Financial and Investment News

Have you ever read the book ’The Sovereign Individual’?
For a very long time I had wished to read it since best-selling writer Robert Kiyosaki had listed it as informative read in one of his own books. One of the authors was Lord Reese-Mogg, a Briton who specializes in global strategic investments plus predictions
with regards to how to invest now with various trends in mind. He makes the point that there tends to be a major shift every 500 years or so in Western civilization.
For example, the year 1492 marks the official beginning of the industrial age, thus ending the feudal age, according to many historians. Some 500 years later, in 1992, the world wide web went wide, marking the beginning of the information age and the end of the industrial age.
According to Mogg, this shift will be more pronounced even than the shift to the agrarian or industrial age. This is because microprocessing will have a more fundamnetal impact on human society in it’s entirety, over time. He says that by the year 2045 or thereabout the world will look much different than
it does today, as many industrial age institutions either fade away or are severely modified. The impact of all this is debatable, but Mogg says big changes are inevitable. Just as the changes made from the invention of the printing press during the industrial age could not really be stopped once the genie was out of the bottle,
so too will the changes from microprocessing and a wireless world be. It is already happening, of course. Mogg and his co-author made the fascinating point that, during the beginning stages of these types of great shifts, those on the cusp (as we are now and the Europeans of 1492 were) rarely know what is happening,or just how dramatic the shift is going be.
At the time the first printing press was invented, for instance, the church had a virtual monopoly on printing and binding books, including the Holy Bible.  Few people really understood at the time the full ramifications of this invention in not only ushering in the end of the dominance by the church but also the positive impact
of having books available for the first time to the masses.  By the the late eighteenth century the standard of living of the advanced industrial nations went up tremendously. For the first time ever unskilled workers could move to urban areas and earn a wage far above the normal subsistance level so common in the agrarian or fuedal era.. Suddenly, however, the unskilled workers could go to a factory and earn a wage above the subsistence level, introducing true upward mobility. Huge quantities of relatively cheap manufactered merchandise became available. General wealth prosperity and an increased standard of living followed thereafter.
Now we are at the starting point of a similar era, except that instead of the german-invented printing press we have microprocessing and the American invented information superhighway. The overall ramifications of this shift will indeed be indeed enormous,  particularly as the cost of wireless networks continues to drop globally.
In the future, certain entrepreneurs will get richer at ever younger age. You may even see some that go on to become billionarre’s by the time they are in their early twenties.
Is there anything to be wary of in this new information driven economy? Well we have to be beware of mega-mergers perhaps more than ever. If we get to a point where, say, ninety percent of all purchases are made online, and the big search portals then merge, it
will be easier than ever for the big companies to monopolize the marketplace, since most people tend to find things via a handful of search engines now.
A merger of Google and Yahoo for instance, would be very bad for the consumer. Having almost 90 percent of all searches go thru one source (which would be the case if they merged) would be a real stranglehold on the buying public. You could eventually see bribery by deep pocket companies to get the top spots in the organic search results so the blue chip biggies could have a monopoly on the big retail and wholesale terms, much like they do now to a de fact degree in the brick and mortor retail world.
I mean just look at how the big boys have knocked out many mom and pop coffee shops and retail stores in recent years, some using blatantly unfair practices. So as consumers we should all be on gaurd against such abuses in cyberspace and especially the search engines, where a few  people on top could filter the results in a way that benefits a few corporate players at the top. How should you deal with these changes? I suggest you find a good information age home business, such as Trilogy International and get to work