
Should Financial Advisors Criticize Capitalism?
Financial advisors today find themselves in a major ethical dilemma: Should they represent their own monetary interests before those of less-sophisticated clients? Or, should they mention, as history has repeatedly shown, that the larger financial system contains more built-in major risks that cannot be hedged and can destroy years of accumulated

Is Your Financial Adviser Working Against You?
Most businesses value their customers, but inherent conflicts-of-interest in the financial services industry unfortunately prove this is too often not true. Here’s why: The daily business in financial services is selling financial products, often without regard to fees and overall costs of the investment. Too often, this means more expensive

How Neo-Conservatism Affects Investors and the Financial Services Industry
Very few industries are as blatantly anti-customer as the financial services industry. And for good reason. Basically, the financial service industry is bi-furcated into two very separate operations that, when they work together, are anti-consumer, while simultaneously being pro-banking and pro-corporate. In everyday life, too many individual investors are routinely

The GOP’s War Against Retirees
As millions of Americans remain concerned about whether they will have enough money to fund their retirement, they can remain assured that the GOP is intent on making these post-working twilight years as difficult as possible. While retirement once had an appealing ring to it over 50 years ago, that

What’s the Connection Between TBTF Bank Arrogance and the TPP?
At first glance, the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was drafted by corporate lawyers and lobbyists, and the arrogance of the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks may seem like unrelated events. But what if this arrogance hinted at a building confidence that average people worldwide would now be more accountable to corporations

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies: Here Are the Public Enemies of Individual Investors
Being an individual investor today is tough. Not only do you have to suffer through increased market volatility, a low-return environment, worrying about job security and whether you will get a raise, but now there is another new source of concern: your financial services industry trade association. While the vast

Banking with the Felons
If the media and financial services industry ever needed more evidence about why investor confidence in the financial system is so low, they do not have to look far. The U.S. Justice department today said that six banks will be forced to plead guilty to price fixing and anti-trust violations

Anatomy of a Financial Fraud—BNY Mellon’s Currency Manipulations
Financial fraud is a large, profitable business, but you would never know that reading the financial press. That’s because banks and investment firms perpetuating these frauds, aka “perps” on “Law and Order,” are so ingrained into the nation’s financial services fabric that criticizing them is verboten in the mainstream financial

Fool’s Mate for Individual Investors
Fool’s mate happens in chess when a player, often a novice, is boxed into a position where any action leads to defeat. That’s the case for individual investors today as evidenced by news stories involving two of the nation’s largest financial institutions. Taken together, these events involving JP Morgan, with
Financial Journalism’s Objectivity Problem
Objectivity in the media has always been a very debatable and contested issue even among the most experienced professional journalists and academics, but so far those discussions have centered on everyday beat and political reporting, and not financial journalism. That’s a mistake because financial journalism today, especially as it is