A populist movement called Occupy Wall Street was born out of frustration over a decade’s long trend of growing wealth and income disparity between the very rich and the rest of the country. The anger is focused at corporate leaders on Wall Street and also political leaders in Washington. Congressional approval ratings are at historic [...]
Would you believe that just 10 years ago, Congressional approval ratings hovered around 65%? Today, partly due to the way the debt ceiling debate was handled over the summer and the failure by the SuperCommitte that came out of that discussion, approval ratings have sunk to near single digits for our elected Congress members. But [...]
The European Debt Fiasco has dominated headlines in the last few weeks, so we wanted to provide some perspective on the potential outcomes and how they may affect your investments. The Road Ahead The debate centers around the relationship between the strong and weak economies using the Euro. Because the Euro is made up of [...]
As we pointed out in out our post on the cost of health care, getting healthcare costs under control is by far the number one thing we need to do for the long term fiscal health of our nation. The Cleveland Clinic is bucking the ever increasing cost trend with some inspired strategies. As their [...]
The government announced this week that Social Security recipients will receive a 3.6% Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) to their benefits this year. This comes after two years of no COLA due to inflation being too low. The last increase was in 2009 when payments increased by 5.8%, largely due to the peak in energy [...]
In a previous post, we discussed the current under building of residential housing units and how the longer that goes on the more demand for new home construction builds. A similar situation is occurring with our vehicle fleet in this country. Karl Smith writes about this post at Modeled Behavior. In discussing the significance of [...]
When it comes to investment markets, determining “The Fairest of them All” depends not just on where you are investing, but also on the initial conditions. We’re going to look at two different time periods to get a sense of the attractiveness of three primary investment areas – Cash, Bonds and Stocks. For cash we [...]
As we saw with our last post, residential construction is far and away the biggest economic problem for the US right now. So it only stands to reason that the economy isn’t likely to get back to full strength until residential construction is doing better. We also need to understand how much stronger housing may [...]
This is a good look at some major components of the US economy over the last 16 years. There are a few insights that are particularly meaningful in understanding why overall job growth has continued to be disappointing. Two of the areas show strength since the bottom of the recession in 2009: Exports and Business [...]
Recently we’ve been asked how we can be confident about investing when the world seems so uncertain. It’s because we’ve been through rough times before, which helps us understand that short term losses are not an indication of long term returns. Below is a chart showing a composite of all of our clients’ returns starting [...]
We’ve created a few documents that may assist you in sorting and gathering your financial data.
We’ve created a few documents that may assist you in sorting and gathering your financial data.
