Will the reverse mortgage surge in the coming years? We think so. Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge wrote yesterday, “Nearly eight years into an economic recovery, nearly half of Americans didn’t have enough cash available to cover a $400 emergency. Specifically, the survey found that, in line with what the Fed had disclosed in previous years. Forty-four percent of respondents
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There’s been a lot of talk about the low level of VIX lately. Just this past week Zero Hedge commented on VIX saying, “As Nasdaq melts up faster than Bitcoin, perceived equity market risk has utterly collapsed. VIX just hit 9.92 as NASDAQ hit 6,100 (note the most recent low is 9.39 from 12/15/06 and all-time low at 8.89 on 12/27/93) What is
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By Mike Landfair When you get to be my dad’s age, it is easy to look back on a well-lived life and have some regrets regarding these 7 financial decisions. His biggest regret is embodied in the saying, “I earned lots of money when I was young and burned it all on wine, women, and song. The rest I just wasted.”
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The best time to think about your retirement is always the present. Perhaps it’s only a few years away, but then again even if you’re young, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s too early to prepare. What if an accident forces you into early retirement and renders you unable to provide for your family? You surely get the
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As there name suggests, tangible assets, such as gold or real estate can actually be touched and this tends to gives people a more authentic sense of ownership. Intangible assets tend to be perceived as more abstract, and can be 1) completely intangible, such as bitcoin or domain names or 2) claims to tangible assets such as a stock certificate,
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THE HISTORY OF PAPER MONEY – PART 6: THE GOLD STANDARD In this series, we rarely get far into the twentieth century because it’s hard to have historical perspective on events that are that close to our own time. But today, we’re going to have to roar into the latter half of the twentieth century to show you just how
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Over the last few episodes, we’ve seen the intellectual underpinnings of paper money slowly come into place. But having nebulous ideas about why paper money might be good is one thing, getting people to really believe and to trust in it is another matter entirely. And so today we’re going to tackle the development of the one thing that brought
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THE HISTORY OF PAPER MONEY – PART 4: LAY DOWN THE LAW Last we left off, paper money doctrine was just starting to be established with people like Nicholas Barbon beginning to explore the radical idea that gold and silver didn’t have any inherent value, only the value we gave them. Which leads inevitably to the argument that in using
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In the last episode we got to the ad-hoc unofficial beginnings of paper money. This week, we’ll look at some of the rogues’ gallery that really created the intellectual argument for adopting paper money in some more official way. When we last left off in England in 1640, the first unofficial banknotes were starting to circulate, but in the early
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There is little truth to the idea that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from the east. There’s another marvel that the book about his travels popularized. It was an idea, a radical one which is perhaps best summarized by the very title of the chapter that discusses it. For in the book of the marvels of the world or
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