Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
NEW YORK – The roughly 750,000 people who have arrived in Europe by sea in 2015 make up just a small part of the 60 million people displaced by war or persecution – the largest number in recorded history. Europe has experienced a mass influx of migrants before; some 700,000 refugees entered the European Union…
Gold, the favored investment of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and the old man at the post office who invited you over to see his industrial-size canned bean supply room, is down for the third straight year. Since peaking at “So many crazy fearful people” levels in 2011, the price of gold has fallen by 45%,…
People across the country will pop bottles of champagne at midnight tonight to celebrate the new year. The question is, how much is the government raining on your New Year’s parade with champagne taxes? The Wine Institute has a list of the excise taxes on sparkling wines in each state. If you’re celebrating New Year’s…
The idea behind asset allocation is simple: when one market struggles, it’s OK because an investor can jump into another that is thriving. Not so in 2015. In fact, if you judge the past year by which U.S. investment class generated the largest return, a case can be made it was the worst for asset-allocating…
It’s now readily apparent that we’re in the midst of a new wave of college student protests. From the ConcernedStudent1950 movement that led to the ouster of University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe to the Million Student March that spanned 110 campuses and called for a debt-free education, campuses across the nation are witnessing an…
Marguerita Cheng, a certified financial planner and CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth, has a client in the Washington, DC area who makes $450,000 to $600,000 a year but lives paycheck to paycheck. He spends a lot of it on keeping peace with his ex-wife. Related: Guardian readers: US middle class is ‘living from one…
The Senate is heading toward a battle over Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) “Audit the Fed” legislation, giving the GOP presidential candidate a long-desired floor fight. Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) — who said he was acting on behalf of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — set up a procedural vote on Paul’s legislation for Tuesday,…
Well this is both embarrassing and deeply telling. In what appears to have been a gesture of goodwill gone haywire, McDonald’s recently teamed up with Visa to create a financial planning site for its low-pay workforce. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the thing seems to have been literally incapable of imagining of how a fast food employee…
In one of the best-telegraphed moves in history, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee has voted to raise the Federal Funds interest rate by 0.25%. The tiny rate hike is significant only because the Fed has kept the rate at 0% since 2008, part of its effort to keep the economy on life support in…
What else is there to say… Despite an initial disappointment in stocks, once Janet started speaking, traders started panic-buying… coz everything is awesome… Best 3 days since October… Panic-Buying NFLX as soon as Yellen started speaking… Oil dumped and stocks pumped post-Yellen… (it looks like the move was all pegged on her jawboning beginning at…