Tax Simplification That Really Is One of the the biggest misnomers coming out of Washington is the idea of “tax simplification,” where Congress purportedly makes it easier for all of us to fill out our tax returns by adding several thousand pages of new rules, rates and lists of things we can and cannot deduct […]
Smartphone Addiction? Have you ever wondered how often the average person interacts with his or her mobile device? As it turns out, the mobile research firm Dscout, Inc. has the answer. According to its statistics, the average person taps, pokes, pinches or swipes his/her personal phone an astonishing 2,617 times a day. It adds up […]
Defaults Down the Road When it comes to municipal finances, we may have entered the calm before the storm. You can go to the MuniNet Guide, which describes itself as the “hub for state, local and municipal research,” and find detailed historical statistics on the bankruptcies of small municipal utilities and special purpose districts, cities, […]
Deficit Funding Many were alarmed when, on June 5, the good people who run Medicare and Social Security released a report that said that the Medicare program will become insolvent in 2026 and Social Security will face a similar fate in 2034. The Medicare projection is three years earlier than the previous report, while the […]
Churning at the Top Index investing is boring, right? This seems especially true with the large cap indexes like the S&P 500, which includes big permanent, stable titans of the global economy. Not much changes from year to year, decade to decade. Or does it? In actual fact, the S&P 500 added and deleted three […]
The World’s Most Polluted Cities Let’s say you’re a global tourist and instead of looking for ancient ruins, five star restaurants or sun-splashed beaches, your goal is to spend your time in cities ravaged by pollution. Where would you look? Beijing citizens have a cynical slogan: “Don’t trust air you can’t see,” but the city […]
Flattening Curve The best indicator of a future recession is not perfect, and doesn’t provide an exact time or date, but economists have found that an inverted yield curve can be a warning sign of a downturn to come. A what? The yield curve is a map of the yield of bonds from very short […]
Healthy Earnings – For Now Professional investors are constantly trying to figure out whether the U.S. economy is healthy or sliding toward a recession. The most important tea leaves they read are actual corporate earnings vs. the earnings estimates provided by Wall Street analysts. Surprises on the upside are generally considered to be positive signs, […]
The Cost of Waiting The median retirement portfolio account balance for persons age 56-61 is just $25,000—which is obviously not enough for a healthy retirement, and suggests that many Americans followed less-than-healthy savings habits. In fact, this amount could have been accumulated simply by saving $6 a month in a 60/40 portfolio from 1980 to […]
Mega Cash Returns There wasn’t a lot of fanfare when Apple Computer announced that it would commit $100 billion of the excess cash it had laying around to buying back its own shares. This may be because, as you can see from the chart, the company has made a quarterly habit of committing enormous sums […]
