Sunday, May 31, 2015

FINANCIAL MARKETS ALERT --- no news

In the last couple of months the financial markets have for the most part been acceptably boring. There of course have been interesting individual company reports and some merger and acquisition activity, primarily in tech and biotech.  This is not new at all.  Watching CNBC or listening to Bloomberg or reading some NYT columns, one could think that we are always on the precipice of disaster.  It doesn't seem that way here at all.

These are unpredictable financial markets as is always the case, and something significant could happen tomorrow or a month from now.  We don't know.  We do know that nothing new or of broad consequence has been happening recently.  Boring is fine for now, although it leads to little comment here.  When things change, there will be plenty to write about.  

Paperwork backlog

Trying to do too many things and affected by several events beyond my control, I am now buried under a massive backlog of bills, administrative requests from accounts, insurance company forms, and estate issues related to K's parents.  Never has there been a situation like this in my life.  Tonight is one where sleeping was not an option and the bills backlog has been 90% cleared up, and it should be as it's 4:30 am here.  Having some bills run to two months was unheard of here. Fortunately,while my credit rating will likely take a small hit, that's not really important.

On top of all of this, which can be understood, there are the nuisance requests from companies that are hard to understand and annoying.  This week's example were calls from Citibank about a credit card problem.  K has one of their cards.  I ignored the recorded calls. Finally in the last few days real people started calling twice a day emphasizing that this was not a sales call.  Digging up K's card, I called. Citibank was calling about an $11 balance on her card that was not due until June 7th. Bizarre. Apparently K's card is some special one that doesn't have charges for late payments. K's balance had not been paid since at least February and had grown from $10.  What a stupid company.

Much more work to do, but not tonight as that's impossible.  The night is almost over.