“Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”
William Goldman, famed screenwriter
2009 promises to be yet another challenging year, but in no way a carbon copy of 2008.
That’s at the core of my disconnect with all the expert talking heads who have internalized the wreckage of the past year and project yet more […]
Everyone will be glad to put this dismal market behind us and start fresh in 2009.
With just a few weeks left in the year, here is a menu of goals and actions you should start planning for to help you make up for lost ground.
1. Contact your human resources department now…there is often a two […]
So, how exactly does the average person justify their clunky and emotional consumption purchases?
Easy. They don’t call it consumption. They re-label it as an investment.
If only it were that easy.
The case in point today is the resort time-share.
This is an equal opportunity calamity in waiting, that affects the rich and the poor alike. […]
Do you remember last year, when the excise tax finally was removed from your phone bill?
It was first enacted in 1898 to help finance the Spanish-American war.
We have another such relic left over from World War II:
Rent Control
The last surviving intervention from what had been a full menu of wage and price controls […]
Looks like we’ll have to rewrite most of the investment textbooks after this year.
The cherished concept of portfolio diversification has taken a big hit and may never fully recover.
Back in the day…
The conventional wisdom was that non-correlating assets would not move in tandem. If foreign stocks tanked, domestic stocks would take up the slack. […]
Not warfare, exactly. More like an implacable imbalance.
Demography is destiny…and we have three distinct age cohorts who will soon be at odds as they attempt to divvy up the spoils.
1. The Baby Boomers
Front and center, thirsting for their entitlement transfers, are the baby boomers. The 77 million born from 1946-64. Their sheer […]
Something to think about as the market’s ups-and-downs continue.
Every sell order executed since the bottom fell out on September 29th has had a corresponding buy order.
Of course, the imbalance is lopsided. That’s how markets lose value…when the sellers outnumber the buyers.
The mirror image is when buyers outnumber sellers, and bull markets emerge.
And that […]
Maybe the Feds are on to something that shows promise.
First, some background.
My learning curve on debt and leverage ramped up dramatically after I had begun to buy low and moderate income apartment buildings in Oakland.
This was many years ago. Think disco…and bell bottoms. You could still buy Oldsmobiles back then.
This was a […]
