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 […]
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 […]
A Better Place A recent global survey of more than 18,000 adults in nine countries asked a simple question: “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?” As you can see from the graphic, the most optimistic country, regarding the future, is Sweden, and […]
Better Conversation-Starters Sometimes our social interactions seem to happen by default, and we don’t get much out of them. Consider the stock greeting: “How are you?” What information are you likely to get when you ask this tired question? Tired answers, like: “Busy,” “fine,” “okay,” or “good.” And what did you learn from that? How […]
Electronic Personhood Did you hear that the European Parliament has proposed to grant “personhood” status to intelligent machines (aka robots)? If you don’t believe it, here’s the exact language: “At the least, the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons responsible for making good any damage they may […]
The Long Reach of the IRS You probably don’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for a U.S. citizen named Meghan Markle, who is about to tie the proverbial knot with Prince Harry of England. But an article in the Wall Street Journal notes that Ms. Markle, and other American citizens who marry foreigners, […]
The Trade War that Isn’t—Yet When most of us hear talk about something described as a “war,” we intuitively recognize that there could be very unpleasant outcomes on all sides. Wars have one thing in common: there is seldom a clear-cut “winner” amid the damage and destruction. So when President Trump declares a “trade war” […]
