892 articles · page 36 of 45
The unprecedented decline in housing prices suffered as a result of the 2008 recession is still significantly affecting retirement wealth, but it also has great far-reaching implications for the future of retirement planning. The reason: home ownership is the main engine for generating retirement wealth for most Americans. Housing wealth exceeds money held in retirement accounts,…
The latest legal battleground between federal and state laws regarding the legal use of cannabis is now being waged on television. Specifically, it concerns an ad for a cannabis vaporizer, Neos, which was scheduled to air on KMGH, an ABC affiliate in Denver. Yet while Colorado has legalized marijuana for medical and recreation use, ABC…
At first glance, mentioning the financial service industry and psychopaths in the same sentence seems insulting, illogical and controversial, especially to financial professionals and investors who, for different reasons, must hold the financial industry in high esteem. Linking these two terms is especially sensitive since the common view is that psychopaths are generally considered criminally insane. And…
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 wealth in a single major…
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 or inappropriate products are sold…
As the number of part-time workers continues, more workers are now becoming freelancers to make an income. But this large shift comes at even larger price: freelancers do not get benefits, including the all-important 401(k) plan and its critical employer match. According to a CNBC report, over 53 million Americans are now freelancers, comprising up…
“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” — Stephen Decatur, U.S. Navy captain, (1779-1820) The United States may always be right, but sometimes people decide they want to watch the nation from another location. That seems to be the case…
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 victimized by financial professionals who…
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 concept is now as foreign…
Economic inequality, wage stagnation and too-big-to-fail bank dominance are all deservedly critical current topics in the developing presidential campaigns. But what about the role of economic propaganda that still dominates the news and has worked to quash any public education and criticism of the U.S. financial system? Most professional reporters who cover investments and finance…
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 than to their own sovereign…
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 majority of investors do not…
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 in the foreign currency markets.
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 press, such as the Wall…
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 $1.7 trillion in assets under…
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 practiced on TV by the…
The corporate media routinely admonishes violent protests, even as it ignores the undisputed historic role excessive politically-motivated behavior has been in causing fundamental political-economic change. Media coverage of the events unfolding in Baltimore connected with the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man , carry a familiar theme: protestors gather to demonstrate their anger at the unprovoked death,…
Corporate tax evasion reaches a new pinnacle. America’s largest corporations hold themselves out as the paragon of citizenship and patriotism, yet when it comes to doing their biggest civil duty–paying taxes–too many of the nation’s largest corporations are traitors and deserters. Now, it looks like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the $1 trillion-plus agency…
Libertarianism seems like a fresh alternative to the corporate Republican and Democratic parties, but this philosophy justifies greed, rampant individualism and isolationism. This is not a philosophy for a global economy. Yesterday’s announcement that Rand Paul would run for president as a Libertarian candidate was historic. Libertarians are a small, doctrinaire conservative faction that relies…
