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One of the largest voter segments identified as being strong supporters of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump is people with a high school education. Here is a rare video that shows their first meeting and how they came to be associated with the Trump presidential candidacy. To see this rare video and the logic behind…
“The business model of Wall Street is fraud.” Or, to put it another way, “The business model of Wall Street is conflict-of-interests.” By far, the most pointed statement made so far in the 2016 presidential campaign (at least, as far as the financial services industry is concerned) has been the single sentence…
It’s no secret that every aspiring entrepreneur focuses on building a brand. For certain industries, this is a valid pursuit. But for the emerging cannabis industry, devoting excessive resources in time and money to build a brand may be a mistake. The reasons: Cannabis is a perishable, crop-by-crop product, and producing the exact clone of…
The Golden Rule is having an impact on the financial services industry. This biblical phrase, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31) has driven discussions about the ethics of reciprocity for over a thousand years, but at many of the nation’s largest financial services firms, this lesson is unknown…
For decades, people concerned about financial reform and protecting individual investors against predatory industry practices have accepted the fact that they must work in a very confined space in order to advance even modest reforms. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has changed that perception. Sanders is an unabashed, long-time advocate of breaking up the nation’s…
Market volatility is increasing. The market is swooning. China is approaching a recession. And your portfolio returns are falling. If you want to boost your returns, here is the best and easiest way. Cut you fees and expenses. Those savings go right into your bottom line and not into your broker’s or fund manager’s pockets. Here…
If there is a winner of the upcoming Power Ball Lottery, they could end up winning over $1.4 billion. And accompanying this once-in-a-lifetime bonanza will be a tax bite that could run as high as $400 million, depending on how the payout is taken, as well as other considerations, such as the winner’s home state…
Democratic presidential candidate made an historic pledge today by promising to breakup the same global U.S. banks that caused the 2007 recession, wiped out trillions in wealth for all Americans, and have been abusing their privileged status for generations. In his speech today, Sanders said: “If a bank is too big to fail, it is…
When you are a master of the universe, you have to make sure your place on earth is secure. That’s why the nation’s largest hedge funds have been pushing the odds, gaming the system, working to get the edge and hedging their bets to get the most bang for their millions in donations to the…
One of this holiday season’s biggest and most timely movie hits is “The Big Short,” an unusual film about one of the most esoteric financial topics ever to be presented to a mass audience on the big screen. There are no car chases, shots of cleavage or explosions in the film, but for anyone who…
An old tale tells the story about a scorpion who wanted to cross a river. Unable to swim, the scorpion asks a frog, who was sitting on a nearby rock, if he could ferry him across the river on his back. “I would do that for you, but how do I know you will not…
The near decade-long battle against adopting the fiduciary standard has been politicized from the start, butyesterday’s passage of the Senate’s Omnibus 2015 $1.1 trillion spending bill delivered a huge package of tax breaks, as well as a provision that barred the SEC from forcing financial companies from disclosing their political contributions to trade associations. This…
Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump has been called many things based on his public and private behavior against fellow Republicans, Syrian refugees, John McCain, the disabled and some women, but we have to thank him for an almost forgotten episode in financial history which has inadvertently shed some light on how the 2000 tech crash…
2016 looks like it will be a rocky years for investors. U.S. economic growth in 2016 was cut to 2.4%, a decrease from a previous estimate of 2.8%, according to a report by Goldman Sachs in September 2015. On a global level, GDP growth was cut from 4.3 % to 3.7% primarily due to a slowdown in China…
The leading trade association of the $16 trillion in assets (as of year-end 2014) mutual fund industry has again shown its distain for individual mutual fund shareholders. In a recent letter to Congressional committee, the president of the Investment Company Institute (ICI), the mutual fund industry’s leading lobbying group, went on record last week as…
Issues can be defined as how they are addressed, as well as how they are ignored. Tonight’s second Republican debate will continue to show the Party’s priorities, as well as what issues they choose to avoid. While taxes, regulation, defense spending and anti-Obama rhetoric are all expected fodder for tonight’s debate, viewers should also take…
In his new book “Reply All,” Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush uses his e-mail correspondence with various constituents to explain his policies, political philosophy and strategy to promote his conservative platform as Governor of Florida. (He served as Florida governor from 1999 to 2007.) But one very important series of e-mail exchanges that readers will…
Coca-Cola, Big Tobacco, Oil and the Need for a Fiduciary Standard. What do all of these things have in common? At first glance, it would seem nothing, but there is a common thread: It’s about levels of deception. In some cases, these are deceptions that have lasted for generations and some that have caused millions…
The more it changes, the more it is the same, is a paraphrase of a French proverb, but in this interesting exchange between Senators and Wall Street executives in 2010, in this case Goldman Sachs, the issues of ethics, fiduciary responsibility, and conflicts of interest were aired for one of the first times in a public forum.
We use our eyes to see the world, but language is what helps shape our perceptions of how we view the world. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in politics. And if you want to twist the way people think about their most immediate surroundings and how they are governed, the Republicans have adopted some tricks that…
