pensions

I heard this about Bell, California on the car radio this morning. The sums involved are absolutely astronomical for a town of 37,000.  This may be an extreme case but it far from isolated. Hundreds of residents of one of the…

Here's a video with Michael Mauboussin talking about his recent piece for Legg Mason called "Untangling Skill And Luck." Here, he talks about trying to resist the classic temptation to be a closet momentum investor who runs and…

According to the Federal Reserve, money market fund holdings of households has declined by about $380 billion since the end of 2008. (According to AMG, all money market mutual funds—institutional and retail—have posted net outflows of about…

This is a question I have been struggling with since the sovereign debt crisis began.  So let me run a little of it by you.  This may be half-baked but I would love some comments. In a perfect world, we would have full employment…

Links on the pensions bailout now wending its way through the US Congress and other links from finance, the economy and technology.

New York is one of the states at highest risk of default and budget cuts are coming. However, for now, those cuts will be limited to service cuts, dismissals and furloughs. Public sector pensions remain an intractable issue that will move…

Remember absurd books like Dow 30,000 or Dow 36,000 or the eponymous Dow 40,000? In 2008, I labelled them "Five Books not to buy." Well somebody must be buying them because Dow 40,000 is implicitly what pension funds are expecting…

Peter Boone and Simon Johnson have just written a post "Greece And The Fatal Flaw In An IMF Rescue," at Baseline Scenario which outlines three scenarios for the Greek economy going forward. True Fiscal Austerity... We…

As Irwin Stelzer argued in a recent opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero seems to be an admirer of Charles Dickens's character Mr. Micawber. When asked what he plans to do about…

Most of us have about 20 years to secure our retirement - from our mid 40s to our mid 60s. That has been an absolute disaster for my generation, with inflation-adjusted returns on a global equity portfolio being down about 23% over the past…