Our Preamble
The purpose of our blog is to provide ethical and endlessly curious views into the world of money and investing. Hopefully, as you read our blog posts, you will increase your knowledge about the use of money, improve your investment results, and reduce the risks and costs associated with the use of money. Our commentary is not crafted to support any political agenda, but will comment on the potential consequences of both current and projected actions of our Government (and others) on the economy, investments, and the efficient use of money.
We are neither focused on the individual investor, nor riveted on the professional. We will strive to deliver highly evolved commentary, fully digested concepts and rational projections in plain straight forward language that is easily palatable and useful to all.
We also strongly encourage all well-reasoned and civil-tongued readers to comment, question, and enlighten us with their knowledge and experience. Persistent synergistic discussion has the power to enrich us all.
Sincerely,
Art Zaske
President and Founder
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by Art Zaske on May 6, 2010
The European Sovereign Debt Crisis has taken hold of the markets in the last several days. And this is a real concern for investors everywhere. We are taking this situation very seriously.
First of all, some background. For decades, Greece has not balanced its government and municipal budgets and their sovereign debt (the debt floated by the government) has grown dramatically while their ability to service the debt has shrunk. Greece’s national debt is about $400 billion Dollars or about 113% of GDP (the size of their economy). Greece has an overly large portion of their workforce working for the government at all levels. The Greek public sector is about 40% of the economy. To put that into perspective, we will offer a loose example …one could say that you have three private sector workers working to support two public sector workers. And this just cannot work economically. The demonstration of this is that Greece’s government deficit was almost 15% of GDP in 2009.
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by Mike LaFontaine on May 3, 2010
Does the small cap asset class make up a sufficient portion of your stock portfolio? If not, you may be missing out on a crucial segment of the market, as highlighted in the Wall Street Journal article “Small Caps Loom Large.” While many financial commentators refer to the past ten years as the “lost decade”, they are doing so based on the lackluster performance of popular benchmarks such as the S&P 500 Index or Dow Industrial Average. During that same decade, the small cap asset class performed much better.
While Wall Street’s biggest stocks have lost ground since the decade that began Jan. 1, 2000, small-capitalization stocks have soared. The Standard & Poor’s 600, a small-stock index, gained nearly 100% during the period, producing an annualized return of 7.1%. The large-cap S&P 500, by comparison, fell nearly 18%, representing a loss of almost 2% a year. — WSJ Article
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