I have put off discussing the debt ceiling for two reasons. First, because these economic issues are inherently political, and I promised not to discuss anything political this year, since I don’t like doing it and was tired of having to do so for the last few years of the economic crisis. Second, the market…
Has our society gone bipolar? As I understand it, people who suffer from manic depression, now called bipolar disorder, experience episodes of extreme mood swings from clinical depression to extreme elation. In the most serious cases it is all extremes, there is nothing in the middle. I think this describes our societal situation pretty well….
I’m not sure how it happened, but someone has caused a rally in the bond market. Commodity prices have been dropping, although not as fast as they should. Stock prices have been falling faster than they should, and bonds are rallying. The yield on the ten-year Treasury has dropped from 3.5 percent to just below…
It is always hard to tell when a market has gone from being just a little maddening to becoming a full-blown bubble, but we are starting to see some telltale signs. One of those signs is the classic market bifurcation. Over the last year, everyone has done well on an absolute basis but some have…
Over the years I have written a great deal about the various problems in my industry. I have discussed the flawed structure of the retail brokerage world, the lack of training of the vast majority of “financial advisers,” the layers and layers of fees, and the conflicts of interest. I also have discussed the psychological…
