International Investing

Let’s say you file a claim with the insurance company after a disaster. Instead of getting a check, the insurance company tells you that it would prefer NOT to pay the claim since that would put the insurance company in a precarious financial position. What would your reaction be? Some banks are confronting a similar [...]

Remove the part about “Who Don’t Own Stock” and you’ve got a legit story. Another silly rule designed to prevent conflicts makes analyst guesses less trustworthy.
You’ve almost certainly seen it: Every time an analyst on CNBC comes on to talk about a stock there is The Screen. We find out whether they own the stock, [...]

Great John Carney post at Dealbreaker.com. The cure is worse than the problem:
“Of course what’s really happening here is that the hedge fund managers are taking the fall for the collapse of Bear, and the even broader reverberations from that, including the controversial merger, the bailout and the credit markets’ woe,” law professor Larry Ribstein [...]

How can doctors get fat off the tax payer if the tax payer has a choice? MD lobbyists are preemptively shoring up their bottom line under the guise of safety. Add this to the existing list of readymade excuses to steal from the tax payer whose greatest hits already include, “it’s for the children,” and [...]

The headline quote from Gordon Gekko from the 1987 movie Wall Street show this has been common knowledge for decades: Fund managers cannot beat the index after fees.
According to this Bloomberg article, consumers are finally starting to catch on:
When Fidelity Investments opened the Magellan Fund in January to new shareholders for the first time in [...]

Previously a $5 move would be front page news. Now it’s just to be expected:
Crude oil for July delivery rose $5.07, or 3.9 percent, to settle at $136.38 a barrel at 2:48 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil reached a record $139.12 a barrel on June 6. Futures have doubled in 12 months [...]

From Whiskey & Gunpowder:
China added more to global economic growth in 2007 than the U.S. That’s the first time a country other than the U.S. has contributed more to global GDP since at least the 1930s. This little history-making milestone typifies a growing list of Chinese economic achievements… and American shortcomings. “On [...]