Today I would like to share with you a book I read (and even translated some paragraphs into russian) sometime ago by my beloved author, Stuart Wilde. The book is called
The Little Money Bible
There is a short book review: "In this wonderful little "money bible", Stuart Wilde presents the ten laws of abundance and money, showing us that we can align effortlessly with good fortune!Stuart reveals the psychological aspects of the money game, as well as the deeper secrets of prosperity. He reminds us that comprehending the ebb and flow of money in our lives is one of the great spiritual lessons of life, as are physical balance, love, and interpersonal relationships. Throughout history, philosophers and great religious leaders have taught that there is divine abundance, which ebbs and flows through our lives as the seasons do. Money is just a symbol of the infinite goodness that gave us life.
Basically, Stuart lets us know that we can be rich and be spiritual. With wealth, we can help others strengthen themselves so that they can also accumulate money. Abundance, Stuart reminds us, is our birthright!"
..and again the book is not about greed but on the contrary - the law of attraction, love and positivity. The book says: " “Moneymaking is not a serious business; it’s a game. At first it may seem that it’s a game that you play with forces outside yourself…”
There is another quote: "When you are insecure, it turns people off. To spend money, people have to give away a part of their security. When they make the transfer of money to you, they have to feel solid; they have to feel they are getting something that will make them more, because they are paying out and becoming less right now. If you are solid and contained and secure, it helps them feel solid, so they transfer their cash more readily."
"The way to ensure that you will always have enough is to forget about the money and concentrate instead on giving of yourself emotionally – that is, supporting people, putting out energy, and being there for others. People are scared and insecure, and they need emotional support; they need protection. It costs nothing to give it to them. To do so, you have to put aside your problems and worries; you have to subjugate your ego.
"You practice listening, empathizing, really hearing what they are saying – instead of cocking an ear politely in their direction while thinking about something about something else. Look them in the eye when they speak, repeat back to them words they have used so they know you have listened and understood them."
"Make a point of noticing the plum tree full of fruit, gaze at fields of wheat, meditate on the endless rows of vegetables at the supermarket, and accept the warmth of the sun as it rises each morning. Also, engage your childlike self, with awe, in the abundance of stars in the night sky. Each of these are signposts of the Universe-at-Large reminding you that you have the gift of life - That your journey takes place on a planet that is blessed and chock full of everything that you're ever going to need."
"Money is a symbol of that life force, of its appreciation. Money can be a solidified form of love. Through the transfer of money, we facilitate love and communication with other humans. It offers us a simple system of providing for and loving and nurturing ourselves, and it is one way of expressing generosity and kindness for the less fortunate."
In Chapter 10 of The Little Money Bible by Stuart Wilde, he speaks about what he calls the Law of Love Money and Compassion. Something very interesting grabbed my attention today as I was listening, and I was able to discern something new about changing thought in order to attract what you want.
Here’s the chain reaction: 1. Feel self hate and loathing that is weighing heavily on your mind. 2. Use the pain of that self hate to numb you from the real root of your issues. 3. Give off negative energy from the unresolved issues that are written all over our face/body/words/actions…no matter how subtle. 4. Ask for money, get none. Ask for rewarding work, get the opposite. Ask for a good deal, get a bad deal.
Wilde says, that the reason is that in order to spend money, people have to feel secure in making the transfer.
People who want to accept our money and people to whom we want to give money, will feel uneasy about the exchange if you have negative energy attached to it.
So what do you do if you do feel self hate or loathing and can’t change it overnight? Wilde suggests that in order to attract the money and people you want in your life, you don’ t have to change your entire self right now. You simply have to be, “OK with who you are, flaws and all, and [go] out in the world with honorable intentions,” and that is what will ultimately will make you attractive to the people who have what you want.
Bottom Line: In order to give out good energy around money, work — anything you want, it’s not about changing your flaws right now. It’s about changing the way you think about your flaws so that your energy is swayed in a positive direction.
Some affirmative thoughts he offers around this philosophy are: “I’m going out today. I’m going to believe in myself. I’m going to be honorable. I’m going to concentrate on people and treat them fairly. I’m going to treat myself fairly. By nurturing myself, my energy will build and I will feel more secure. By being more secure, I will prosper.”
(PRICEONOMICS) American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage – they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock. They could invest the money in assets that will compound over time and someday provide a nest egg. Instead, they trade that money for a diamond ring, which isn’t much of an asset at all. As soon as you leave the jeweler with a diamond, it loses over 50% of its value.
Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. Not only is the demand for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare. Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a diamond high.
Countless American dudes will attest that the societal obligation to furnish a diamond engagement ring is both stressful and expensive. But here’s the thing – this obligation only exists because the company that stands to profit from it willed it into existence.
So here is a modest proposal: Let’s agree that diamonds are bullshit and reject their role in the marriage process. Let’s admit that as a society we got tricked for about century into coveting sparkling pieces of carbon, but it’s time to end the nonsense.
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The Super-Rich Who Hide Trillions in Cash Offshore Author: David Leigh
Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain’s offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife.
The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade, with a former chief economist at McKinsey estimating that wealthy individuals may have as much as $32tn (£21tn) stashed in overseas havens.
In France, Jean-Jacques Augier, President François Hollande’s campaign co-treasurer and close friend, has been forced to publicly identify his Chinese business partner. It emerges as Hollande is mired in financial scandal because his former budget minister concealed a Swiss bank account for 20 years and repeatedly lied about it.
In Mongolia, the country’s former finance minister and deputy speaker of its parliament says he may have to resign from politics as a result of this investigation.
But the two can now be named for the first time because of their use of companies in offshore havens, particularly in the British Virgin Islands, where owners’ identities normally remain secret.
The names have been unearthed in a novel project by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists [ICIJ], in collaboration with the Guardian and other international media, who are jointly publishing their research results this week.
The naming project may be extremely damaging for confidence among the world’s wealthiest people, no longer certain that the size of their fortunes remains hidden from governments and from their neighbours.
BVI’s clients include Scot Young, a millionaire associate of deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Dundee-born Young is in jail for contempt of court for concealing assets from his ex-wife.
Young’s lawyer, to whom he signed over power of attorney, appears to control interests in a BVI company that owns a potentially lucrative Moscow development with a value estimated at $100m.
Another is jailed fraudster Achilleas Kallakis. He used fake BVI companies to obtain a record-breaking £750m in property loans from reckless British and Irish banks.
As well as Britons hiding wealth offshore, an extraordinary array of government officials and rich families across the world are identified, from Canada, the US, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, China, Thailand and former communist states.
The data seen by the Guardian shows that their secret companies are based mainly in the British Virgin Islands.
How Rich Is the Catholic Church? Author: Matthew Yglesias
Pope Francis is not just the spiritual leader of one of the world’s major religions: He’s also the head of what’s probably the wealthiest institution in the entire world.
The Catholic Church’s global spending matches the annual revenues of the planet’s largest firms, and its assets—huge amounts of real estate, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Vatican City, some of the world’s greatest art—surely exceed those of any corporation by an order of magnitude.*
But it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to understand exactly how rich the church is. That’s in part because church finances are complicated. But it’s also because, in the United States at least, churches in general are exempted from the financial reporting and disclosure requirements that otherwise apply to nonprofit groups. And it turns out, that exemption may have undesirable consequences.
The main thing we know about Catholic Church finance is that in cash flow terms, the United States is by far the most important branch. America is a rich country with a large population of Catholics. What’s more, America’s Catholic population is a religious minority. That’s meant that, rather than using political clout to influence the shape of mainstream government institutions, as in an overwhelmingly Catholic country such as Brazil, the Catholic Church in the United States has created a parallel state: a vast web of schools, hospitals, universities, and charities that serve millions of clients.
Our best window into the overall financial picture of American Catholicism comes from a 2012 investigation by the Economist, which offered a rough-and-ready estimate of $170 billion in annual spending, of which almost $150 billion is associated with church-affiliated hospitals and institutions of higher education. The operating budget for ordinary parishes, at around $11 billion a year, is a relatively small share, and Catholic Charities is a smaller share still.
Apple and General Motors, by way of comparison, each had revenue of about $150 billion worldwide in Fiscal Year 2012. Legally speaking, there is no such thing as “the Catholic Church,” which is why these finances get so complicated.
As far as the law is concerned, each diocese is a separate legal entity, incorporated in the states where it operates. Generally speaking, they are organized as what’s known as a corporation sole—a legal corporation wholly controlled by the individual bishop rather than a board of directors—and not officially part of any larger transnational spiritual organization. This has led to conflicts during the sex abuse scandals. Lawsuits have caused disputes about how deep the church’s pockets go and who should pay.
On several occasions, abuse-related litigation has inspired dioceses to declare bankruptcy, which offers a rare window into the internal financial organization of the institution. Individual parishes, though operating under the umbrella of the relevant bishop, have a fair degree of financial autonomy.
They conduct separate fundraising and maintain separate expenses. That way, parish donors can feel they’re bolstering their particular community and not an impersonal bureaucracy. But it’s common for parish investment funds within a single diocese to be pooled. When a diocese declares bankruptcy, this raises the question of whether pooled parish investment funds are available to be seized by the bishop’s creditors or whether they exist separately.
As a fascinating article in this month’s American Bankruptcy Institute Journal explains, the status of parish investment funds depends on some very subtle details. Both the Diocese of Milwaukee and the Diocese of Wilmington ran pooled investment funds in which a single account simply noted how much each parish had contributed.
The difference is that in Wilmington, Del., operating funds were also mingled into the pooled account, whereas in Milwaukee they were kept separate. That small difference ended up costing Wilmington parishes $74 million in exposure to Episcopal creditors. At the same time, as a matter of Canon Law individual parishes can be wholly “suppressed,” merged into other parishes, or otherwise divided up, essentially at the discretion of the bishop—notwithstanding the existence of separate bank accounts.
This authority suggests that the diocese does indeed wholly own and control its parishes, but church officials take advantage of the ambiguity, sometimes claiming to fully control its parishes, sometimes—for legal reasons—arguing that the parishes are wholly independent entities.
India up “For Sale” to Western Corporate Capital Author: Colin Todhunter
Do you know that there is a country up for sale? Do you know that its finance, agriculture and retail sectors are being put ‘on the market’?
Perhaps you are already aware of this due to various media reports. But then again, maybe you are not because it’s all being carried out behind closed doors in Brussels. The EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA), something that could fundamentally restructure Indian society and impact the lives of hundreds of millions, is being negotiated ‘on the behalf of the public’ by politicians on both sides who are champions of the type of economic liberalisation that has already been responsible for bankrupting many Western economies.
Negotiations began in 2007, covering a wide range of areas, including various goods, products and services, as well as investment rules, government procurement; and intellectual property rights. After 16 rounds of talks, the issues are still being fine tuned. ‘Developed’ countries are resorting more and more to these types of bilateral trade agreements with individual developing countries because they want to continue to push their free trade agenda that was rejected by developing countries at the World Trade Organisation.
The EU-India FTA essentially represents the demands of big business in the West and results from their strategic hegemony over government bureaucracies and politicians. With Western economies in crisis, India represents potential ripe pickings for transnational corporations’ never ending compulsion for profit.
Kavaljit Singh of the Madhyam research institute notes that the EU wants to export its heavily subsidised dairy products to India (1). The Indian government has encouraged the co-operative model in the dairy sector with active policy protection. It therefore makes little sense that dairy trade will be opened up to unfair competition from subsidised European exports under the FTA.
According to RS Sodhi, managing director of the country’s largest milk cooperative, Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, the FTA will rob the vibrant domestic dairy industry and the millions of farmers that are connected to it from their rightful access to a growing market within India.
The EU has an overproduction problem in the dairy sector and is looking to dump its surplus. By dumping products in other countries, producer prices and incomes there become depressed. India’s dairy sector is mostly self sufficient and employs about 90 million people, a majority of whom are 75 million women. The sector is a lifeline for small and marginal farmers, landless poor and a significant source of income for millions of families.
Although the Indian government is saying that the dairy sector will be protected, the EU is lobbying hard to open up the sector. S Kannaiyan of the South Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers movements wonders if the government can be trusted. It’s a fair point, given its obsession with foreign investment and neo-liberalism.