Just the other day, I visited a friend of mine at his office. While I was waiting in the lobby, I happened to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone magazine and started leafing through it. Naturally, I was looking for pictures of tattooed, scantily clad, rock-and-roll babes. Much to my chagrin, my attention was captured by an actual article. (Proof, if I needed it, that I'm aging way too fast.)
The article was about our country's dependency on foreign oil and how that was a bad thing. Apparently, the Citgo station under the Saudi Arabian desert had already pumped its best days. Doom and gloom about the world's energy situation poured from the pages, leading me to believe that the good old days of fossil fuel were well and truly over.
The author went on to point out that in one year alone, the price of gas had jumped from $1.78 a gallon to more than $3, and the price of crude oil had jumped to $70. "Wait a minute," I said to myself. "Something doesn't seem quite right about that."
When I flipped to the cover of the magazine, I figured out why. The issue was from the end of 2005. The first thing that popped into my head was, "Who in the hell leaves a magazine in the waiting room for three years?!" My second thought was, "Damn, this guy is right. Isn't oil going for almost $100 a barrel now? Didn't I just pay almost 4 bucks a gallon to fill up my guzzler?"
I turned back to the article and feverishly read through the pages to see what our bleak future looked like, but then my buddy finally appeared and took me into his office. I told him, "I wish your magazines in the waiting room had more pictures," which earned me a puzzled look.
I forgot about that article during my visit, but as I was driving home, my thoughts circled back to it and I wished that I could remember the author's name, or that I had at least ripped the article out of the magazine. I would love to see what this guy is writing about our current situation and what his predictions are for the future. (Then again, maybe not.)
Can you imagine if this author was a financial advisor and had sent that article to all his clients in 2005? If he were doing a marketing campaign today, I bet he would send the same article out again, along with an announcement that he was changing his name to Swami. Whatever Swami said at this point would be golden. Whether it was muni bonds, gold, or pork bellies — a positive mention of any of them would have his clients flooding him with investment dollars.
