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In 1960 about 4% of wives earned more than their husbands. In 2023 it was 16%. My wife earns much more than me, but it doesn’t bother me at all. For many years, when I was a banker, it was the opposite. Now I’m a starving writer and she’s a tenured academic. My parents would […]
I read a disturbing but not surprising article in the Wall Street Journal. Junior investment bankers routinely work 100 hours a week. An all-nighter followed by a plane flight or customer presentation in the morning is common. They often lose track of what day it is because they never rest on the weekends. After one […]
We Have Met the Drug Smuggler – by Carl Vonderau. More than 200K people travel from Mexico into San Diego each day. In 2023, 27K pounds of Fentanyl were seized at the border crossing. We hear that Mexican cartels are the ones flooding us with these drugs. But that’s not true. In reality, drug-trafficking crimes […]
I recently attended a Novel Intensive Workshop in Jonesborough, Tennessee, the oldest town in the state. Jonesboro has a home were U.S. President Andrew Jackson lived. The building we were in was built in 1797. While there, I received a certificate from Steven James and Robert Dugoni for War and Peace because I’m writing a […]
Partners in Crime, the San Diego chapter of Sisters in Crime, welcomes you to a discussion with William Kent Krueger and Carl Vonderau about Krueger’s writing as well as his latest novel, Spirit Crossing. It will be a virtual event on Saturday, December 7, at 2:00 p.m., Pacific Time. Krueger writes a mystery series set […]
What Your Banker Thinks When You Want to Start a Business – Carl Vonderau. You’ve got this great idea, or you need to expand your small business to the next level. All you want is some financing to seed your growth. So you go into talk to your boring banker. She loves the idea, but […]
It’s hard to believe the number of swindlers that show up this time of year. I get at least one ad a week for a free gift card or for virus protection that I’ve supposedly signed up for. These are sponsored by fraudsters trying to glob onto the insides of my laptop, or to tease […]
When we were living in Montreal and my kids were young, we used to take them to the Jay Peak Ski Resort in Vermont. Little did I know that one of the owners was stealing millions of dollars that were supposed to be invested in the park. In the early 2000s Jay Peak was underdeveloped […]
In the last newsletter I described how my former client in Montreal, SNC-Lavalin, was involved in the Grand Man Made River in Libya. In 2011, when the civil war took place, Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saadi, needed to get out of the country. Fast. An SNC executive facilitated a payment of $200K to charter a private […]