Be sure to catch this classic flick on Turner Classic Movies, or from Netflix. W.C. Fields at the peak of his popularity.
I’m not sure of the original author of this aphorism, but today’s title explains how Bernard Madoff allegedly scammed his clients out of $50 Billion (that’s with a “B”) using […]
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. […]
A quick quiz:
Q. What does Wall Street do after they’ve introduced a new, quasi-asset class like structured investments to its well-heeled clients?
A. They roll it out to the retail investor population.
A quick review:
Structured Investments are derivative instruments, that mimic a portion of an underlying index, while purportedly intending to return the original principal.
The […]
The beginning of wisdom as revealed in a poignant quote….
“There’s no end to things they can invent that seem to me little more than a gamble for the enjoyment of the inventors.”
(From Charles Brooks, a physician in Allentown, Pa., age 65, who expects to sell his two structured products at 7 cents on the dollar, […]
Let’s see how the IRS is doing this year handling refunds.
According to Martin Vaughan’s article in the Wall Street Journal (9/9/09, D5) here are the results.
Filing your return online, and providing routing information for direct deposit to the taxpayer’s bank account…an average of just 10 days. And for some lucky taxpayers as soon […]
I think life would be much simpler if I didn’t read so much.
Last time I bothered to count there are some two dozen investment periodicals that inform my point of view.
One of the best is Forbes.
No, not just because I am part of their finance blog network. Forbes is fearless about biting the hand that […]
This may be the granddaddy of all financial scams.
I’m beginning to think we may be genetically programmed to be suckered into these fraudulent snares. How else to explain their utter resistance to repeated exposure and censure?
Like most scams, it works best in distressed economies. Desperate borrowers will lower all their natural defenses, as […]
We are going on fraud patrol now. Sadly, the only indicator that reliably ticks upwards during economic slowdowns involves the incidence of fraud.
Today we tackle the subject of affinity fraud, and in our next post we will expose the practice involving advance loan fees.
I’ve been waiting for the mainstream business press to step up to […]
