John T. Reed’s news blog

A Facebook friend asked the following: I would love to see one of your in-depth, unemotional and well reasoned analysis on the value associated with the three different schools your sons went to relative to each other. Columbia being highest ranked, Arizona in the middle, and ASU near the lower end in terms of academic reputation, where would you want your son to go all things considered? I’m guessing cost followed their reputations (with Columbia the most expensive and ASU the least). John T. Reed No one in my family went to ASU. Two went to U of A. My middle...

The heavy bag of coins my wife gave me to figure out what to do included a bunch of foreign coins from the expatriate lives of my wife’s parents and her father’s parents. Initially, I despaired of being able to make heads or tails out of them. Many contain no Latin letters or Arabic dates (Those are the letters and numbers Americans use.) But it was fairly easy to figure out what each and every one was on the Net.For example, one seemed to be Chinese or Korean with a picture of a man on one side and a junk...

I screwed up on part of my effort to convert gold coins and numismatic silver ones to junk silver. In CA, you need to make coin purchases exceed $1,500 per purchase. The reason is CA imposes sales tax on smaller purchases. In Oakland, it is 9.5%. I paid about $30 in tax on my purchase of 66 JFK ’64 half dollars.Further complicating things is that eliminates a lot of coin dealers because they do not have $1,500 worth of the type of junk silver that I want, namely, 1964 JFK half dollars or at least early 1960s Franklin half dollars....

Time and again in recent decades, the stock market was soaring. Why? Because of some stupid bubble like dot-coms or Sub-prime mortgages. Then it would burst costing the investors billions if not a trillion dollars.It’s setting records again. Another bubble? Better performance, not lower expectations Apparently not. Normally, bubbles are manifestations of rising price-earnings ratios. That’s stupid. It means investors are accepting lower earnings per dollar of stock value, not that the companies are doing well.In real estate investing, that is called cap-rate compression. Prices go up because stupid investors start accepting lower rates of return. Why would they be...

The lieutenant and the Jesuit When I was a junior Army officer and my cousin was a Jesuit priest, we got into a discussion at one of my mom’s extended family back-yard barbecues. I was telling him how being in the Army felt like being in the Soviet Union. He said the same was true about the Catholic Church citing them talking out of both sides of their mouths on whether Catholic schools should get federal money (they said they should) and should be told what to do by the federal government (they said they should not).My cousin the Jesuit...