The news media, in its coverage of the Congressional debate over raising the debt ceiling, has alarmed its readers and viewers with terms like “government default” and “global financial crisis.” But if there is a government shutdown looming in our future, what is the most likely outcome for investors? First, there is no question that [...]
Will Social Security Go Bust? You may have read that the Social Security Trust Fund depletion is projected to occur in 2033, a year earlier than previous projections. This sounds alarming, except for several caveats. First, the projected date of the trust fund depletion has been in the 2035 range for the past decade, so [...]
Every year since 1975, the Social Security Administration has automatically adjusted its benefit payments upward to account for inflation; the goal is for the payments to keep pace with the cost of living that recipients are experiencing. For the past decade, these inflation adjustments have been pretty modest, as you can see in the chart. [...]
You might be surprised to learn that 65-75 percent of the world’s cryptocurrency ‘mining’ (having computers solve complex but meaningless algorithms to be rewarded with a coin) takes place in China. As Bitcoin and other crypto values have soared, so too have the number of would-be ‘miners,’ so many that their furiously active processing engines [...]
There have been reports that so-called “elder abuse” in a financial context is on the rise, costing elderly Americans an estimated $36 billion last year alone. By one estimate, roughly one in three older Americans has been scammed in the past five years—what an official at the Institute on Aging calls “an elder financial abuse [...]
Arguably the wildest consequence of the recent pandemic is the remarkable price boom in the U.S. housing market—which, some might remember, went spectacularly bust in the 2008-9 Great Recession collapse. Today, half of all houses put on the market are purchased in less than a week, often for more than the asking price. One recent [...]
The U.S. investment markets continued to defy gravity in the second quarter of the year, closing out the month of June—and the first half of 2021—at new record highs. This is the fifth consecutive quarter where the U.S. markets posted gains. Everywhere you looked in a diversified portfolio, you saw gains in the second quarter. [...]
Inflation is in the news again, thanks to a recent jump in the Consumer Price Index. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has calculated that the price of a basket of goods and services rose 5% on an annualized basis in May, the largest increase since August of 2008. The inflation rate was 4.2% in April—which, [...]
You probably know that the U.S. stock market has been delivering the highest returns among all developed nations, not just in the last couple of years but over the most recent ten years. But that also means that U.S. stocks have become much more expensive relative to other nations. How much more? One of the [...]
We can probably all agree that 2020 was a unique investment year, with the pandemic ravaging the economy, reducing travel and even removing the normal commute to the office—and at the same time delivering above-average 15.76% returns on the S&P 500 index. But not every company sailed through the pandemic unscathed. Consider New Residential Investment, [...]
