I’m watching the 1968 version of “Thomas Crown Affair” and as the protagonist was depositing the $2.6mm into a Swiss bank I wanted to find out what it would equal to today.

$2,600,000.00 in 1968 had the same buying power as $16,810,188.79 in 2011.

In 2009, almost half of all venture capital money spent in America went to four cities: New York, Palo Alto, Seattle, and Sunnyvale. So the obvious question is: Why does the Bay Area create so much economic power and not Detroit? Both have the same federal government. They work under the same laws and same rules. But San Francisco and Silicon Valley have created a culture that responds to innovation and creates business models like no other place on Earth. Cities that do this become a beacon for the most talented people in the world…

In defense of Washington, it wasn’t originally set up to be the nation’s economic engine. The U.S. government has seeded whole industries through land grant universities, defense contractors, and scientific and medical researchers to name just a few. But the government has never, will never, nor should it be expected to ignite badly needed sustainable economic booms. These economic booms originate in the souls of individuals and great cities.

Source: Gallup Management Journal

Yep, this tracks. I’m coming from the other end of this spectrum, what with my risky investing behavior.

If you believe that major market moves happen in New York, then watch the weather there. I’ve paid attention to that on occasion, mainly in dark winter storms but it’s only useful for daytrading.

Wouldn’t this mean that in sunnier climates, say in California, people invest more conservatively?

Weather variables, and sunshine in particular, are found to be strongly correlated with financial variables. I consider self-reported happiness as a channel through which sunshine affects financial variables. I examine the influence of happiness on risk-taking behavior by instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, and I find that happy people appear to be more risk-averse in financial decisions, and accordingly choose safer investments.

Happy people take more time for making decisions and have more self-control. Happy people also expect to live longer and accordingly seem more concerned about the future than the present, and expect less in inflation.

Source: “Weather and Financial Risk-Taking: Is Happiness the Channel?” from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study on Economic Research, August, 2009