The ‘Risk-Aversion’ Misnomer
August 31, 2010Financial advisers often discuss investors who are “risk-averse.” But people, on the whole, are not terribly averse to risk. We are, on the other hand, extremely averse to loss. Imagine the following game show scenario: You are offered the choice of receiving $3,000 in hand, right away, or the potential for $4,000 with a 20 percent chance of getting nothing at all. There are some daring souls who would go …
Jonathan Bergman in Bloomberg Businessweek
August 30, 2010Bloomberg Businessweek, August 30, 2010Jonathan Bergman comments on the firm’s recommended allocation to real estate securities.
The First Alzheimer’s Vaccine: A Helmet
August 30, 2010Medical researchers who are furiously trying to develop new tests, vaccines and treatments for Alzheimer’s and other devastating brain diseases have pointed us toward something we can use immediately: a helmet. We are not talking about some type of super-helmet with miraculous prophylactic powers. Just an ordinary helmet, suited to the activities many of us like to engage in. A bicycle helmet when we ride. A ski helmet when we …
Today’s Miserables Confront Javert’s Three-Strikes Law
August 27, 2010It cost $47,102 to house an inmate in a California state penitentiary in 2008. For 13 years, Gregory Taylor was one of the people Californians paid to keep locked up. Taylor was jailed for trying to break into a church kitchen to find something to eat. Taylor was homeless at the time and was coping with drug addiction. He had previously received food at the church and occasionally slept there, …
One Less Reason To Flee New York
August 26, 2010As we conclude this hard-times summer of the “stay-cation,” New Yorkers who are contemplating divorce can finally end their marriages in a civilized way, without leaving home. Until this month, New York was the last state to require a divorcing spouse to prove that the other party was guilty of cruelty, adultery or abandonment. Every other state has had no-fault divorces for decades. As a result, New Yorkers had to …
Rooting For Gridlock And A Tax Hike
August 25, 2010You don’t hear this very often, but I hope my taxes go up next year — and yours, too. I do not have a burning desire to send more money to Washington. I don’t have a ton of disposable cash and no better place to use it. I do not buy the patently silly argument, propounded by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and others in the Obama administration, that a tax …
Eric Meermann in Daily Finance
August 24, 2010Daily Finance, August 24, 2010Eric Meermann discusses investing for people in their 40s.
How Everyone Came To Have A Second Mortgage
August 24, 2010A quarter-century ago, only someone in desperate need of cash would take a second mortgage. Then Congress changed the tax rules, and today, millions of Americans have “home equity” lines. Banks are losing $30 billion a year on these products, and untold thousands of families stand to lose their homes to foreclosure. Is this another example of a law’s unexpected consequences? Nope. This outgrowth of the Tax Reform Act of …
Creative Financing For Uncle Sam
August 23, 2010Check the national debt clock: Our federal debt is $13.3 trillion, next year’s budget is $1 trillion in the red, and we have unfunded commitments for Social Security, health care and other programs as far as the eye can see. Is the United States already insolvent? Yes, according to a recent Bloomberg column by Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff. After comparing the government’s obligations with its expected future …
Seeing The Forest, Losing Sight Of The Trees
August 20, 2010A tall, handsome white ash tree shades the east side of our Vermont home. Its golden-brown autumn foliage contrasts with the reds of the sugar maples around it. Its ramrod-straight trunk reminds me of a favorite baseball bat, also ash, that I swung as a boy. This tree should outlive me by many years, but it probably won’t. Every ash tree in eastern North America — an estimated 7.5 billion …
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