Articles

This month marks the 5th anniversary of one of the scariest events in investment history: the collapse and bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, at the time one of the largest investment banking firms on Wall Street…

If you haven't already, you will soon be hearing alarming reports of the "dramatic rise of Treasury bond rates," and the breathless implication in the articles and on the...

September 16th was Respect for the Aged Day in Japan.  An article I recently read highlighted the importance of physical activity and aging, while featuring a 102 year old...

Every day 10,000 Americans turn 55; it is also interesting that the same number of Americans turn 65 each day.  So, on an annual basis we have 3 million Americans turning 55...

What do the Fukushima Daichi (Fukushima) nuclear meltdown and the Wall Street meltdown have in common? They both demonstrate how really bad decisions are made when politics and emergencies co-occur. The Fukushima meltdown was one of the worst disasters of the late 20th century. The utility operating the plant went bankrupt as soon as the disaster hit. Temporary decisions were made sporadically to thwart the intensity of the event…

There’s a lot of focus on the dividend component of investment returns these days–for a variety of reasons. First, dividends represent money in hand, which is more of a sure thing than stock price appreciation. Many investors still have a wary eye on the 2008 meltdown, and are having trouble convincing themselves that today’s record stock values represent real money in their portfolios…

It is hard to believe that Larry Summers has the inside slot for the next Federal Reserve President. As many may recall, but most do not, Larry Summers played a key role in...

An old question has become new again. You have tax-deferred accounts like IRAs and Roth IRAs, and you have accounts that pay taxes every year on the income they receive. Where do you put different types of assets?…

Are you enjoying this long respite from reading about the European debt problems? Just a year ago the news scared many observers into thinking that the world was on the edge of a deep economic malaise. The last time Europe made headlines, Greece was going bankrupt, France had its pristine AAA credit rating downgraded, Spain was wrestling with unemployment north of 20%, Italy was insolvent and everybody south of Germany was mired deep in economic recession…

Whether you like Obamacare or not, the individual mandate is probably the most intelligent proposal that our government has come up with since the 1960s when Medicare was...

The headlines have been telling us over and over again that the U.S. stock market is achieving record highs, and the not-so-subtle implication is that they have nowhere to go but down. In fact, the “lost decade” of 2000 to 2010 has obscured the fact that, historically, it is pretty common for stocks to achieve record highs

One of the more interesting debates in estate planning circles these days surrounds so-called credit shelter trusts. These are trusts set up as a way to preserve the full amount of estate tax exemption between a husband and wife…