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 [...]
Tariff Worries
Imagine taking dollar bills and inserting them into a shredder. This is how you might think about a concept economists call “deadweight loss.” As its name suggests, a deadweight loss occurs when there’s an irrevocable loss of economic output. Deadweight losses can occur under a variety of [...]
Strengthening Your Financial Defenses
Some years ago, an elderly neighbor came to our door, asking for a favor. She was looking for packing tape because she’d sold her television and needed to ship it out. She went on to say that the buyer, who she’d found on eBay, was in Nigeria. It was, of course, an obvious scam. But for whatever [...]
Strengthening your financial defenses
“Your checking account balance is low.” It’s an alert no one would ever want to receive—especially if you’d just been paid. But such was the message that a friend—let’s call him Ron—received recently. A hacker had gained control of his account and had started to bleed its balance toward [...]
122 years old? Really?
Fraud wears many faces—but perhaps the most unusual is that of Jeanne Louise Calment. For years, the French-born Calment, who claimed to have been born in 1875, was celebrated as the world’s oldest person. By the time she died in 1997, she would have been 122— if she had been telling the truth, that [...]
