Like John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, whom he admires, Mr. Bernstein views Wall Street as a largely parasitic enterprise that flourishes at the expense of ordinary investors. “You are engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the financial services industry,” he warns in the pamphlet. “Every dollar in fees and expenses you pay them comes directly out of your pocket.” He recommends using basic, low-cost index funds whenever possible.
.. The nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute puts the proportion of baby boomers at risk of running out of money in retirement at 40 to 50 percent.
Thomas Piketty Is Right Everything you need to know about ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’
Piketty likes to describe the distribution of income and wealth concretely, and not in terms of summary statistics. He looks at the proportions of the total claimed by the top 1 percent (sometimes also the top tenth of the 1 percent), the top 10 percent, the next 40 percent, and the bottom half. (He labels the 40 percent between the top decile and the median as the “middle class.” There is an element of oxymoron in a middle class that lies entirely above the median; but I suppose this usage is no worse than the American habit of describing everyone between the clearly rich and the abjectly poor as being in the middle class.)
.. About 60 percent of the income of the top 1 percent in the United States today is labor income. Only when you get to the top tenth of 1 percent does income from capital start to predominate.
.. The recent surge of extreme inequality at the top of the wage distribution may be primarily an American development. Piketty, who with Emmanuel Saez has made a careful study of high-income tax returns in the United States, attributes this to the rise of what he calls “supermanagers.” The very highest income class consists to a substantial extent of top executives of large corporations, with very rich compensation packages.
No Accounting Skills? No Moral Reckoning
One of the less sexy and thus forgotten facts about the Italian Renaissance is that it depended highly on a population fluent in accounting. At any given time in the 1400s, 4,000 to 5,000 of Florence’s 120,000 inhabitants attended accounting schools, and there is ample archival evidence of even lowly workers keeping accounts.
.. Every level of Dutch society practiced double-entry accounting — from prostitutes to scholars, merchants and even the Stadholder, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange. Painters regularly depicted merchants keeping their books
.. A cultural ideal was set. For the next century, it became common practice for public administrators to have portraits of themselves painted with their account books — sometimes with real calculations in them — open, for all to see.
.. The explosion of data-driven journalism should also include a subset of reporters with training in accounting so that they can do a better job of explaining its central role in our economy and financial crises.The explosion of data-driven journalism should also include a subset of reporters with training in accounting so that they can do a better job of explaining its central role in our economy and financial crises.
Michael Burry Profiled: Bloomberg Risk Takers
“Bloomberg Risk Takers” profiles Michael Burry, the former hedge-fund manager who predicted the housing market’s plunge. He forecast that the bubble would burst as early as 2007, and he acted on his conviction by betting against subprime mortgages. The former head of Scion Capital LLC was profiled in Bloomberg columnist and bestselling author Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short”.