- 16,000 Readers Shared Their Experiences of Being Told to ‘Go Back.’ Here Are Some of Their Stories. NY Times.
- New Inequality Data Is a Gift to Campaign Sloganeers. Barry Ritholtz.
- Josh Hader’s Fastball Is Baseball’s Most Mysterious Pitch. FiveThirtyEight. I find baseball to be the most boring sport to watch but the most fun to read about.
- Harsher Punishments Lead To More Suspensions For Black Kids. Futurity.
- What Senator Hawley Gets Wrong about American Identity. CATO. Probably a good time to point out that I think more Democrats and left-leaning people should read CATO stuff.
- Toddlers Can’t Truly Answer “This or That” Questions. Futurity. Although don’t think recency bias goes away fully as we grow up!’
- I don’t think anything newsworthy happened at the Mueller hearing, but if you haven’t yet, please read the 6 or 7 page executive summaries in the actual, public Mueller report here. If nothing else, it will allow you to smugly ask your fancy dinner party friends if they’ve actually read the Mueller report.
Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 19 July 2019
Should You Go for an MBA?
Last month I took a look at a question with some relevance to me personally: should I buy a new car? In a similar vein, this week I’d like to take a look at a question that a lot of my peers are currently facing, and one that I faced myself a few years ago. That is, I’d like to take a look at whether going back to school to get an MBA is worth it or not.
This is an example of a cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analyses can aid our decision-making in a lot of situations. They can be used to figure out:
- which R&D project a company should devote resources to
- what price to buy a factory for
- whether you should make an investment in your own education
The basic idea behind a cost-benefit analysis to see if an MBA is worth it is 1) measure the total costs of getting an MBA, 2) define a baseline against which we will measure the “MBA bump”, 3) measure how much we can beat this baseline by, by getting an MBA, and 4) somehow account for the timing of these costs and benefits.
Continue reading “Should You Go for an MBA?”Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 12 July 2019
Lots of different topics this week– investing, Mueller, AOC, minimum wage law. If you have to pick one, read the AOC interview at New Yorker.
- Should You Take the Annuity or the Lump Sum? Of Dollars And Data. HT Barry Ritholtz.
- If I Had Five Minutes to Question Robert Mueller. Lawfare Blog.
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Presidential Race and Trump’s Crisis at the Border. New Yorker. Highly recommended.
- How U.S. Tech Giants are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State. The Intercept.
- Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration. SSRN. One of several recent-ish papers that have changed my mind on the economics of minimum wage hikes. I now think there’s pretty good economic evidence that increasing minimum wages is a good idea in most places. “Our findings provide direct empirical evidence supporting the monopsony model as an explanation for the near-zero minimum wage employment effect documented in prior work.” HT Tyler Cowen.
Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 5 July 2019
Really great article from Barron’s this week on an upcoming 401(k) rule change. My take: this change is designed to help insurance salesmen at the expense of retirement savers. Happy Fourth of July!
- Hedge Fund Hold’em. “We find that hedge fund managers who do well in poker tournaments have significantly better fund performance.” HT Tyler Cowen.
- Annuities in 401(k)s Won’t Solve the Retirement Crisis. Here’s Why. Barron’s. HT Barry Ritholtz. I totally agree with this guy, quoted in the article: “John Voltaggio, a managing director at Northern Trust Wealth Management, which has $294.2 billion in assets under management, argues that individual retirement accounts and 401(k)s are already tax deferred, so it’s better to buy an annuity in a taxable account.”
- Why Many in China Oppose Hong Kong’s Protests. NY Times. HT Tyler Cowen, again.
- Putin Doesn’t Care About Economic Growth. Project Syndicate. HT Cowen, one more time.
- George Soros and Charles Koch team up for a common cause: an end to “endless war”. Vox. Wonderful!
- Justin Amash on Trump, impeachment, and the death of the Tea Party. Vox.
- American Concentration Camps, Then and Now. Foreign Policy In Focus. HT Juan Cole.
Financial Mad Libs: How To Recognize and Ignore Them
The online media ecosystem is filled with all kinds of financial news. Quarterly earnings reports, Fed watching, political commentary, early retirement planning, etc. Much of this content is time-wasting at best, and actively harmful to your financial future at worst. But one type of online article that is particularly irksome to me is the Financial Mad Lib. Financial mad libs are automated content (written at least partly by a machine) that use publicly accessible information to stitch together a simple story about a company or economy.
Continue reading “Financial Mad Libs: How To Recognize and Ignore Them”Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 28 June 2019
- Democratic Debate Ignores Illegal Immigration’s Cause: No Visas. Cato Institute.
- How China Really Sees The Trade War: Xi Still Believes He Has The Upper Hand. Foreign Affairs.
- The Fed is doing something new: listening to low-income workers. Vox.
- If Only Turing Was Alive To See This. Slate Star Codex. Machines pretending to be humans pretending to be machines pretending to be machines– awesome!
- The Law That Makes It Easy to Go to War with Iran. New Yorker. As a veteran it drives me nuts that Congress has ceded its national security responsibilities to the President.
What Happens At Your First Financial Adviser Meeting?
So, you’ve done your homework, you’ve researched financial advisers, you’ve been reading the LWM blog, and you’ve made the decision to call up Luther Wealth. What actually happens during that first financial adviser meeting?
Continue reading “What Happens At Your First Financial Adviser Meeting?”Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 21 June 2019
Two of my favorite investors chat this week! Great stuff. Also an opposing take on my support of stock buybacks.
- MIB: Jonathan Stein, founder and CEO of Betterment. Barry Ritholtz. My two favorite investment companies (besides Luther Wealth!) chatting about the industry. Enough said!
- That was then, this is now. Tyler Cowen. Comparison of fugitive slave laws in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the current refugee situation at the Southern border.
- The Economist Who Put Stock Buybacks in Washington’s Crosshairs. New Yorker. A counterpoint to my contention that stock buybacks aren’t evil.
- Does Trump Have the Legal Authority to Demote the Federal Reserve Chairman? New York Times. Yeesh.
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Is The New Healthcare Rule A Sly Stimulus Program?
Last week, President Trump announced a change to federal healthcare rules which will affect employers that offer Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs). HRAs are vehicles which employers fund with tax-free money for an employee to use to purchase healthcare. Before this recent rule change, HRAs were not allowed to be used to purchase health insurance on the individual market. Starting in 2020, employers will be allowed to fund HRAs instead of offering group insurance policies to their employees.
Continue reading “Is The New Healthcare Rule A Sly Stimulus Program?”