02/18/2021
Today Shuli Ren, Bloomberg Bonus season is upon us — time to get the numbers telling us if we still have viable careers. It's an especially dicey period for research analysts at the biggest investment banks. As things stand, they don't need compensation figures to see that their jobs are increasingly superfluous. |
Allison Schrager, RealClearMarkets My first exposure to finance was a high school class on markets where we were required to read Peter Lynch'sOne up on Wall Street. About 25 years later, including many years of studying economics and finance, what we were taught about investing seems crazy to me: that good investing entails picking the right stocks, stocks that will make money. This is wrong because it leaves out one of the major objectives of finance: managing risk. Yet this is how most people think about investing; we teach it in schools and we see it in our culture. A few weeks ago, we cheered on small day traders who, for... |
Antoine Gara, Forbes Michael Burry, the hedge fund investor who built a massive position in GameStop before it became a meme stock on Reddit and skyrocketed, sold his entire stake in late 2020, missing out on an over $1 billion windfall. |
Chris Lee, New York Magazine A Who's Who of screenwriters, producers and streaming service execs are speeding to make the next Big Short about r/wallstreetbets. But is there room for them all? |
Bartley Madden, RealClearMarkets Over the last two years, sustainable or ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investment funds have increased tenfold. During that time, the Business Roundtable strongly endorsed "stakeholder" capitalism, rejecting the traditional notion that maximizing shareholder value should be a firm's exclusive focus. Today, managements and boards are pressured to do whatever it takes to score higher on ESG metrics. Proponents (including the rapidly growing ESG investment funds) say that giving ever more attention to ESG initiatives rings true to the firm's purpose in society. In the old days,... |
Tom Krattenmaker, USA You could have bet your retirement fund on it. Status quo defenders are whipping out that old pet phrase — "job killing" — and its usual variants to malign President Joe Biden's plan to jump-start the country's overdue shift to a clean energy future. The job-killing claim is as specious as it is predictable and shortsighted. If it's jobs we care about — jobs now and jobs a decade and more down the line — a clean-energy future is our best friend. And our worst enemy is runaway climate change. |
Justin Hughes, The Hill Buy American obligations in federal procurements have been too easily circumvented by waivers. |
Tim Worstall, Washington Examiner A good way to understand the United States is to listen to one of the great native sons, Mark Twain. With all this talk about President Biden's national industrial strategy to "build back better," Twain's timely advice is this: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so." |
John Tamny, RCM Back in the early 1990s it was assumed by some of the deep in thought that the dissolution of the Soviet Union signaled the "end of history" of sorts. Supposedly small l liberal democracy of the western kind was an endpoint in the historical evolution of government. It never made sense. And it didn't precisely because human nature wasn't going to disappear with the happy vanishing of the U.S.S.R. and other Iron Curtain countries. Ambitious people make things happen, though not always for the good. Some channel their ambition through the force that is government, which means we'll likely never... |
Robin Hartill, Motley Fool Even if it's been decades since the ink dried on your divorce decree, those marital vows you took can pay off in the form of higher Social Security benefits. As long as you haven't remarried, your marriage lasted at least 10 years, and two years have passed since your divorce was finalized, you can qualify for up to 50% of a living ex-spouse's benefit once you're both eligible to start collecting. |
Suresh Palliparambil, Worth The convenience and ease of use that come from contactless payment solutions are just one benefit, but digital payment solutions and accessibility are an added noteworthy feature that will propel the technology further through consumer and investor interest. |
Axel Weber, Project Syndicate Economic forecasting models have long been notoriously inaccurate in predicting inflation, and COVID-19 has further complicated the challenge. Those who heed current consensus forecasts of persistently low price growth could be in for a rude awakening. |
Richard Moody, Regions Bank |
Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, Charles Schwab Do you and your partner argue about money? Many couples do. Here's a way to keep things under control. |
James Copland, Manhattan Institute Over the last 25 years, the big-ticket plaintiffs' barâ?"whom we at the Manhattan Institute have dubbed "Trial Lawyers, Inc."[1]â?"has formed a symbiotic relationship with state and local officials. The multistate tobacco litigation in the mid-1990s made billionaires out of several... |
Joseph Calhoun, Alhambra Investments This is a holiday-shortened week in the US but there is some important data on tap. Retail sales are expected to show a month-to-month rise for the first time since September. Year-over-year number? |
Joanna Payne, Charles Schwab Scrutinizing your trading losses can help you realize more gains. |
Brian Wesbury, First Trust Advisors |
Liz Ann Sonders, Charles Schwab As quickly as it soared to the moon, GameStop came back down to earth; but the lessons learned are key to turning day trading speculators into longer-term investors. |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Dan Caplinger, Motley Fool Few investors have been around as long as 90-year-old investing legend Warren Buffett. The person many call the Oracle of Omaha remains as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway(NYSE: BRK.A)(NYSE: BRK.B), a company he first started doing business with more than half a century ago. Buffett's lifelong track record has put the power of time to full advantage, and his accomplishments will be hard for anyone to surpass. |
Paul La Monica, CNN Who needs to worry about earnings growth and valuations when you can buy whatever "stonks" Elon Musk tweets about? GameStop, Etsy, Shopify, Dogecoin and Bitcoin are just a few of the investments Musk has boosted. But should investors be cautious? |
Bill Wirtz, Foundation for Economic Education Joe Biden, the current front-runner of the Democratic 2020 field,promises the return of electric vehicle (EV) tax credits. The presidential candidate says that "a key barrier to further deployment of these greenhouse-gas reducing vehicles is the lack of charging stations and coordination across all levels of government." Biden wants 500,000 new charging stations by the end of 2030, thereby incentivizing the use of electric cars beyond the advantages given when buying them. |
Vivekanand Jayakumar, The Hill By having overcommitted to its easy policy stance, the Federal Reserve will find it hard to change direction in the future without creating significant financial market upheaval. |
Sarah Anderson, RCM The Congressional Budget Office has released a new report on the budgetary and economic impact of President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats' Raise the Wage Act. Supporters of the Raise the Wage Act have framed it as giving low-income workers a pay raise, but they're ignoring the actual impact increasing the minimum wage will have on those very same workers. The goal of the Raise the Wage Act is to gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025 from the current $7.25 per house. After 2026, the minimum wage will be indexed to median wages. Tipped workers would also... |
Tom Joyce, Examiner Sen. Mitt Romney recently eschewed Republican orthodoxy and proposed a bill that would establish a child allowance for most parents in the United States. |
Donald Boudreaux, American Institute for Economic Research There are two different ways for you to acquire your daily bread, beef, and beer. Using the first way, you produce each of these goods yourself directly. You spend part of each day growing wheat and milling it into flour, with other parts of each day devoted to raising and slaughtering cows and distilling hops. |
Jimmy Sengenberger, Jimmy at Crossroads John Tamny says we overstate the role of federal loans when it comes to rising tuition. |
Rep. Tom McClintock, WE We are now nearly a year into the most self-destructive social experiment in the recorded history of human civilization. |
Paul Davidson, USA Today Congress should lower the top-income threshold for married couples to receive a $2,800 stimulus check to $100,000 from $150,000 because it would help the vast majority of households make ends meet at significantly less cost to the federal government, according to an analysis by Morning Consult. |
Glenn Hubbard, The Hill Federal assistance to bridges can once again foster prosperity for many Americans, while allowing flexibility across the nation. That assistance offers a rich alternative for "building back better." |
Joakim Book, Am. Inst. for Econ. Research David Attenborough, a well-known BBC film presenter and climate activist, has a fantastic quote about growth and economists. It's so captivating that I suspect it lays at the foundation for ridiculing every sensible environmental comment by economists. The quote reads: "Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist." |
Adam Andrzejewski, City Journal The teachers' union's outsize power comes at the expense of students, parents, and taxpayers. |
Angelo Calvello, Institutional Investor AI that works in the investment world starts by knowing nothing about investing. |
Fabiola Cineas, Vox A race-neutral plan to give young Americans economic security at birth. |
Eric Boehm, Reason.com Further evidence that tariffs simply don't make sense as trade policy. President Joe Biden should take note. |
Susan Dziubinski, Morningstar These heavily weighted names in the Morningstar US Dividend Growth Index are all at least 10% undervalued. |
Scott Grannis, Calafia Beach Pundit Just about the entire world economy is in the grips of reflation. What's reflation? My definition of reflation is when economic activity and... |
Jonathan Lesser, City Journal Texas's disastrous experience is a cautionary tale for the northeast. |
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