While Congress fiddles with new laws aimed at preventing another foreclosure crisis, the one we’ve already got is burning out of control. Some of the new regulations make sense, such as cleaning up the appraisal system. But the government is failing to address the ongoing effect of lingering home price deflation, which is as bad as ever in many regions.
There is a glaring error in the math commonly used in the investment industry to illustrate comparative performance of stocks, bonds and other vehicles. It’s so overlooked that even some of the representatives that companies send out to explain and promote their products are unaware of it. The culprit is average annual returns, and the flawed way they are used in marketing materials for financial products.
The Fed, and our government, have been trying to extinguish the stubborn economic wildfire of the past several years by smothering it with money. The latest uptick in the unemployment rate makes clear that the tactic has failed to fix the jobs crisis, with good reason: instead of lending to businesses and supporting entrepreneurial activity, banks are stuffing much of the extra cash into their mattresses to beef up their balance sheets.
Gold’s role as a hiding place from inflationary government spending is reaching a fever pitch. As the perceived value of paper currencies erodes, people increasingly want the real deal.
Yet many individual investors who think they own actual gold could be in for a shock because what they own is a pretty good promise, but definitely not the real deal.
Many of the nation’s nearly one million financial industry professionals may have been too busy to notice or were lulled into thinking that the recently enacted Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill was mainly aimed at the big guys on Wall Street—the ones who were too big to fail or too greedy to be believed.
The nation’s 35,000 or so independent investment advisors expect increased regulation to bury them under a ton of new paperwork, but I’ve stumbled upon a much bigger problem that could drive some independents out of business and leave unsuspecting investors out in the cold. The problem is becoming more apparent as the ranks of independents swell and broker dealers, on whom we depend to execute our transactions, compete for bigger slices of the pie, in some cases offering multi-million-dollar bonuses to jump ship.
Some investors let their political views cloud their financial judgment. Advisors can help keep profits ahead of partisanship.
An investment advisor in the nation's capital expects to encounter a lot of politics in his daily rounds. For most of my three decades in financial planning here, I've kept politics out of my business and kept clients focused on the bottom line.
Advisors who relied on cut-and-paste solutions instead of true planning have some mighty unhappy clients.
The crumbling of Wall Street institutions coupled with the wealth carnage of the past several years has left most investment clients bewildered and unhappy, an embarrassment for the investment profession but also an extraordinary opportunity.
Investment professionals in the U.S. need to fix conflicts of interest or end up like the Brits, under government's thumb.
The 2008 meltdown and the recession have upended the financial services industry, leaving a lot of clients feeling so burned that a growing number are taking the perilous step of going it alone. Although there is plenty of blame to go around, the core problem has been the system by which most investment professionals are trained and paid--by the companies whose products they sell.
For-profit health insurance has undermined our economy and society. It's time to try something old.
If you want to know what went wrong with our health care system and the best way to fix it, all you have to do is look back a few decades to a time when health care was a community concern, considered as essential as any public utility. It should be again, not just because it makes sense but also because it's the most profitable way to go.
