My job as critic of personal finance advice is made a lot easier if other writers concisely summarize their points of view in easy to digest and refute bullet points. It gets even better if the other writer is argumentative, taking a neatly delineated position on a question which I can contradict.
So when I saw that Free Money Finance yesterday posted a list of Money Myths, my heart leapt. And I was not disappointed. There were eight myths listed, with bullet point explanations and links to fuller arguments from previous posts. What could be easier?
By my scoring, one of the myths really is untrue, two are so subjective that it could go either way based on interpretation, and five are not myths.
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Today I am going to write about The New York Times again.
I know. I know. I shouldn’t. I promised to stop taking the Times seriously a while back. But I just can’t stay away. Including the Thursday re-run I wrote about it twice last week. I just can’t help it. Moths and flames.
On Wednesday last the Times published Looking Ahead to the Spend-Down Years. I am honestly not sure how to characterize the topic of the article, other than to say it had to do with retirement and money and cited the work of several clueless academics with evidently too much time on their hands.
The piece was illustrated with creepy but eye-catching computer generated images of a man’s head as he aged. This was explained in the first few paragraphs.
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Labor Day Weekend is prime time for big-picture discussions in the financial press. With the cultural end of summer, and the heightened feeling of 
seriousness of the back-to-school and back-to-work season, Labor Day is a good time to review where we are and where we are going. Also, articles on broad topics can be written far in advance so that journalists can take the weekend, or entire week, off.
Thus, The Wall Street Journal recently treated us to a spate of pieces on basically the same topic, the wisdom of investing in the stock market.
Brett Arends kicked off this festival of tea leaf reading mid-week with Why Stocks Still Aren’t Cheap. Then over the weekend we got Is It Time to Scrap the Fusty Old P/E Ratio?, covering some of the same ground as Arends but with a less bearish spin, and Thinking Outside the Stocks, discussing off-beat non-stock investments.
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With a coordination that I am sure both found embarrassing, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both ran stories on Saturday with tips on how to deal with a bout of deflation.
This raises several questions. Do we expect deflation? If so, why? What is deflation, anyway? Why is it so bad? Is the advice from these two giants of the mainstream any good? And what was it about last weekend that inspired them to write about, of all things, deflation?
That’s a long post’s worth of rhetorical questions. So, without further ado, let’s dive right in. Personally, I do not expect deflation in the near term, at least not enough to notice. Whether or not it is expected, or even seriously worried about, in the larger investment community is a harder question to answer.
The WSJ opens its piece telling us that “The markets are signaling that a bout of deflation may be coming.” But the only market indicator cited is a rally in bonds. True, the yield on 10-year Treasuries is down this year, although it is up from where it was at the end of 2008. And yet a rally in bonds is not exactly an unambiguous statement about deflation. The bond market goes up and down all the time. Why is this rally a deflation prediction?
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SmartMoney carried an item the other day about how, according to a new survey, those crazy kids have found another way to act foolishly. They are 
taking less risk with their investments.
The factual basis for believing that younger people are taking less risk is a little thin, a single question on a survey of affluent Americans (Aflo-Americans?) done by Merrill Lynch. Still, it confirms my previously held beliefs and even fits into predictions of the future I made more than a year ago, so I am going to go with it.
52% of those under 34 described themselves as having a low risk tolerance. That is more than either the 35 – 50 age group (45%) or 51 – 64 group (46%). Only the oldest, and presumably retired, 64+ group came in at a higher rate of low tolerance, at 55%.
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My job as critic of personal finance advice is made a lot easier if other writers concisely summarize their points of view in easy to digest and refute bullet points. It gets even better if the other writer is argumentative, taking a neatly delineated position on a question which I can contradict.
Investing, PF Blogs, The Big Picture | Frank Curmudgeon | 
September 21, 2010 2:59 pm | 
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