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How Three Neighbors Got Gas

March 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I live out in the country. Among my few neighbors is a man we like to call “Mr. Mow-it-All.” This guy has the most perfect lawn you will ever see. He mows religiously when the grass is green. We see him almost daily out there on his zero-turn John Deere riding mower, keeping his lawn looking like Pebble Beach.

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Why You Should Oppose the Keystone XL Pipeline

March 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

There is one reason why you should oppose the proposed $5.3 billion Keystone XL Pipeline. And it has nothing to do with “green religionists,” as The Wall Street Journal calls the opposition in today’s paper.

Instead, it has everything to do with a foreign oil company using U.S. government power to force Americans off their land in the name of “eminent domain.” It has everything to do with putting a 78-year-old grandmother in jail, pepper-spraying protesters and using other bullying tactics that would make the Mafia proud.

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The Death of Small Banks in the US

February 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The US government is going to kill the small banking industry in the US. The irony is hard to miss. It was not the small banks that threatened the financial system in the crisis of 2008. Yet they will bear the brunt of the regulatory costs imposed in its wake. The end result will be that US banking assets will collect into the hands of even larger banks.

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Laws Tie Moving Companies in Red Tape

February 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In 2004, Maurice Underwood was just a man with a van.

When he made the decision to start his own moving company, Underwood was running an established small business in Reno, Nev., providing home cleaning services. A moving business was a natural next step, he thought, after he noticed several of his clients inquiring about moving services.

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S&P On the Kill List

February 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

“Paybacks are a bitch,” as they say.

What was Standard & Poor’s thinking back in August 2011, when the ratings agency took the Red, White, and Blue’s AAA rating away? A rating the most powerful government in the history of the world had held for 70 years. S&P downgraded long-term US debt to AA-plus. That score ranks lower than over a dozen governments, including Liechtenstein’s, and is level with Guernsey’s and France’s.

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Plus Ça Change (Plus C’est La Même Chose)

November 9, 2010 by Leave a Comment

This past week provided an excellent example of this old French saying, which translates somewhat inelegantly into English as: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.� The US mid-term elections may have resulted, as expected, in a large victory for the Republicans, who now control the House of Representatives. But notwithstanding some grand headlines in the press, this is highly unlikely to change current US or global economic and financial market trends.

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Daily Show Interview: Elizabeth Warren on the “Hacked at� Middle Class

October 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Elizabeth Warren — Harvard Law School Professor and Special Advisor to the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — appeared on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show earlier this year beating the drum for Wall Street reform.

From her perspective, banks have gotten the cops, regulators, off the beat in order to sell predatory credit cards, car loans, and home mortgages for huge profits and bonuses, while also taking on ever-increasing risk… of the sort that results in financial crisis.

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The New Commandments, Part 2

August 12, 2010 by Leave a Comment

The SEC’s budget, or appropriated funding as it is known, was $906 million for FY2008, having risen 11.5 percent annually since 2001. Investor complaints however, have barely increased. From 2001 to 2007 their annual growth was just 1.6 percent.

According to a Rand Corporation study of investment advisors and broker-dealers registered with the SEC, the combined total of these grew at an annualized rate of just 3.4 percent over the five years 2001 – 2006, but this growth rate was skewed by some 700 hedge funds that subsequently deregistered after the study’s end point; excluding these the annualized growth would shrink to just 2.5 percent. All of the growth has come on the investment advisor side, and these are typically very small operations compared to broker-dealers.

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The New Commandments, Part 1

August 12, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Most Americans don’t know it, but the financial industry may be the most highly regulated sector in the economy. Because each new rule passed by FINRA, the SEC, or the five national banking regulators unquestionably works to the good of the hapless investor or depositor, none may be removed and only more may be added.

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Supposed to be Standard, More Often Just Poor

May 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Rating agencies have rightly shouldered much of the blame for the financial crisis, and yet the world still looks to them for guidance on sovereign debt. For example, the Euro, which has now dipped under $1.30, owes part of its lost value to recent credit rating agency (CRA) downgrades of Greece, Portugal and Spain. These countries are clearly mismanaging their national budgets, but given the recent history of CRA blunders it feels a bit ironic to trust them in particular to tell us when a country’s in trouble.
 
From Fund Strategy:

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