When’s the last time markets reacted positively to anything happening in Greece? Last week, just 10 days after Greek voters voted against a resolution that would have required stiffer austerity…
Big Board Floored
The Big Board is not so big anymore. A decade ago, it accounted for 80% of stock trades. Today, it accounts for 20%. There are also far fewer publicly traded…
How to Retire Early – Part Two
In part one of “How to Retire Early,” we focused on the need to reduce expenses and control debt. Doing so can create the foundation for a retirement plan by…
How To Retire Early – Part One
How would you like to retire early? Maybe 62 is a good age or maybe you’d like to retire at 60 or even 55. But unless you’ve won the lottery,…
What Yellen Should Have Said
The question reporters should be asking now is, what did the Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee do for two days last week? The statement it issued based on its…
Central Bankers: Masters of the Universe
Earlier this month, along with our usual dire observations about an economy that has come unhinged, I noted that the world was not coming to an end. On closer inspection,…
Economic Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is “a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from…
Stock Market Continues to Set Records, But Why?
Let’s take a simple quiz and answer the following multiple choice question. The stock market is hitting new highs because: Corporate earnings are at an all-time high. The economy is…
Habitat for Inhumanity
The idea was logical enough. Reduce interest rates, making housing more affordable, which would produce a recovery in the housing market. The housing market was at the heart of the…
Bet You Can’t Count to a Quadrillion
When someone uses “quadrillion” in a headline, you know you’re in for a bit of an alarmist rant. We’re talking 1,000,000,000,000,000, which, stated another way, is a thousand million million. …