Last Friday a dandy bit of numerical fiction hit the wires. I thought it was inflammatory and misleading on an issue of great national importance. On the other hand, I was looking forward to pointing out what a crock it was.
So you can understand my disappointment when it got only limited play and was more or less gone and forgotten by the weekend. Oh well.
As a consolation to myself, I’m going to write it up anyway. This won’t cure the letdown, but it may make me feel a little better.
The Reuters story had what I thought was a can’t-miss headline. "No Health Coverage Tied to 45,000 Deaths a Year". How could that not be the lead story for every Saturday paper in the country? Admittedly, for many blue-state types in the media it may have had a certain dog-bites-man aspect. But still, I would think that a dead body every 12 minutes would make great copy. I guess this is why I am not an editor.
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There was a pretty good post over at WiseBread yesterday on how if a credit card company forgives some of what you owe, what was forgiven is income 
you have to pay taxes on.
On the one hand, this is a point worth repeating because it seems to surprise most people. On the other hand, the post neglects to mention an important exception, and, moreover, feeds into the belief that this is an irrational fluke of the tax code. It isn’t. It makes sense.
You owe Credit Card Corporation (CCC) $5000. Realizing you are unlikely to pay them back in full, and now regretting lending you the money to begin with, CCC agrees to settle the debt for $2000 cash. You sell your PEZ dispenser collection on eBay and send them a check.
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It is time once again to check up on the wonderful world of personal finance bloggers, conveniently packaged into this week’s edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance. Hosted by Taking Charge, a CreditCards.com blog, and edited by one person with an introduction by another, this week certainly gets points for production value.
Narrow Bridge Adventures offered up a primer on trading stocks on margin 
which was about 75% correct. At least the author makes it clear that he has never done this and doesn’t ever intend to. But I am growing tired of bloggers writing posts on topics they don’t know much about as if they did. Other novices are likely to be misled into doing something foolish.
On the other hand, a blogger who claims to be an amateur, Kyle at Amateur Asset Allocator, posted on How To Invest In A Low-Return Environment, i.e. the environment we are in now and expect to be in for a while. Besides the basics of watching out for fees and taxes, Kyle hits the nail on the head with what may be the most important investing advice of the year: "lower your expectations."
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As I wrote on Friday, lists of lessons we have learned from the current economic troubles have been enjoying a vogue lately. A dim view of my fellow humans prevents me from being so optimistic as to believe that we are going to emerge from this fiasco meaningfully wiser. But I do have a list of lessons that we could learn from recent experience. But probably won’t.
In the best case scenario, regulators are just as smart and capable as the people they regulate. And, just to be clear, best case scenarios are rare. Many of the complaints about how the Fed, SEC, et al. blew it by not foreseeing and preventing the Wall Street meltdown are unfair. If the thousands of people making seven figures at meltdown ground zero didn’t see it coming, why would we expect the hundreds of government employees watching them from the outside to pick up on it?
25 years is not forever. Amongst my many brilliant theories is this: especially in the realm of culturally significant business phenomena, if something has been going on for more than 25 years people will mistake it for a permanent always-has-been-always-will-be thing.
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The Great Recession began, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, on December 1, 2007. But it didn’t become Great until September 15, 2008. That’s the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and when what might have been a garden variety slowdown became an all-out panic on Wall 
Street.
Now that the GR seems to be abating, and on the occasion of the first anniversary of the meltdown, journalists, pundits, and even bloggers have spent a lot of time lately summarizing the lessons we have learned from the experience.
Phillip Moeller at US News & World Report gave us 6 Money Lessons of the Great Recession. The first is that "the experts are often wrong." Apparently many used to think that the term expert meant an omniscient seer of the future. Moeller also tells us that "everything is negotiable."
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Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
September 25, 2009 1:30 pm | 
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