One of the most common educational props in the financial planning world is something known as the Callan Periodic Table of Investment Returns. The table is constructed in various ways—either with annual returns, or monthly returns—but the result for those shorter time periods is always the same and vividly illustrated. As you can see from [...]
One of the bellwether indicators of the health of the U.S. economy is automotive sales; when Americans are feeling confident and financially secure, they are more inclined to buy a new car than when they’re pessimistic and financially strapped. The last time we experienced a recession, back starting in 2008, auto sales fell from well [...]
We don’t yet have a clear report card on how well-educated America’s students have been this school year, with so much remote learning during the pandemic. But there is a wealth of statistics about how America’s educational system compares with other countries. The National Center for Education Statistics examines between 58 and 61 different educational [...]
Are you ready to get back on a luxury cruise? A surprising number of people are answering “yes.” According to the the cruise ship market updates on CruiseMarketWatch.com, post COVID-19 sailings will begin, industry-wide, on March 1 of this year, and the cruise industry will resume its operations at roughly 50% capacity, based on advance [...]
You’ve probably heard speculation that the pandemic lockdown measures, which enforce social distancing and reduce income for millions of Americans in service-related and other jobs, will result in a higher suicide rate. The data, of course, is not in yet, but there are some potential clues in the historical suicide data that has been collected [...]
The changes in Social Security benefits and taxes for 2021 were a bit controversial. Benefits will rise 1.3% this year, which is not expected to allow beneficiaries to keep up with increases in the cost of living. Meanwhile, the tax withholdings have risen faster than inflation; for 2021, workers will pay a 6.2% Social Security [...]
Conventional economics tells us something that would seem to be obvious: when the government creates more money, there is more money available to buy things, and therefore the prices of things rise—and we get inflation. For some reason, this logical sequence of events seems not to be happening today. The amount of money in the [...]
The U.S. Postal Service has announced the new stamp collection that it will issue in 2021—and there are a total of 63 new designs on display. You can see all of them at: https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1117-usps-announces-upcoming-stamps.htm. The stamp collection includes ten new stamps that feature photographs of American flowers, a photo of a Colorado Hairstreak butterfly, eight [...]
The financial media took a brief break from predicting everything that will happen in 2021 (don’t laugh; it’s their yearly habit) to bring us the engaging story of how masses of small amateur investors managed to bid the share prices of three largely-unprofitable companies—GameStop, AMC Entertainment Holdings and Blackberry—up nearly 1,000 percent, collectively. GameStop's stock [...]
You might have read that people who were forced to put their social lives on hold due to the coronavirus adopted dogs and cats in record numbers last year, wiping out the population of these popular animals in shelters. As it happens, this was a bit of an exaggeration. Shelter Animals Count's national database calculated [...]
