In previous blogs we have discussed appropriate debt levels for nonfinancial companies and for large banks.  What about for the individual household?  Sometimes, households are ‘credit-constrained’ in that they cannot find borrowers to lend them their desired amounts.  In economic booms, like the housing boom that preceded the 2007-2008 crisis, lending standards tend to soften… Read more

Large banks (think of Wells Fargo, Citicorp, JP Morgan and Bank of America) today hold equity capital roughly equal to about ten percent of total assets.  Inverting that ratio we get assets to equity of ten times or leverage as commonly defined (debt divided by equity, instead of assets divided by equity) of nine times. … Read more

In a recent made-for-TV movie actor Richard Dreyfuss plays hedge fund manager Bernie Madoff, creator of one of the all-time great Ponzi Schemes. A Ponzi Scheme, named after an Italian crook of the early 20th century, is a fraud in which a proprietor (like Bernie) accepts money from investors based on a claim to be… Read more

Based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis, the Big Short is a movie about several hedge fund managers who identified cracks in the mortgage market in 2005-2007 and attempted to bet on a collapse in the market for mortgage-backed securities (MBS). In particular these managers noted that underwriting standards on mortgage… Read more

What is the right amount of debt for a particular borrower? This depends on the borrower.  Are we talking about a corporation, a bank, a household, a government entity, or an investment fund?  At a very high level, it seems that some debt can be beneficial, while too much debt can be detrimental.  Sort of… Read more

Asset management is an extremely competitive industry that offers extraordinary wealth building opportunities to those managers who are successful in generating market beating returns, or at least in bringing in large amounts of assets to manage. This opportunity draws lots of really smart people to the business. The problem is that the average performance of… Read more

We have shown in prior blogs how do-it-yourself investors can achieve reasonable investment returns through the use of low-cost highly diversified passively managed funds. How can non-do-it-yourselfers obtain these same benefits? There are financial advisors who specialize in these services, but often not at an acceptable level of cost. Recently, a marriage of technology and… Read more

John Cochrane is professor of finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and is an expert on the theory of asset pricing. You can take (or audit) his free online course through Coursera. In this course he starts out by briefly summarizing the state of the art in asset management… Read more

John C. (Jack) Bogle graduated from Princeton University in 1951 and founded The Vanguard Group, Inc. in 1974. In 1975, Vanguard introduced the first so-called “Index Fund” based on the Standard and Poor 500 (S&P500) stock index. The S&P500 is a market capitalization weighted average of 500 of the largest stocks that trade on the… Read more

In general, we expect that a beginner or novice in a field is likely to be out-performed by a seasoned veteran. We would be surprised if a beginner could build a better house than a skilled carpenter, or if an amateur boxer could knock out a pro. Yet, something like this may be true in… Read more