POST PUBLISHED INJune, 2009
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  • Congress considers new limits on Health Savings Accounts

    June 29th, 200903:45 PM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    We have blogged recently about the advantages of Health Savings Accounts. HSAs not only benefit the account holder, they help hold down health-care and insurance costs in general. So now Congress is thinking about, well, putting more constraints on HSAs. Go figure. From the "The Wallet" blog of the Wall Street Journal: Proposals in the Senate ...

  • Savings rate jumps to highest level in 15 years

    June 26th, 200910:59 AM ET
    By Mark Biller
    In the June editorial, I wrote that consumers were sharply adjusting their spending/borrowing/saving habits. Here's the proof, from this report on May incomes: "With the boost to incomes, the savings rate rose to 6.9%., the highest in 15 years." Unfortunately, the "boost to incomes" referred to was primarily due to one-time stimulus checks ...

  • Delaying gratification

    June 25th, 200908:40 AM ET
    By Mark Biller
    The New Yorker magazine recently ran an article on the researcher behind "the marshmallow experiment." I think we've mentioned this in SMI before, but for those who aren't familiar, the experiment consisted of giving a preschool child a single marshmallow with the instruction that they could ring a bell at any time and eat it, but if they could wai...

  • 'The American public is growing concerned'

    June 24th, 200910:01 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    The citizenry appears to be getting increasingly apprehensive about the growth of government spending and the Obama administration's intrusions into the private sector. From MSNBC: As the young Obama administration spends trillions of dollars in its effort to turn around the nation's economy and revive the U.S. auto industry, the American p...

  • Maximizing income from CDs

    June 19th, 200911:35 AM ET
    By Mark Biller
    James Stewart of SmartMoney has a counterintuitive strategy for investing in CD's (certificates of deposit, not the musical variety). Instead of buying longer maturities in order to get slightly better yields, he thinks savers should currently be shortening their maturities. In this environment, I have a suggestion that bucks the conventional wi...

  • Health care: The 'public plan' would become the only plan

    June 18th, 200909:38 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Scott Harrington, a professor of health-care management and insurance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, takes issue with a central claim of the emerging Obama health plan - namely, the idea that private companies would "compete" with a new government-backed health insurer, thus offering consum...

  • The 'mountain of cash' on the sidelines

    June 17th, 200909:19 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    The Los Angeles Times' Money & Co. blog examines whether money sitting on the sidelines in money market funds will flow back into stock funds, helping to fuel an extended bull run. The conventional wisdom, backed by historical research, says it will. In a research report on Monday, Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private ...

  • Everything you ever wanted to know about mutual funds - 2009 edition

    June 11th, 200909:24 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    I guess you could call me a data nerd. I like to pore over charts, graphs, and tables. And such things are abundant in the Investment Company Institute's just-released 49th edition of the Fact Book on the mutual-fund industry. (ICI is the mutual fund trade association). I realize that information on such things as "Characteristics of Mutual F...

  • Media giving a free pass on jobs numbers

    June 10th, 200909:28 AM ET
    By Mark Biller
    A new turn of phrase has been cropping up in recent discussions of U.S. jobs and unemployment. "Saved or created" is the new catch-phrase for the Obama team as they explain that the stimulus is doing what it is supposed to do. The only problem is, those "saved or created" jobs figures are pure fiction. Totally made up. And while it's a ridiculous ...

  • The things that aren't yet happening - and why

    June 05th, 200909:33 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    This week's de facto nationalization of General Motors is part of a growing chain of government actions giving pause to business decision-makers and long-term investors. In a Forbes column (written before GM's announcement), Thomas F. Cooley, dean of the Stern School of Business at New York University, says government overreach is to bla...

  • Mortgage refinancing advice from a founding father

    June 03rd, 200909:09 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    "A penny saved is a penny earned," advised Benjamin Franklin. Or to put it not quite so memorably: "Cutting expenses produces the same budgetary result as earning more money." Actually, because income today is taxable (something old Ben didn't have to worry about), cutting expenses can actually produce a better bottom-line result than earning more....
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