Their actions determine the course of civilization as it moves from primitive tribalism toward a world community. They are able to see beyond the neighborhood concerns that most of the world's population never transcend. The rate of economic change accelerates constantly. Investment strategies that worked for the last generation would be disastrous today. Buy and hold or save and conserve are not the excellent advice they were a few years ago.
Industries rise and die in the space of a decade.
New investment media are springing up like mushrooms after a rain, offering options on futures contracts, future contracts on options, all sorts of derivatives and other esoteric instruments. Money market and other no-load mutual funds have been around for little more than two decades, yet their assets number in the hundreds of billions. The political world is more confused than it has ever been as it struggles to find new problems to solve while ignoring the problems caused by government deficit in the history of the world rally against spending cuts that are actually only decreases in the rate of increase. The politicians who promised to get government of the backs of people have given the tax authorities a bigger budget and powerful new legal and technological weapons to crack down on tax cheats. The underground economy swells larger each day while legislators debate the fine points of inconsequential tax reforms.