. The result is that polygamists are often promiscuous–just not with their own wives. Anthropologist Philip Kilbride reports a Nigerian survey in which, among urban male polygamists, 44 percent said their most recent sexual partners were women other than their wives.For monogamous, married Nigerian men in urban areas, that figure rose to 67 percent. Even though polygamous marriage is less about sex than security, societies that permit polygamy tend to reject the idea of marital fidelity–for everyone, polygamists included. Mormon polygamy has always been a complicated and evolving combination of Western mores and classic polygamous patterns. Like Western companionate marriage, Mormon polygamy condemns extramarital sex. Yet historically, like its non-Western counterparts, it de-emphasized romantic love.Even so, jealousy was always a problem. One study puts the rate of 19th-century polygamous divorce at triple t he rate for monogamous families. Unlike their forebears, contemporary Mormon polygamists try to combine polygamy with companionate marriage–and have a very tough time of it. We have no definitive figures, but divorce is frequent. Irwin Altman and Joseph Ginat, who've written the most detailed account of today's breakaway Mormon polygamist sects, highlight the special stresses put on families trying to combine modern notions of romantic love with polygamy.Strict religious rules of parity among wives make the effort to create a hybrid traditionalist/modern version of Mormon polygamy at least plausible, if very stressful. But polygamy let loose in modern secular America would destroy our understanding of marital fidelity, while putting nothing viable in its place. And postmodern polygamy is a lot closer than you think. Polyamory AMERICA'S NEW, souped-up version of polygamy is called â€Å"polyamory.† Polyamorists trace their descent from the anti-monogamy movements of the sixties and seventies–everything from hippie communes, to the support groups that grew up around Robert Rimmer's 1966 novel â€Å"The Harrad Experiment,† to the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Polyamorists proselytize for â€Å"responsible non-monogamy†Ã¢â‚¬â€œopen, loving, and stable sexual relationships among more than two people. The modern polyamory movement took off in the mid-nineties–partly because of the growth of the Internet (with its confidentiality), but also in parallel to, and inspired by, the rising gay marriage movement.Unlike classic polygamy, which features one man and several women, polyamory comprises a bewildering variety of sexual combinations. There are triads of one woman and two men; heterosexual group marriages; groups in which some or all members are bisexual; lesbian groups, and so forth. (For details, see Deborah Anapol's â€Å"Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits,† one of the movement's authoritative guides, or Goog le the word polyamory. ) Supposedly, polyamory is not a synonym for promiscuity. In practice, though, there is a continuum between polyamory and â€Å"swinging.† Swinging couples dally with multiple sexual partners while intentionally avoiding emotional entanglements. Polyamorists, in contrast, try to establish stable emotional ties among a sexually connected group. Although the subcultures of swinging and polyamory are recognizably different, many individuals move freely between them. And since polyamorous group marriages can be sexually closed or open, it's often tough to draw a line between polyamory and swinging. Here, then, is the modern American version of Nigeria's extramarital polygamous promiscuity.Once the principles of monogamous companionate marriage are breached, even for supposedly stable and committed sexual groups, the slide toward full-fledged promiscuity is difficult to halt. Polyamorists are enthusiastic proponents of same-sex marriage. Obviously, any attem pt to restrict marriage to a single man and woman would prevent the legalization of polyamory. After passage of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, an article appeared in Loving More, the flagship magazine of the polyamory movement, calling for the creation of a polyamorist rights movement modeled on the movement for gay rights.The piece was published under the pen name Joy Singer, identified as the graduate of a â€Å"top ten law school† and a political organizer and public official in California for the previous two decades. Taking a leaf from the gay marriage movement, Singer suggested starting small. A campaign for hospital visitation rights for polyamorous spouses would be the way to begin. Full marriage and adoption rights would come later. Again using the gay marriage movement as a model, Singer called for careful selection of acceptable public spokesmen (i. e. , people from longstanding poly families with children).Singer even published a speech by Iowa state legisla tor Ed Fallon on behalf of gay marriage, arguing that the goal would be to get a congressman to give exactly the same speech as Fallon, but substituting the word â€Å"poly† for â€Å"gay† throughout. Try telling polyamorists that the link between gay marriage and group marriage is a mirage. The flexible, egalitarian, and altogether postmodern polyamorists are more likely to influence the larger society than Mormon polygamists. The polyamorists go after monogamy in a way that resonates with America's secular, post-sixties culture.Yet the fundamental drawback is the same for Mormons and polyamorists alike. Polyamory websites are filled with chatter about jealousy, the problem that will not go away. Inevitably, group marriages based on modern principles of companionate love, without religious rules and restraints, are unstable. Like the short-lived hippie communes, group marriages will be broken on the contradiction between companionate love and group solidarity. And chi ldren will pay the price. The harms of state-sanctioned polyamorous marriage would extend well beyond the polyamorists themselves.Once monogamy is defined out of marriage, it will be next to impossible to educate a new generation in what it takes to keep companionate marriage intact. State-sanctioned polyamory would spell the effective end of marriage. And that is precisely what polyamory's new–and surprisingly influential–defenders are aiming for. The family law radicals STATE-SANCTIONED polyamory is now the cutting-edge issue among scholars of family law. The preeminent school of thought in academic family law has its origins in the arguments of radical gay activists who once opposed same-sex marriage.In the early nineties, radicals like longtime National Gay and Lesbian Task Force policy director Paula Ettelbrick spoke out against making legal marriage a priority for the gay rights movement. Marriage, Ettelbrick reminded her fellow activists, â€Å"has long been th e focus of radical feminist revulsion. † Encouraging gays to marry, said Ettelbrick, would only force gay â€Å"assimilation† to American norms, when the real object of the gay rights movement ought to be getting Americans to accept gay difference.â€Å"Being queer,† said Ettelbrick, â€Å"means pushing the parameters of sex and family, and in the process transforming the very fabric of society. † Promoting polyamory is the ideal way to â€Å"radically reorder society's view of the family,† and Ettelbrick, who has since formally signed on as a supporter of gay marriage (and is frequently quoted by the press), is now part of a movement that hopes to use gay marriage as an opening to press for state-sanctioned polyamory. Ettelbrick teaches law at the University of Michigan, New York University, Barnard, and Columbia. She has a lot of company.

The Allegory Of The Cave By Ray Bradbury - 1148 Words

Negative Effects of Overreliance Materialistic items play a key role in the world today. People use these items, such as technological appliances, to fulfill their daily wants and needs. However, most people do not realize the negative effects of such a heavy reliance on material goods. In â€Å"The Allegory of the Cave,† Plato shares his idea that an overdependence on items can negatively affect ethical decisions. This idea is discussed in â€Å"The Veldt,† by Ray Bradbury, The Truman Show, by Peter Weir, and Daniel Key’s novel, Flowers for Algernon. Throughout all three stories, characters greatly rely on items and other people, leading them to make unethical decisions. In some cases, people are objectified as a result of being needed, desired, and treated unfairly. In â€Å"The Veldt,† The Truman Show, and Flowers for Algernon, an overreliance on items leads to a loss of focus on morals and what is ethically important. In Bradbury’s â€Å" The Veldt,† the Hadley children, Peter and Wendy, lose a sense of right and wrong because their reliance on technology distracts them from their morals. The children lose compassion and understanding for others, engage in violence towards their parents, and make hurtful and unethical comments towards family members. Their overreliance on technology distances them from being able to work and provide for themselves. As Mr. Hadley tries and fails to seperate the children from technology, the kids refuse to cooperate. Peter remembers how he â€Å"didn’tShow MoreRelatedFahrenheit 451 And The Allegory Of The Cave By Ray Bradbury952 Words   |  4 PagesArdon, Samantha Professor Moore ENG 101 #34285 9 October 2017 Lies Hidden in Truth Most people do not walk to a bookshelf and read a book in a one sitting anymore. Has the current world become similar to the society in Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury? 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It relates well to the allegory of the cave by Plato and the book Fahrenheit 451, it was actually written as a response to this book by Ray Bradbury. This song really shows how people in society do not think, they go along with what is going on and do not question, they do not act upon what is wrong. Many similar ideas found in thisRead MoreOppression By George Orwell And Fahrenheit 4512355 Words   |  10 Pages1984 and Fahrenheit 451 ‘If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever’ O’Brien explains to Winston whilst torturing him near the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is this sense of oppression which Orwell and Bradbury both portray in their novels. Oppression can be defined as the, ‘cruel or unjust use of power or authority’. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is quite a clear sense of cruelness and totalitarianism, whereas in Fahrenheit 451 there is a less obvious