It’s been an unusual week in the bond market, and not necessarily in a good way. This has many investors questioning the value of bonds, which is understandable. Bonds are supposed to be the “safe” side of a portfolio, but they’ve struggled in recent years. Arguably, the drama we’re seeing in the [...]
Easy choices
For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European monarchs used a financial instrument known as a tontine to help finance their governments. Tontines were first developed in the 1650s by an Italian government worker named Lorenzo Tonti and were similar to annuities: In exchange for a [...]
Protecting against a new type of financial theft
Recently, a fellow—let’s call him Tom—contacted me with a distressing story of financial fraud. Tom first noticed there might be a problem when he spotted a larger-than-average withdrawal from his checking account. The payee was a 529 college savings plan. But because Tom and his wife—let’s call [...]
Defending against inflation
The Open Kitchen is an old-time restaurant that’s been a fixture in Charlotte, North Carolina for 75 years. Among the memorabilia lining its walls are menus from years gone by. Those old menus provided David Enna, a financial journalist, with a laboratory for examining the long-term effects of [...]
A new milestone
Some milestones are auspicious. Others are not. This week, the Treasury announced that the federal government’s debt had topped $40 trillion for the first time. Government debt is nothing new, but the problem is now of more concern, for two reasons. First, the scale has grown. An apples-to-apples [...]
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