Pitney Bowes is sponsoring a program with the American Red Cross called Holiday Mail for Heroes to enable Americans to send cards to active and wounded members of the armed services, military families, and veterans during the holiday season.

This is the second year of the campaign, and it has shown me not only the power of these handwritten letters and cards for those receiving them, but for the senders and the people who have volunteered to get them to the recipients.  Today, we desperately need to come together and connect emotionally.  The fear that the economic crisis has caused in many people has had the effect of making them suffer alone, and of making them believe that they are powerless to help themselves or others. (more…)

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Some of my readers have asked me to comment on the financial crisis.  Much has been written about it, and beyond the political rhetoric, there are some very intelligent analyses of what happened and why.  To me, the three obvious root causes were:

• The disconnected and fragmented sub-prime mortgage creation and investment system, combined with the incentives of all players in the supply chain of these mortgages to grow rapidly and to take on excessive risk;
• The unintended consequences of an excessive dependence on “mark-to-market” accounting, which caused financial assets to be written down in value to an artificial “market price,” even if the holder had no intention of selling them, and even if the market for that asset really did not exist.  This artificially low asset valuation would not have mattered, except that lending agreements and other financial arrangements depended on maintaining a minimum level of asset values.  The deterioration of asset values due to these artificially low valuations created a death spiral for companies, because the agreements usually required them to shore up declining asset values with additional credit that simply was not available.
• The mind-boggling complexity of these financial instruments and transactions, which made it extremely difficult for anyone to understand when participants were truly in trouble, until it was too late.   This is also why the rating agencies, on which investors depend to evaluate the riskiness of these instruments and transactions, failed so miserably. (more…)

I do not usually react when a performing arts celebrity passes away, but Paul Newman’s passing was different.  Over time, I came to realize that, in certain ways, he was a role model for me.

He was a person who achieved phenomenal success, but never became arrogant.  When I met him on two different occasions at fund-raising events, the first of which was at his Westport, Connecticut, home, he seemed like a very low-key, normal person well-grounded in reality.  He clearly did not appear to take himself too seriously.

What I most admired about him was his passion to keep expanding his horizons.  Had he just been an actor, he would have had a career that, by itself, would have been among the most distinguished of all performers.  However, he became an award-winning director, producer, and writer, all of which required very different skills from acting. (more…)