This debt ceiling nonsense appears to be a manufactured crisis, which could and probably will be resolved pretty easily, and the best approach for all of us is to remain invested in our long-term portfolios.
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March has been a wild and wooly month so far, with high volatility continuing to roil the global stock markets and central banks continuing to put pressure on bond markets. But the most interesting story of the last couple of weeks — and the one that’s sparked the most conversation with clients — is sudden turmoil in the banking industry.
The last month has been close to the wildest ride of my professional life. I have to rank it right up there with my experience of working with my clients and the world in the days following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. I don’t say that lightly. It dawned on…
In this short series (see the Introduction), I lay out the four key categories of work that we do on behalf of our investment management clients — four kinds of activities that are difficult for folks without our training and experience to do for themselves. I hope that this series…
Whenever markets move far enough & fast enough to draw the attention of the non-financial press, investment advisors start to get a few more phone calls than usual. The US markets (stocks and bonds both, unusually enough) have been acting very strange lately — these “up 3%, down 4%” swings…
It’s hard to avoid hearing the rumbling sound coming from Wall Street over the last couple of weeks. Even news outlets that don’t normally mention market news have spent at least a few minutes on the wild ups and downs – okay, mostly downs – of the major indexes. And…
A college classmate wrote me an email recently, asking my opinion about the state of the world, and the markets, in the current political climate. Since the election there’s a nagging voice in my head saying that the money I’m investing is just going to go away on account of…
Yesterday, in a surprise move, the people of the UK voted to leave the European Union, and Prime Minister Cameron was more-or-less forced to resign. Markets around the world had been rising for the last few weeks, as it looked to most observers like the vote would go the other…
Quick: Without looking at your investment account statements, or Googling for the data, how did the American economy and stock & bond markets really do in 2014? As recently as November, the vast majority of us thought that the economy was in dire shape. About 45% of American voters went…
