Source: Flikr Creative Commons Welcome to my website, especially listeners from News and Views with Roshini Rajkumar (WCCO) and MPR News Presents on Minnesota Public Radio. I hope you'll continue the conversation we began on the radio and in person. I try to write a blog post every day on topics that touch on economics and their relation to current events. (You'll notice the last 10 days have … [Read more...]
Living wills and financial leverage
Source: Flikr Creative Commons The headline in today’s New York Times, “‘Living Wills’ of 5 Banks Fail to Pass Muster,” might have struck some as another consequence of the Supreme Court’s view that corporations are people. Do companies need living wills like individuals do? Not quite. The living wills of which the article speaks are bankruptcy plans mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street … [Read more...]
Retirement saving and the principal-agent problem
Source: Flikr Creative Commons ‘Customers First’ to Become the Law in Retirement Investing read the headline in the New York Times. You’re first reaction might be, “it wasn’t already?” No, retirement planning grew out of the financial intermediaries that already existed in the 1980s, when retirement saving started to change radically. Before the 1980s, the 3-legged stool was the metaphor for … [Read more...]