Congressional Insiders Trade Whenever They Want
October 29, 2010You don’t have to be a corporate insider to run afoul of laws against insider trading, and you don’t need to know any inside information about the stocks you trade. Authorities have gone after journalists, analysts, printers and lawyers, among other non-insiders, for actual or alleged violations. But if you are a member of Congress, or if you work for one, don’t worry about going to jail for using what …
Ponies For Everyone
October 28, 2010Is it wrong to promise a child a pony to get her to calm down before surgery? An anesthesiologist posed this question to The New York Times’ Randy Cohen in a recent installment of Cohen’s column “The Ethicist.” Cohen responded that, unless the anesthesiologist had a stable full of ponies he was ready to part with, it was indeed wrong to make such empty promises. The same lesson applies to …
The First World Series I (Mostly) Never Saw
October 27, 2010The first World Series game I ever cared about was played on a Wednesday afternoon in 1967. The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Boston Red Sox 2-1 in Game 1, behind the pitching of Bob Gibson and the base-stealing of Lou Brock. Not that I saw any of this. I was in my fifth-grade classroom in the Bronx, and Mrs. Yachter — well, let’s just say she wasn’t a baseball …
“Helicopter Ben” Climbs Into The Cockpit
October 26, 2010In about a week, “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke will launch a new assault in America’s war on thrift. The Federal Reserve is expected to begin carpet-bombing our bond markets with cheap cash, without first having defined either an objective or an exit strategy. The Fed’s much-anticipated round of “quantitative easing” will put downward pressure on the dollar and upward pressure on the prices of gold, oil and other commodities. It might …
IRS Fixes A Tax Court Slip-Up
October 25, 2010Tax laws are seldom models of clarity. Sometimes they are more garbled than a software manual that has been computer-translated from Malay to English. Occasionally, however, the law is pretty clear, but the interpretation gets twisted. Every professional tax adviser runs across this situation. A client may find an article on the Internet that says he can avoid taxes by putting all his assets in a trust, establishing a new …
Don’t Like The Speech? Attack The Speaker
October 22, 2010If you don’t like what someone has to say, you can attack his right to say it. That is the approach President Obama and fellow Democrats have adopted when it comes to political advertising by businesses. In his State of the Union address last January, the president openly challenged a Supreme Court ruling that said corporations and labor unions have the right to express their opinions in the pivotal weeks …
Rebecca Pavese in Bloomberg
October 21, 2010Bloomberg, October 21, 2010Rebecca Pavese discusses tax strategies relating to required minimum distributions.
When Mattie Meets Halley
October 21, 2010Awhile back, Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote a pretty little song about a baby and a comet. In Halley Came To Jackson, a father gazes at his daughter in the glow of Halley’s Comet when it appears in the sky above Mississippi in 1910. “He made a little wish while she slept so sound,” the song goes. “In 1986 that wish came ‘round,” when his daughter saw the comet again from …
Shomari Hearn in Chicago Breaking Business
October 20, 2010Chicago Breaking Business, October 20, 2010Shomari Hearn suggests some situations in which it makes sense to withdraw more than the required minimum distribution from your retirement account.
When Bosses Collude Against Their Talent
October 20, 2010Back in the 1980s, Major League Baseball owners were unhappy about having to match other teams’ lucrative offers to free-agent stars. They made what they thought was a gentleman’s agreement to shut down the talent market. It worked, though only for awhile. There were 62 free agents after the 1985 season. Only four changed teams. There was a similarly peculiar lack of demand for top-tier players following the 1986 and …
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