With the market up over 27% from its lows last Friday and lots of positive earnings surprises there is almost a viceral buzz building of people hoping it is a sign that we have hit bottom and things will start to get better. From an economic standpoint this is almost certainly untrue.  While things are [...]

With tax-free money market funds paying well under 1% (Vanguard’s Tax-Exempt Money Market is currently paying around 0.61%),  it is hard to find a place to park cash if you are in a high tax braket.  You can still find high yield savings accounts that pay around 2%, but that interest will be fully taxable [...]

 The March Employment Report is out. This graph from CalculatedRisk shows the job losses from the start of each employment recession of the last 60 years in percentage terms (as opposed to the number of jobs lost). The trend shows that as we have moved away from a manufacturing dominated economy making  job losses less [...]

Over the last 50 years public pensions have gone from negligible equity exposure to averaging over 65% equity exposure with another 10% in alternative investments and only 25% remaining in bonds before the latest down turn. This is going to hit the states and municipalities the hardest over the next 20 years. Be very careful [...]

I just finished reading Chris Whalen’s piece on AIG and the implications leaves me speechless. Here is the gist.  Before credit default swaps came into vogue, insurance companies would create reinsurance contracts with each other.  Reinsurance is simply one insurance company transferring some of its risks to another insurance company. Insurance companies, like banks, have [...]

I have been using Skype for all of my international calling for almost 3 years.  I was coordinating a trip to Europe and discovered that most of my European calls on Skype were around $0.02/minute compared to over a $1/minute from the local telephone company.  When my brother’s family moved to Japan, Skype got even [...]