The U.S. Tax System: How Did We Get Here? Pt. 1, the Early Years

My Thoughts on This: I was taught long ago that no one has a responsibility to pay more in taxes than is required. It’s up to you and I to figure out what is required. So we push the envelope and either through good fortune or because we really know what we are doing, we …

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J.P. Morgan Weekly Market Recap – March 11, 2011

The original plan was to post these every week. Some of you like to time the market and this report from J.P.Morgan is perhaps the best summary to help your decision making:

Investable Assets to Hit $80T by 2017

My Comments: When I saw this number, I had to reach far into my psyche to actually figure out how many dollars we’re talking about. And I’m someone who follows astronomy blog sites from time to time and am used to thinking in terms of billions of light years. It takes some time to get …

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Obama Planned Big Budget Cuts All Along

My Comments: I’m trying to decide if the author of this article is fundamentally to the left of the Obama administration and therefore critical of his lack of fire in promoting new revenue sources for the country, ie higher taxes, or whether the writer is critical because virtually everyone on the right is critical, regardless …

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Panel: No Need To Sweat The End Of 30-Year Bond Rally

My Comments: All of this reinforces my advice as a financial advisor for my clients to use the programs from Purcell Advisory Services. Yes, this is a commercial, but if you have money to invest, and are not happy with where it is or the folks allegedly looking after it, click on this maze image …

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Corporations Are Sitting on More Cash Because There’s More Cash To Sit On

My Comments: This is one of the reasons why so many people expect the markets, especially the stock market, to do well in 2013. One of the uses for all this cash is to buy back stock, which in turn reduces the supply, and if you know a little bit about economics, if you reduce …

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Is the Bond Bear Market Finally Here?

By Joyce Hanson, AdvisorOne The broad high-quality bond market began 2013 on a sour note with a sell-off, posting its worst weekly performance since March 2012, as U.S. Treasury prices declined on news of a fiscal cliff resolution, LPL Financial’s bond expert reported Tuesday. While LPL doesn’t believe the sell-off is the start of a …

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Bullish Bets Rising In Commodities

My Comments: For some years now, there has been a slowly growing recognition that the investment world has more than two basic elements. We’ve always thought stocks and bonds. Sure, there were always outliers but they were never given the same formal recognition given to stocks and bonds. Today, many of us refer to the …

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The Smartest Kid In Summer School

My Thoughts on This: Many of us in the investment world are wondering, as we always do at the beginning of every year, how this new one is going to unfold. After all, we get paid to help our client’s accounts grow, not shrink. So we read the tea leaves like everyone else and come …

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Doll Predicts New U.S. Stock High, Slow Economic Growth

My Comment: I first met Bob Doll some 25 plus years ago when he was a regional representative for what I recall as Oppenheimer Funds. He made intelligent presentations and clearly had his act together. Over the years he has appeared in various high profile positions within the industry and has always been pretty close …

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