Here’s a great idea from Amity Shlaes: Suggestion: Postpone the tax talk, and, instead, push the candidates on bailouts. Force them to declare whether they consider themselves to be “Austrian” or neo-Keynesian.” Let them say […]
Read morePeople are always writing about the best places to to buy homes, retire, get a job, etc.. Only one problem, thought. These are always backwards looking, and things change. In this case, they changed […]
Read moreTwo new reports came out today indicating that the U.S. economy is weaker and more fragile than we thought. Productivity dropped for the second consecutive quarter, and hiring slowed. It appears that a weak global […]
Read moreFinancial innovations often involve complex quantitative models that can be used to perform difficult computations, like valuing complex derivatives, and to enable great new products and capabilities, like passive index fund investing, hedging interest rate […]
Read moreAfter writing about retirement savings and spending for the past couple of years, I thought it was about time to take a look at what others have written on these subjects; here is what I […]
Read moreRay Dalio is the founder of money manager Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund advisor on the planet. One of Bridgewater’s claims to fame is the “all-weather portfolio” that is designed to perform reasonably well […]
Read moreTony Robbins has a terrific new book on winning the financial game (“Money: Master the Game”). The highlight of the book is a series of interviews with famous investors, in which Robbins extracts valuable insights […]
Read moreNational Markets: Since the recession began, we’ve said that residential real estate markets would not recover until the homeownership rate (the percentage of households owning the home they live in) fell to the 64 percent […]
Read moreIn two recent speeches Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen has highlighted issues of personal finance. In each case she referred to results from the Fed’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the most recent version […]
Read moreOne of the major stories of recent years is that of rising income and wealth inequality, whereby the rich are supposedly getting richer and the poor poorer. A primary piece of evidence for this is […]
Read moreIn order to better understand the state of household finances, the Federal Reserve has recently conducted a special survey called the Survey of Household Economics and Decision making, or SHED. This is in addition to […]
Read moreHousing is traditionally a very volatile sector of the economy. It tends to lead the business sector (indeed, some economists like Ed Leamer of the UCLA Forecasting Group say that housing IS the business cycle). […]
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