The Truth About the Economics of Investment Help

It seems to me I have already cleverly mocked the Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report blog. I think I said something about how the author doesn’t actually talk to wealthy people so much as talk to people who talk to wealthy people, or at least talk to those who claim to talk to wealthy people. Then again, maybe that was the Times’ Wealth Matters blog. It’s all a blur to me now.

The latest installment of the Wealth Report doesn’t merely talk to people who claim to talk to rich people, it rehashes an article on Reuters whose author talked to people who claim to talk to rich people.

The post, a little confusingly entitled "Do Millionaire Investors Get Better Deals?", is about how financial firms are now more interested in the investment business of sub-millionaires. This is a change from a few years ago when, we are told, they concentrated their efforts on bigger game.

Read more »

The Money Culture War

Yesterday’s New York Times carried a column worth reading by David Brooks. It is a little confused, even by the standards of Times columns, but the gist of it is a call to arms for a brand new culture war, this one over money.

I’m all for that.

Brooks starts out by recalling a centuries old idea.

The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.

This was a theory invented for, and more or less exclusively applied to, the fall of the Roman Empire. But don’t let the fact that it’s long since been cast aside by historians distract you. Brooks thinks we’ve gone soft.

Read more »

House Price Recap

It’s the last Tuesday of the month, and that means it’s S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index Data Release Day. This month’s dollop continues the recent upswing we have seen in the past few months, so is not very newsworthy. (According to official media sources, to be newsworthy it must either be a change in direction from the month before, or be down. Ideally both.)

In case you haven’t seen the numbers, which is likely, I’ll pass along the highlights. The 20-city composite was up 1.6% for July. That’s three up months in a row. The index is now up a not inconsiderable 3.6% since April.

Of course, that gain is dwarfed by the loss that went before. From July 2006 to April 2009 the index lost 32.6%. This little uptick leaves us 30.2% below the peak. And we are still down 4.2% for 2009.

Read more »

Numerical Fiction that Didn’t Take

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.

Read more »

Non-Lessons Not Learned

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."

Read more »