Investment Biker Read online

  She winced, not answering. She loved riding with me as a passenger. The motorcycle associations said 90 percent of their riders were men, but that was changing. There were even a couple of magazines now devoted to women’s motorcycle riding. At twenty-three, Tabitha was as adventuresome as any woman I’d known. Now in my mid-forties, I would have twenty years of motorcycle driving experience to draw on; Tabitha would have her youth.

  “If something happens to one bike,” I went on, “the trip won’t be over. You take the driving lessons, and we’ll both sign up for the BMW mechanics course so if we break down in the middle of the jungle, we can fix the bikes.”

  While I had sometimes spied her in the background as she was growing up, I first really met Tabitha Estabrook when her mother, Biffie, an old friend, dragged her over to my house so I, who taught finance at the business school at Columbia University, could tell her it was in her best interest to go to business school.

  She was a tall, leggy blonde who had grown up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where, at the all-female Nightingale-Bamford School on the East Side, she had absorbed the fashionable political ideas of her time and place: that in an enlightened society the state would fix almost all of society’s problems. The Republican Party was an enemy of decency, a temple to greed, possibly the Great Satan Himself. Her father had been a Navy pilot after college, and now he was practicing law. As a schoolgirl, caught in the middle of her parents’ bitter and nasty divorce, she found Nightingale-Bamford to be a surrogate parent at an important time, and she continued to have great affection for her alma mater. At Amherst she fashioned her own major, an interdisciplinary course featuring Islamic studies.

  At that first meeting we were attracted to each other. Even though I taught at the business school, I told her what I tell all my students, that she shouldn’t go to business school, that it was a waste of time. Including opportunity costs, it would cost her or her parents more than a hundred thousand dollars, money better spent starting a business, which would succeed or fail, either of which would teach her more about business than would sitting in a classroom for two or three years listening to “learned professors” who had never run a business prate on about doing so.

  I asked her out, one thing led to another, and we began to see a lot of each other.

  We kept discussing the trip over the next few days, and she began to plan as if she were going. It was natural for me to take her along. I’d made many long-distance trips—across Europe, the United States, India, China, and to Alaska along the Alcan Highway—and often I’d taken my current woman friend.

  However, while she continued to be enthusiastic, as the week wore on I began to wonder about her driving her own bike. Yes, she once traveled on the back of my motorcycle from San Francisco to New York, but five hundred miles a day on a superhighway was no preparation for what we were planning. Sure, the roads in Pakistan had been bad, but there too she’d been merely a passenger.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I announced one night at dinner. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to drive your own bike. It’s too difficult for a beginner. Remember how bad the roads were in India and Pakistan? The ones in China, Siberia, and Africa are going to be even rougher.”

  She shot me a hard glance. “You don’t think I’m tough enough?”

  “No, I didn’t say that. This is just a long, long trip. This is the longest and toughest ride of all.”

  “I can do it.”

  I sighed. What had I started? “A rider needs several thousand miles—several tens of thousands of miles—under her belt for something like this. The pace we’ll have to keep up, the terrible roads, the weeks—months—of driving day after day will wear you out. You need experience. I remember how I was as a beginner. One time I came off an interstate, for God’s sake, and shot off into a cornfield because I was green and wasn’t paying enough attention. The first time I was on a gravel road the wheel skidded out from under me. I had bruises and raspberries everywhere. Well, in many of these places, we’re going to wish we had something as good as a gravel road.”

  “We’re not leaving for three months. I’ll practice before we go.”

  I took a deep breath and launched in. “Look, I’m not explaining this well enough. On the China trip I set out from Turpan to Hami with a film crew in a bus behind me. This was to be two hundred fifty miles, a quick day. We didn’t take much food or water because we were assured the road was fine and we’d arrive in Hami before dark. Well, that day turned out to be seventeen hours across roads that were a nightmare. We couldn’t stop because there was nowhere to stop—no place to buy anything to eat. We were in the desert, so there was no water. It was like being halfway across a sea—you are in trouble no matter what you decide to do. Once we were out there, we had to push on. I think we’d all have died if we’d stopped. Two thirds of the way there, the film crew was ready to give up, and they were riding in the bus.”

  She stared at me so fixedly, I wasn’t sure what she was thinking.

  I continued. “There’re going to be times on this trip when we’ll have to bust a gut to keep going, and it’s going to be hard, the hardest thing you’ve ever done. Half the world—more than half the world—is still rough, wild, unpaved, savage.”

  Her eyes seemed to stare through me as she thought this over. “You don’t think I’m tough enough.”

  “I think you’re plenty tough, but you might not have enough experience, even by the time we set out, for such a long, hard trip.”

  “I’ll work and make myself ready, Jim. We’ve traveled thousands of miles on your bike. I have a pretty good idea of what I’m getting into.”

  “But the pace. I run six miles a day to keep fit. You know enough to know this will wear you out as well as beat you up. There’s no way you can build up enough stamina in just three months.”

  “I think I can.”

  “You also know I’m a real pusher sometimes. I have to be. Like on that Hami drive, when I had to make sure we made it. As a matter of fact, the same damn thing happened the next day. A simple two-hundred-fifty-mile drive from Hami to Turpan took another seventeen hours.”

  “Jim, I’ll keep up.”

  I was still not sure she knew what she was getting into, not sure I knew what I was getting into. “We can’t go around the world driving three or four hours a day.”

  Now she gave me a direct look. “Jim, if you don’t want me to come, say so. Go alone.”

  “No, I didn’t say that. I’d love you to come. It’ll be wonderful having you along. But we’re going over the world’s worst roads, through some of its harshest weather, across the Sahara and the Andes, through epidemics in places where there aren’t hospitals, telephones, airports, or even telegrams, where there are bandits, terrorists—who knows what.”

  Over the next few days we looked on the darker side of the trip.

  We discussed the possibility that we might get killed. Tabitha’s reaction was that she could get killed in New York, too. As for me, I expected to make it or otherwise I wouldn’t have planned to set out.

  I had to figure out what to do with my investments while I was gone. Investment markets are volatile beasts, and you have to keep an eye on your positions. They’ve always fascinated me. One of the first things I noticed about them was that they went down as well as up, and I remembered how excited I was when I learned you could sell them short—sell what you don’t own, and profit from their fall as well as from their rise. Where we were going there wouldn’t be phones, telexes, or faxes, much less daily newspapers. Most of my investments had always been long term, so I didn’t need to make any major moves. I cut back on my shorts, and I kept no futures positions at all.

  Then, early in 1990, most of my money was in utility stocks, U.S. government bonds, and foreign currencies, and I pretty much left it where it was. I owned utility stocks, mainly distressed ones with nuclear plants such as Illinois Power and Niagara Mohawk, because I was convinced they’d hit bottom and would solve
their problems. I thought U.S. interest rates were headed south, so I was bullish—optimistic—on bonds and bearish—pessimistic—on the dollar, that is, I expected the price of bonds to rise and that of the dollar to fall. I figured the politicians would do everything they could to keep the economy going. Since they’re not very smart, all they really know how to do is cut interest rates. I bought foreign currencies, mainly certificates of deposit denominated in guilders or deutsche marks, reasoning that the dollar would go down as the politicians cut interest rates.

  As an American, I hated to see this happen. But as an investor about to set off around the world, I had chanced upon the perfect investment scenario, because these were holdings I wouldn’t have to watch on a daily basis. I would make money if I were right, and I wouldn’t get wiped out if I were wrong, because government bonds and utility stocks might go down, but basically they were secure instruments over time, as were the currencies of sound countries.

  Whenever I travel, because of who I am, I notice promising investment opportunities. While this wasn’t an investment trip by any means, I suspected I would visit promising stock exchanges. In addition to experiencing the world and its people firsthand in the vivid and close way you can on a motorcycle, I knew I would learn about the markets in Africa, China, and South America, which I felt might explode in the nineties. I was also curious about the markets in Australia and New Zealand. I’d made a lot of money for myself and others by investing in sleepy markets that exploded upward. In fact, one of my first stops on this trip was to be Austria, where I was to give a speech to the investment clients of Ober-bank. A few years before, my investment in the Austrian stock market had quintupled in three years. I wondered if I would find more such places to invest. With the world throwing off the shackles of socialism and Communism, I figured not only was the time right, but the opportunity might not be repeated for decades, if ever again in my life.

  As the weeks sped by Tabitha stuck with it. She was going to go. I still worried that the trip was wrong for her and that she would change her mind at the last minute, but March got closer and we kept moving forward as if we were going to do it.

  We bought spare cables, mirrors, a carburetor, and extra Michelin tires. We packed rolls of 3M’s magic construction tape, two inches wide, clear, and seemingly indestructible, my favorite item for emergency repairs. We got sleeping bags, rain suits, and an extra helmet. Tabitha hunted up the wedding band she’d used on our previous adventures. We’d learned it made traveling a lot simpler if she wore one. We bought maps and plotted routes, as AAA had no trip tickets for getting through the Central Asian Republics, Siberia, and the Sahara. We doped out ways to get money into places without American Express offices and where the sight of a traveler’s check would produce suspicious stares. I battened down my office, and I made sure someone would look after my house while I was away. There were vaccinations to take and visas to obtain.

  However, I wasn’t going to get any letters of introduction, nor did I pack my address book. We made the choice to make this trip serendipitously and spontaneously. We wouldn’t depend on old friends, personal or business, to put us up and pull us into gatherings of their friends. It would be more of an adventure to meet our own new friends, friends of the road. In this way we would have a different adventure, maybe better, maybe worse. We would play the trip as we found it.

  And still I was holding my breath, hoping Tabitha wouldn’t change her mind, hoping she’d come.

  Finally the big day arrived. I couldn’t believe it. March 25, 1990, was a bright spring day, and I was about to set out around the world. The way we planned the first leg, we’d leave from the west coast of Ireland and drive across Europe and China to Japan, becoming the first ground travelers ever to ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The second leg would be to return to Ireland across Siberia, Russia, and Central Europe, another first—the Pacific to the Atlantic. Back to back, the trip would be twenty thousand miles.

  Tabitha crated the bikes and took them out to the Aer Lingus freight terminal. I wondered if we’d taken care of everything. Had I given enough instructions about the boiler for next winter? What would the housesitter do if the roof leaked? Too late now. We were in the air. For a few minutes a sense of unreality and strangeness struck me, and I mused on who I was and how I happened to be hurtling over the Atlantic on what might prove to be a fool’s errand.

  We had pored over our maps and decided that the westernmost point in Ireland was Dunquin, population less than one hundred. It would be our starting point. In Ireland, after uncrating the bikes, we drove from Shannon Airport through the lush countryside to Dunquin, where we looked for the post office.

  It was Saturday afternoon when we arrived in the tiny village of thatch-roofed stone cottages and haystacks, its lush green slopes topping slate-gray cliffs. The post office was closed. We knocked on the door anyway. It turned out that the postmistress lived there—just as post-office officials sometimes did back in Alabama when I was a child—and we told her we were traveling around the world and wanted to prove we had been here in Dunquin at the start. Ruddy faced, sixty, and plump, Mrs. Campion reminded me of dozens of Alabama churchwomen, pillars of their communities, who had clucked approvingly as I’d served as an acolyte in the Episcopal church. Would she sell us some postcards, then postmark and date them?

  She laughed with Irish delight at the whole absurd idea and invited us in for a cup of tea. She signed the cards, then a Gaelic student who was there signed them, and then we signed them, and then she stamped them. It was like a party. The official start!

  Riding through this part of Ireland was wonderful, great for motorcycles, the roads curvy and small and convoluted, green and beautiful. All my life, from my history courses at Yale to my work at Oxford and later on Wall Street, I’ve studied geography, politics, economics, and history intensely, believing they are interrelated, and I’ve used what I’ve learned to invest in world markets. I was on the lookout for investment opportunities, for some country—and its investment market—about to take off, where I could jump in and make five, ten, fifteen times what I put in.

  Ireland wouldn’t be one of those countries. In fact, the lush countryside made me sad. For centuries Ireland has been in a state of war or rebellion or depression. It seemed such a shame that despite all this beauty, despite the ebullient, warmhearted Irish temperament, there should be for so long this raging instability. All the country had was tourism and pastureland, although I figured with its pool of semiskilled labor, it might make it as the back office for English or German banks, insurance companies, and brokerages.

  Ireland is a victim of statism, which my dictionary defines as the concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly centralized government, and which I further define as the belief that the state is the mechanism best suited for solving most if not all of society’s ills, be they health related, natural disasters, poverty, job training, or injured feelings. Statism is the great political disease of the twentieth century, with Communist, socialist, and many democratic nations infected to a greater or lesser degree. When the political history of our century is written, its greatest story will be how a hundred variants of statism failed.

  When a country is run by the government, when the government not only owns the post office, the telephone system, the railroads, and the utilities but also the service sector and light and heavy industry, the country begins to have the air of the U.S. postal service in the nineties compared with what it was in the fifties. A couple of generations later, all vigor is drained out of that society.

  Across the Irish Sea, Margaret Thatcher was the first major example of a leader who reversed this trend. When she was elected in 1979, Britain was bankrupt from its government’s efforts to solve every social problem. She began to sell off the assets and businesses that had been nationalized by the Labour Party, invigorating the country’s economy. Ireland was late in beginning this process.

  I had last been in Ireland in
1964, while a student at Oxford, and it now shocked me how empty the countryside was. What hit me was that the talented genes kept leaving Ireland, and that they had been leaving for generations. That didn’t mean there weren’t some smart, delightful, wonderful people here, but there had been a great migration out of the gene pool.

  On our second day out, near Cork, Tabitha’s bike broke down. I had no idea what was wrong, and for all her mechanic’s training, neither did Tabitha.

  Back in New York we had both signed up for the BMW mechanics course, but with even the best intentions, I had never made a single class. Other things were always more pressing. Besides, we both knew she was far more mechanically oriented than I was. I can’t operate venetian blinds without getting tangled in the cord. Tabitha not only had time and a mechanical bent, but her father had taught her a lot about machinery, how machines worked. This was one more aspect that had attracted me to her.

  Before we left, we had hired her BMW instructor, Scott Johnson, who had a passion for these motorcycles, to come over and give her extra lessons, private tutorials. Over several winter weeks Tabitha worked with him in the side yard of the house. Late in the frigid days, sometimes at night under a lamp’s yellow glare, they’d take a bike apart, put it back together, and then take it apart again.

  While he showed her what each mysterious part did and how it worked, I was doing a million other things. I was the host of a TV show about economic affairs in addition to teaching finance at Columbia. But most of my attention had gone into organizing my investments and devising ways to put my New York life in the deep freezer while we were gone.

  Unfortunately, all Tabitha’s training had been in the classroom and not on the road. She could strip down an engine and put it back together, but she couldn’t diagnose what was wrong when it broke down. In this case, we needed practical street smarts, not theoretical expertise.

  Along came a local motorcycle gang, dressed the way they are everywhere in the world. Barry O’Keefe and Kevin Sullivan, the leaders, turned out to be wonderful folks, just good old motorcycle trash like us. They loaded Tabitha’s bike into a truck and fixed it in five minutes at their shop. The bike looked good, black with white racing stripes on the fairing, chrome exhaust pipe gleaming. They invited us to a dive called the Mojo Pub, where we had a party.