Steadfast Finances

 Financial Crisis,Public Awareness         1 comment

One of the better pieces I’ve seen on CNN since, well, the first Gulf War coverage. Goldman Sachs was the number one private campaign contributor to Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign. It’s one of the single biggest contributors to both parties in Congress. So it’s a rare event when a establishment politician like Carl Levin [...]

 Infographics & Chartology,Real Estate         No comments

Image Credit: Chart of the Day Being a chartporn aficionado, it’s hard to not to look at such a chart and wonder if precious metals and real estate markets from the late 1970s/early 1980s will do an encore. Real estate still has a long way to fall, in my opinion as well as many others [...]

 Financial Crisis         No comments

Well said by Michael Lewis on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS… If you had told me in early 2009 that all these big Wall Street firms would be back even bigger and paying big bonuses and essentially socializing their losses but their gains privatized and that the American people put up with it — that’s the incredible [...]

 Economy,Financial Crisis,Infographics & Chartology         No comments

Fairly sobering stuff when forced to visualize the amount of money we don’t have to cover the promises we’ve already made. Guess no one told the “fiscal conservatives” in Congress that it would take the entire world’s GDP plus a few trillion more to meet our total debt and unfunded obligations. (Might help to disengage [...]

 Financial Crisis,Humor         No comments

One of the upsides to having insomnia is you watch all sorts of things you wouldn’t ordinarily watch. Case in point, this humorous quote from an old James Cagney flick One Two Three filmed during the Cold War which couldn’t have sarcastically summed up the Achilles Heel of capitalism and forecasted the financial crisis any [...]

 Banking,Financial Crisis         No comments

One would have thought Michael Lewis’ The Big Short would be the pinnacle of financial post-mortem exams. But his latest masterpiece on Ireland’s financial house of cards poignantly summarizes the “Perfect Storm” effect of behavioral economics: unregulated financial markets, greed for making money trumps fear of losing money, and good old fashioned herd psychology. Most [...]

 ETFs,Index Funds,Investing 101         1 comment

In 2007, the financial crisis and impending stock market crash was nothing but a bearish prognostication. To the chagrin of many, once the stock market was in total free fall, the Feds stepped in with tons upon tons of money to prop up the market, sell billions of dollars in USTs on a weekly basis, [...]

 Financial Crisis,Investor Psychology,Real Estate         1 comment

I speak quite a bit about the dark side of investor “confidence”, and no where is there a better example on the fallout from manipulating investor psychology than the latest Vanity Fair piece by Michael Lewis on the Irish financial crisis. The endless flow of cheap foreign money had teased a new trait out of [...]

 Economy,Financial Crisis,Humor         8 comments

I’ve got just one word for you… just one word… plastics nickels. Nickels are the next bubble: the metal content is now worth $0.07. If you melt it down, it’s worth 7 cents. One of the characters who made a fortune betting on the financial collapse of the system, is buying nickels. So he rings [...]

 Banking,Financial Crisis,Public Awareness         No comments

Only in America! Not only did taxpayers bail out Fannie and Freddie and overpay (still overpaying) the executives, but we’re also paying their legal bills. Kinda like paying the Captain of the Titantic an overly generous salary for ramming the iceberg, rescuing him from certain death, then paying his legal bills after the families of [...]

 Investing 101,Peer to Peer Lending         No comments

Some time ago, I mentioned that P2P lending investors should no longer believe that a peer to peer lending loan to federal or state government employee is a “sure thing” or that government employees can never be laid off. Since then, lots of supporting evidence has manifested. Not only from state governments eying bankruptcy court [...]

 Consumer Education,Economy,Financial Crisis         3 comments

Fascinating interview from NPR’s Deep Reads with Raghu Rajan, University of Chicago professor, former chief economist for the IMF, and author of Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, and the cold shoulders he received after predicting the financial crisis in 2005 at a conference where the main objective was to praise [...]