John T. Reed’s news blog

Another useless financial advice column about inflation and retirement: Anne Tergesen’s Wall Street Journal column yesterday. She correctly points out that retirees get screwed by inflation but offers zero helpful advice. She just quotes a guy saying he's "troubled by what [he] sees." . I am troubled by the WSJ offering zero help to readers who will be devastated by inflation if it happens. Pensioners are the group hurt worst by inflation. . Again, I think the problem is stock brokers have no inflation protection to sell that pays them a commission. The solutions are simple: non-USD-denominated assets. They are...

My wife and I saw the movie King Richard today. The basic, true story, is much like another movie we saw recently: RESPECT Both were about African-Americans from relatively low-income families who dreamed of being superstars—and did. RESPECT was the Aretha Franklin story. In that story, the driving force was Aretha herself. In King Richard, the driving force clearly is Richard Williams, the stage father of two tennis GOATs Venus and Serena Williams. Although without the girls buy-in too, their success does not happen. I had a connection to Aretha in that songwriting and performing is a creative exercise where...

The subtitle is “Why progressives ruin cities.” That is a better description of the contents than the title. . I like to reduce it to basic principles. . • Liberals are process oriented. • Conservatives are results oriented. • Liberals see good intentions as a 100% substitute for results. • Liberals glom onto theories which are called ideologies. • In the scientific method, theory is an early step. In subsequent steps, the theory is proven or disproven by testing and empirical evidence. Liberals reject empirical evidence or anything else that would disprove the theory. The theory or ideology is king....

Today’s WSJ says NFL player Kyle Van Noy is a skilled real estate rehab flipper. I was going to check if that was true, but the article fails to give enough information. The key fact that is missing is how much did comparable houses that were not rehabbed go up in value during the same period. Probably about the same. . Hardly any rehab is profitable. Van Noy appears to have spent $320K n renovations to three houses. That is less than the difference between the purchase and sale prices in each case. But A. we do not know the...

Today’s WSJ editorialized that raising the FNMA/FHLMC mortgage limit in high-cost markets to near $1million will cause another subprime crisis. What? I read every book on that crisis and saw the movie and speeches and panel discussions including the people involved. . Raising FNMA/FHLMC limits played NO role in the subprime crisis. Here is the history of the limits. https://www.hsh.com/mortgage/a-history-of-conforming-fanniefreddie-loan-limits.html  The subprime crash was in 2009. In the years leading up to that the limit was raised to $417,000 in 2006 and stayed at that amount through 2016. As its name explains, the subprime crisis was caused by making loans...