In my last post I suggested that we can soon say goodbye to the fiduciary standard for investment advisors, and I blamed several Evil Acronyms: FINRA, FSI, NAIFA and SIFMA. Here’s why. read more »

The broad investing public isn’t exactly riveted by the controversy surrounding the so-called “fiduciary standard,” but they should be. To understand why, here’s some quick background, vastly simplified.(1) read more »

Old habits die hard. The most senior folks still active in the investment business started their careers in the late 1960s, forty years after the last financial crisis (the Great Depression) started and thirty years after it ended. Thus, none of us had ever experienced a financial crisis until 2008. It’s not that financial crises are rare or new – as Reinhart and Rogoff have shown,(1) financial crises have been happening for eight hundred years. But they’re new – astonishing, jaw-dropping – to us. read more »

In my last post on this extremely unpopular topic, I suggested that public hostility to the US-led invasion of Iraq is the result of short-term impatience with the outcome of a complicated war and its even more complex aftermath. I could explain why, but since I know nothing whatever about the matter, I’ll turn instead to an expert and let him speak for himself. read more »