When Paul Ehrlich’s obituary appeared a few weeks ago, it came and went without much notice. But during his lifetime, he was enormously influential. By training, Ehrlich was a biologist, but he was most well known for his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. It opened with this dire prediction: “The [...]
Productive bubbles
In an interview a little while back, the technology investor Peter Thiel drew an uncomfortable comparison. Today’s frenzy around artificial intelligence, he said, parallels the tech stock bubble of the 1990s. To illustrate his point, Thiel pointed to Amazon. By any measure, it’s been an [...]
The net of it
Last week the government released its monthly employment figures for February. The results weren’t great. Payrolls declined, and unemployment ticked up. These numbers square with other downbeat data, including a recent uptick in bankruptcy filings. Another worry: Oil prices have been rising, a [...]
A less taxing retirement
A popular joke about retirement is that it can be hard work. That’s because financial planning is like a jigsaw puzzle, and retirement often means rearranging the pieces. In the past, I’ve discussed two pieces of that puzzle: how to determine a sustainable portfolio withdrawal rate and how to [...]
Lessons from Lehman
Before its collapse in 2008, Lehman Brothers had been one of the most prominent investment firms in the United States. But after 158 years in business, what caused it to fail so suddenly? In a word: complexity. Lehman had been involved in the securitization of mortgages, a process that resulted in [...]
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