Yes your deal is better. My Lexus dealer only washes and vacuums when I bring the car in for service. But as far as washes go in an auto wash place, I think they do a fantastic job and its worth the $480 a year for unlimited cleaning (inside and out).
Charlie - Until you posted that I had no idea you could even get monthly cleaning at a car washing service. But you put a value on something I was receiving that until today I had no idea of its worth. I use the service at least 3X a month which would be $25-30 (based on day of the week you go) but I just never calculated a value. But this service is much better and the car looks cleaner than the automated service I used. Admittedly there are better ones but the one I used to go to was very convenient. I don't know if the MB dealership handwashes the car or puts it through an automated system. But everytime they do it it looks as if it were waxed. They provide a great service in exchange for buying your car there.
BTW - the dealer I took the SL from does not have that free car wash service. But my sales guy wrote down that I can have it cleaned whenever I want if I let him know I need it. He said he'll pick up the SL and get it washed as anytime he gets the chance to drive an SL he takes it. It's not a bad tradeoff for me as he'd leave his car which is a CLS 550. My GL450 and S550 are from the dealer that offers us free car washes and my wife uses the service even more than I do for the GL. She loves that car and treats it like royalty.
The right hand picture is ironically appropriate since it represents all that would be left of Apple if they started paying the taxes that they 'owe', since those taxes are all in excess of the taxes that Apple and all of its competitors pay to the countries in which they are doing business.
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
The bite on the left is maybe overstated, and "legally" only has so much value when you buy the laws. Nobody does business in the Caymans or with Swiss banks due to honesty and ethics.
Apple is being picked on though, it's not like they are the only participant.
Dealing a new blow to Switzerland's historic banking secrecy, Swiss finance officials Wednesday approved a plan that would allow the country's banks to disclose details of their businesses that handle American clients to U.S. authorities investigating offshore tax evasion.
The measure, scheduled for special consideration by the Swiss parliament as soon as early June, would also allow banks to disclose information about employees who were involved in working with bank divisions that worked with American clients who held secret accounts.
Funny that UBS has a Warburg connection, which is also one of the concocters of the Federal Reserve system. Buy your own rules and rule enforcement both.
I agree with you. The USA is run by incompetent Boobs or Corporate plants. Not sure our threats to the Swiss bankers are really being heard. I doubt they really give a RIP. This is the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve. Only fitting they stick it to US big time to celebrate 100 years of screwing the sheep of the USA.
The Federal Reserve is our central bank. Don't virtually all industrialized countries have central banks? Do you favor eliminating or replacing the Fed, or changing it? If so, have you thought through the counsequences? Who would the winners and losers be, in terms of influence and wealth?
The answers to these questions are way above my pay grade.
Yes with both private and government influence. Too little Federal oversight on printing money, that dilutes the money in my pocket. It is quite obvious the QE has helped the stock market, at least temporarily. It has also caused prices to rise forcing the standard of living to go down for most of Americans.
The answers to these questions are way above my pay grade.
I wish I knew more about what they do as well. I just see the end result of having less buying power on a fixed income. That I blame of the Federal Reserve.
You should blame less buying power on the national debt, the war on terror & Obama's free spending. Those have all come together to weaken the dollar. The Fed responds to monetary policy needs as a result of all that, the economic conditions in the country and at the same time tries to help the US export business. Without the Fed's help we'd still be in the doldrums we were in back in the 2007-2009 period. I think they've done a great job and when you see a weak dollar and fed easing you need to move into equities, gold oil etc as they will respond and move much higher. That's exactly what we've seen since the policy of easing took hold.
You should blame less buying power on the national debt, the war on terror & Obama's free spending. Those have all come together to weaken the dollar.
It looks like you know a lot more about the market & the economy than my wife's financial advisers. They told us to get out of equities last Fall, which I did. My last calculation it cost us about $50k. We did buy a couple houses that could make up for the loss.
It looks like you know a lot more about the market & the economy than my wife's financial advisers. They told us to get out of equities last Fall, which I did.
That's because in the past 6 months, the dollar has gotten stronger against other major currencies. The £ is down from about $1.62 in the fall to about $1.50 today and the € is down from $1.37 to about $1.31.
The threats to those Swiss banks are empty threats, ruses to distract the sheep - as the same people who run them run our treacherous FIRE industries and our self-destructive financial laws as a whole. The Federal Reserve scheme is just another example of private gain via public sacrifice. The marriage of untouchable lawless private banks and national finances have many moral and ethical hazards.
Funny how the easing didn't kill the currency. Could be that the mess the nation is in isn't any worse than the mess seen by others. Maybe the real positive of the race to the bottom known as globalization - mutually assured economic destruction.
It looks like you know a lot more about the market & the economy than my wife's financial advisers. They told us to get out of equities last Fall, which I did. My last calculation it cost us about $50k. We did buy a couple houses that could make up for the loss.
IMHO time to find some new advisers. Statistics show that nobody can reliably time the market. Being out of the market for just a few percent of the time can miss big rallys....as we've recently seen. I maintain my asset allocation and rebalance when necessary... an approach that takes the emotion out of things and has been shown to deliver superior results over the long term.
Could be that the mess the nation is in isn't any worse than the mess seen by others.
I suspect you're right, Fin. During one of the iterations of '[enter name of European country] will need a financial rescue in order to pay its bills beyond [enter date approximately 1 month later] and may leave the euro', a Wall Street economist (I don't remember which one and it probably doesn't matter) referred to the US as "the best house in a bad neighborhood". i suspect that is why the dollar has remained as strong as it has.
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
I maintain my asset allocation and rebalance when necessary. . .
That's the same policy I've used for the last 15 years or so, and it has been very satisfactory. I don't go up as much as the truly committed do on the highs, but I go down much less when the drops hit. As I age I put less in equities (110 minus my age) and rebalance once or twice a year. Got nervous a couple of weeks ago and took the winnings and put them in bonds & cash. Now I'm right at 45% equities.
Takes discipline to let the winners pay the losers, but no thought at all. Works for me.
I've heard of the 110 rule.... but, I'm still about 90% equities.. I did invest in an apartment complex when I had a chunk of cash available, but bonds just don't appeal to me....
I did switch to almost all dividend paying blue chips a few years ago... Figured out that I wasn't much of a stock picker...
Here some advice worth following...minimizing costs
Burton Malkiel writing in yesterday’s WSJ explains why the high fees charged by active managers cannot be justified, and why low-cost indexed funds have to be the core of your investment portfolio. Reason? Index funds have far outperformed the average active manager, and at a far lower cost to the investor.
From 1980 to 2006, the U.S. financial services sector grew from 4.9% to 8.3% of GDP. A substantial share of that increase represented increases in asset-management fees.
Excluding index funds (which make market returns available even to small investors at close to zero expense), fees have risen substantially as a percentage of assets managed. In my judgment, investors have received no benefit from this increase in expense ratios.
The increase in fees could be justified if it reflected increasing returns for investors from active management, or if it improved the efficiency of the market. Neither of these arguments holds. Actively managed funds of publicly traded securities have consistently underperformed index funds—by roughly the differential in fees charged.
Passive portfolios that held all the stocks in a broad-based market index have substantially outperformed the average active manager since 1980. Therefore, the increase in fees likely represents a deadweight loss for investors.
Why do investors continue to pay such high fees for financial services of such questionable value? Many may incorrectly judge the quality of investment advice by the price charged. Individual and institutional investors may suffer from overconfidence and truly believe that they can select the best investment managers and earn excess returns, despite historical evidence to the contrary.
Outperforming the consensus of hundreds of thousands of professionals at the world’s major financial institutions is next to impossible. It has been for decades. Over long periods, about two-thirds of active managers are outperformed by the benchmark indexes. The one-third that may outperform the passive index in one period are generally not the same as in the next period. But investors can benefit from low-cost index funds and their exchange-traded cousins.
The lesson for investors is very clear: You can’t control what markets can do, but you can control the costs you pay. The less you pay to the purveyors of investment services, the more there will be for you. The quintessential low-cost investment vehicles are index funds, which should comprise the core of every investment portfolio. The high fees charged for active management cannot be justified.
Couldn't agree more. Outside my 401(K) I'm Vanguard index funds all but the health sector fund and within the 401(K) they're all various types of index funds except for my company stock, which I keep at 4-5% & costs appear low there as well.
I'm not interested in paying brokers or advisors either. A percent or two over 25 years adds up to serious money, at least in my world.
Absolutely. Save 0.5-1.0%/year and see how that changes the total 20 years out. It's major.
I think the thing that opened my eyes was this:
The common rule for retirement is that you can withdraw 4%/year and you won't outlive your money. Since the average advisory fees are often 1% (above the mutual fund fees), that is 25% OF YOUR TOTAL INCOME in retirement, using the 4% rule!
I decided to learn how to manage it myself (even though I'm not yet retired).
I decided to learn how to manage it myself (even though I'm not yet retired).
This can be a very rewarding (pun intended), but be aware that it is time consuming to do right. My wife retired before me and took over about half of our portfolio (we also have a 401K). She has handily outperformed the market, but it represents about a half-time job for her. Since my retirement I spend a fair amount of time doing background research as well. Anyway, I do not discourage you from doing it, but if you are going to actually trade stocks in real time plan to spend at least a couple of hours a day on it.
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
I like that, best house in a bad neighborhood. It's hard to think of anyone who is better off overall. China is still a bit of a house of cards that could fail much easier than the west, EU is kind of caught in a loop as the more productive members are forced to bail out others in order to keep the scheme afloat for their own benefit, Russia is still a bit undeveloped, etc. The situation is bad, but everything is relative.
I've never talked to an advisor in my life. I am still young enough where I can probably survive just by tossing money into it every other week. Maybe once or twice a year, I will quickly examine it and maybe do a little rebalancing - but I can't commit the effort. I am also still a little spooked by 08, so I am probably overly conservative still - but I think over the life of my 401K, I am at something like 9%, I am fine with that.
This can be a very rewarding (pun intended), but be aware that it is time consuming to do right.
I will respectfully disagree. I'm not buying individual companies, I'm buying low-cost mutual funds - index funds in almost all cases. Once the funds are chosen, there's nothing to do other than monitor the asset allocation and rebalance as necessary.
...I am also still a little spooked by 08, so I am probably overly conservative still ...
The thing is, 08 was a great buying opportunity and those who stayed the course actually did really well. I do agree that it was scary. If the entire financial system would have collapsed, then all bets are off. Of course in that case it wouldn't have mattered whether you were picking index funds or individual stocks....
I'm not buying individual companies, I'm buying low-cost mutual funds - index funds in almost all cases. Once the funds are chosen, there's nothing to do other than monitor the asset allocation and rebalance as necessary.
This is exactly my approach. I can adjust future contribution percentages and rebalance my 401(K) to keep everything where it belongs with no tax impact, while my funds built with taxable money are available for cars or whatever.
I've put all of my investments in funds classified as "moderate" risk, even the new funds I bought with the proceeds from my old car. I'll probably stay that course for the foreseeable future.
In 08 I rebalanced/allocated soon after I sensed things started going south, and didn't lose much at all. But I know people who lost their shirts - not good times (although they made it all back).
I've put all of my investments in funds classified as "moderate" risk, even the new funds I bought with the proceeds from my old car. I'll probably stay that course for the foreseeable future.
I found one article particularly useful in asset allocation - it's not that technical but some math abilities are useful. Google for "Ultimate Buy and Hold Strategy".
This one is about the out of control medical costs and how consumers are being fleeced because doctors order so many un-necessary colonoscopies and other medical tests. A friend of ours was in the hospital around Christmas for 10 days and felt like a prisoner as she thought she should have been discharged many days earlier. She went for the same test three times, all with similar results plus other tests that she wonderred why they were even necessary. At one point she refused to go for a test and adamently confronted her doctor. When she told him she would report all this to the insurance company if he made her have the test the docttor backed down. I have great respect for doctors but I went from talking to them like they were superior to talking to them the way I would a contractor in my home.
This one is about what we all consider science fiction. This may be a place to put money at the right time in the future. Anyone further interested should check out 2045.com.
Although I am a little slow on the up-take, it would appear to me that the apple promotion to buy the older phones on a trade in is a brilliant way to offer a lower cost phone to those that can`t afford the full price...I`m not familiar with how a trade in would work, but say they introduce the next generation phone, and if the service provider would let a person like me, trade for the new phone, without any penalties, and the new phone was a nice upgrade, I would be more than interested....Then they would have many millions of perfectly good used phones to offer at a much lower price......Correct me if I am wrong or off base on these thoughts :-) Tony
I`m not familiar with how a trade in would work, but say they introduce the next generation phone, and if the service provider would let a person like me, trade for the new phone, without any penalties, and the new phone was a nice upgrade, I would be more than interested....Then they would have many millions of perfectly good used phones to offer at a much lower price......Correct me if I am wrong or off base on these thoughts
Tony,
I have been mostly away from computers the past couple weeks since my entire family (kids, grandkids, and father-in-law) was here visiting from Seattle, Akron, OH, and St. Louis. They are all back to their homes now. It was a "zoo" in our house for a while.
I believe your statement above is on the money. I think this will be a good thing for Apple. I also have a feeling that we will be pleasantly surprised by a few announcements in the Developers Conference starting tomorrow. I feel a whole lot better about AAPL now than I did a couple months ago.
Good story in today's NY Times re the economy. I like this economic cycle. Slow growth, great economies of scale, great productivity from employees and very low interest rates are a great signal for earnings and stocks, especially if Europe is mending and China doesn't shoot itself in the foot (see second link). Rapid growth has investors worrying about how fast it will stop and looking to bail at a moments notice. Slower growth means they are looking for continued increases and they invest more steadily and heavily. When you think about it that was the big problem with Apple. Had they gotten to their current earnings level at a slower pace the stock would have been lower iin the past and a lot higher now. Too fast a growth for a large company is not good from an investor POV. It's kind of stupid because you penalize the stock for the company accumulating cash quicker. But as we've seen investors, for really stupid reasons don't value strong Balance Sheets and cash. That's what happens when you have purely short-term investors. If this was your personal business you'd want the rapid growth and cash accumulation. But in the stock market you now want slower growth and more years of it. Our economy now mimics exactly how the market operates. So IMO - a lot of runway left for stocks to rise in the next 12 months.
Interesting perspective.....I guess the people without too many assets want quick growth , and thse with a lot just want to slowly accumulate more :-) Makes sense to me..
From my vantage point, observing several different mini eco-systems, I think employment is as much as it is going to reflect in statistics....All the people (all) are busy and business is good....Bids are higher, along with material costs....Frankly things are booming....BUT there is an underlying current that would remind me of `self punishment`--- things being happy and smooth, people just want to find some fault....and consequently along comes a `correction`..
Hope all is well with you, and you are enjoying the new cars :-) Tony
Good to see some posts for a change. I had a nice run in May but it has wilted back some in the last two weeks. Still doing OK, but nothing stellar. I hope ljflx is right about the slow growth, etc.
Len, I agree. I've been a big time bull on the stock market since the spring of 2009. We could see a 5-10% correction, but overall, the bull market will persist for a long time to come. Now, if only AAPL can follow the broad market bullishness, I would be much happier.
Those two articles are very interesting. The one on China's urbanization is fascinating.
While a lot of people believe there may be some short term inflation, many think that the real problem will be deflation.
All the previously big spending baby boomers are retiring, don't have the money they once had and will no longer be driving the economy. Read some of Harry Dent's economic predictions. Whether you agree with him or not, he makes a lot of sense.
I am most concerned about a "stagflation" scenario, which we seem to be experiencing already. Effective zero gains in wages and overall worth/wealth of people who actually work, very slow employment recovery, etc but inflating prices for most cost of living inputs. In other words, even when things look to be slowly improving, they might not really be so rosy.
Kind of like the "productivity" gains, which in reality in much of the working world are just less workers doing more work, afraid to complain or lash out as they don't want to lose their job to cost cutting "job creators" who seldom have to answer to what they have wrought.
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BTW - the dealer I took the SL from does not have that free car wash service. But my sales guy wrote down that I can have it cleaned whenever I want if I let him know I need it. He said he'll pick up the SL and get it washed as anytime he gets the chance to drive an SL he takes it. It's not a bad tradeoff for me as he'd leave his car which is a CLS 550. My GL450 and S550 are from the dealer that offers us free car washes and my wife uses the service even more than I do for the GL. She loves that car and treats it like royalty.
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
Apple is being picked on though, it's not like they are the only participant.
We should also threaten the Swiss with action against their FIRE leaders if they don't start bowing to us re: tax evaders and dodgers.
The measure, scheduled for special consideration by the Swiss parliament as soon as early June, would also allow banks to disclose information about employees who were involved in working with bank divisions that worked with American clients who held secret accounts.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/05/29/swiss-bank-deal/2369039/-
Funny that UBS has a Warburg connection, which is also one of the concocters of the Federal Reserve system. Buy your own rules and rule enforcement both.
The answers to these questions are way above my pay grade.
Apple pays exactly the amount of tax they are suppose to pay based on the current law.
Yes with both private and government influence. Too little Federal oversight on printing money, that dilutes the money in my pocket. It is quite obvious the QE has helped the stock market, at least temporarily. It has also caused prices to rise forcing the standard of living to go down for most of Americans.
The answers to these questions are way above my pay grade.
I wish I knew more about what they do as well. I just see the end result of having less buying power on a fixed income. That I blame of the Federal Reserve.
I agree. If they don't, we have 1000s of IRS agents that need to earn their keep.
Seems like they've been working pretty hard, already...
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It looks like you know a lot more about the market & the economy than my wife's financial advisers. They told us to get out of equities last Fall, which I did. My last calculation it cost us about $50k. We did buy a couple houses that could make up for the loss.
That's because in the past 6 months, the dollar has gotten stronger against other major currencies. The £ is down from about $1.62 in the fall to about $1.50 today and the € is down from $1.37 to about $1.31.
IMHO time to find some new advisers. Statistics show that nobody can reliably time the market. Being out of the market for just a few percent of the time can miss big rallys....as we've recently seen. I maintain my asset allocation and rebalance when necessary... an approach that takes the emotion out of things and has been shown to deliver superior results over the long term.
I suspect you're right, Fin. During one of the iterations of '[enter name of European country] will need a financial rescue in order to pay its bills beyond [enter date approximately 1 month later] and may leave the euro', a Wall Street economist (I don't remember which one and it probably doesn't matter) referred to the US as "the best house in a bad neighborhood". i suspect that is why the dollar has remained as strong as it has.
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
That's the same policy I've used for the last 15 years or so, and it has been very satisfactory. I don't go up as much as the truly committed do on the highs, but I go down much less when the drops hit. As I age I put less in equities (110 minus my age) and rebalance once or twice a year. Got nervous a couple of weeks ago and took the winnings and put them in bonds & cash. Now I'm right at 45% equities.
Takes discipline to let the winners pay the losers, but no thought at all. Works for me.
I did switch to almost all dividend paying blue chips a few years ago... Figured out that I wasn't much of a stock picker...
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Burton Malkiel writing in yesterday’s WSJ explains why the high fees charged by active managers cannot be justified, and why low-cost indexed funds have to be the core of your investment portfolio. Reason? Index funds have far outperformed the average active manager, and at a far lower cost to the investor.
From 1980 to 2006, the U.S. financial services sector grew from 4.9% to 8.3% of GDP. A substantial share of that increase represented increases in asset-management fees.
Excluding index funds (which make market returns available even to small investors at close to zero expense), fees have risen substantially as a percentage of assets managed. In my judgment, investors have received no benefit from this increase in expense ratios.
The increase in fees could be justified if it reflected increasing returns for investors from active management, or if it improved the efficiency of the market. Neither of these arguments holds. Actively managed funds of publicly traded securities have consistently underperformed index funds—by roughly the differential in fees charged.
Passive portfolios that held all the stocks in a broad-based market index have substantially outperformed the average active manager since 1980. Therefore, the increase in fees likely represents a deadweight loss for investors.
Why do investors continue to pay such high fees for financial services of such questionable value? Many may incorrectly judge the quality of investment advice by the price charged. Individual and institutional investors may suffer from overconfidence and truly believe that they can select the best investment managers and earn excess returns, despite historical evidence to the contrary.
Outperforming the consensus of hundreds of thousands of professionals at the world’s major financial institutions is next to impossible. It has been for decades. Over long periods, about two-thirds of active managers are outperformed by the benchmark indexes. The one-third that may outperform the passive index in one period are generally not the same as in the next period. But investors can benefit from low-cost index funds and their exchange-traded cousins.
The lesson for investors is very clear: You can’t control what markets can do, but you can control the costs you pay. The less you pay to the purveyors of investment services, the more there will be for you. The quintessential low-cost investment vehicles are index funds, which should comprise the core of every investment portfolio. The high fees charged for active management cannot be justified.
Couldn't agree more. Outside my 401(K) I'm Vanguard index funds all but the health sector fund and within the 401(K) they're all various types of index funds except for my company stock, which I keep at 4-5% & costs appear low there as well.
I'm not interested in paying brokers or advisors either. A percent or two over 25 years adds up to serious money, at least in my world.
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Absolutely. Save 0.5-1.0%/year and see how that changes the total 20 years out. It's major.
I think the thing that opened my eyes was this:
The common rule for retirement is that you can withdraw 4%/year and you won't outlive your money. Since the average advisory fees are often 1% (above the mutual fund fees), that is 25% OF YOUR TOTAL INCOME in retirement, using the 4% rule!
I decided to learn how to manage it myself (even though I'm not yet retired).
This can be a very rewarding (pun intended), but be aware that it is time consuming to do right. My wife retired before me and took over about half of our portfolio (we also have a 401K). She has handily outperformed the market, but it represents about a half-time job for her. Since my retirement I spend a fair amount of time doing background research as well. Anyway, I do not discourage you from doing it, but if you are going to actually trade stocks in real time plan to spend at least a couple of hours a day on it.
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
I will respectfully disagree. I'm not buying individual companies, I'm buying low-cost mutual funds - index funds in almost all cases. Once the funds are chosen, there's nothing to do other than monitor the asset allocation and rebalance as necessary.
The thing is, 08 was a great buying opportunity and those who stayed the course actually did really well. I do agree that it was scary. If the entire financial system would have collapsed, then all bets are off. Of course in that case it wouldn't have mattered whether you were picking index funds or individual stocks....
This is exactly my approach. I can adjust future contribution percentages and rebalance my 401(K) to keep everything where it belongs with no tax impact, while my funds built with taxable money are available for cars or whatever.
Not very flashy, but it works.
In 08 I rebalanced/allocated soon after I sensed things started going south, and didn't lose much at all. But I know people who lost their shirts - not good times (although they made it all back).
I found one article particularly useful in asset allocation - it's not that technical but some math abilities are useful. Google for "Ultimate Buy and Hold Strategy".
This one is about the out of control medical costs and how consumers are being fleeced because doctors order so many un-necessary colonoscopies and other medical tests. A friend of ours was in the hospital around Christmas for 10 days and felt like a prisoner as she thought she should have been discharged many days earlier. She went for the same test three times, all with similar results plus other tests that she wonderred why they were even necessary. At one point she refused to go for a test and adamently confronted her doctor. When she told him she would report all this to the insurance company if he made her have the test the docttor backed down. I have great respect for doctors but I went from talking to them like they were superior to talking to them the way I would a contractor in my home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/health/colonoscopies-explain-why-us-leads-the-- - - - - - world-in-health-expenditures.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0
This one is about what we all consider science fiction. This may be a place to put money at the right time in the future. Anyone further interested should check out 2045.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/business/dmitry-itskov-and-the-avatar-quest.ht- - - - - - ml?ref=todayspaper
Tony,
I have been mostly away from computers the past couple weeks since my entire family (kids, grandkids, and father-in-law) was here visiting from Seattle, Akron, OH, and St. Louis. They are all back to their homes now. It was a "zoo" in our house for a while.
I believe your statement above is on the money. I think this will be a good thing for Apple. I also have a feeling that we will be pleasantly surprised by a few announcements in the Developers Conference starting tomorrow. I feel a whole lot better about AAPL now than I did a couple months ago.
Strangely we had the remnants of what could be coming this year---a Hurricane---I`m expecting YOU to give me plenty of warning
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/business/economy/even-pessimists-feel-optimist- - - ic-over-economy.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-m- - - illion-into-cities.html?ref=todayspaper
From my vantage point, observing several different mini eco-systems, I think employment is as much as it is going to reflect in statistics....All the people (all) are busy and business is good....Bids are higher, along with material costs....Frankly things are booming....BUT there is an underlying current that would remind me of `self punishment`--- things being happy and smooth, people just want to find some fault....and consequently along comes a `correction`..
Hope all is well with you, and you are enjoying the new cars :-) Tony
Happy Father's Day everyone !!
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
Those two articles are very interesting. The one on China's urbanization is fascinating.
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/christopher-drose/we-will-never-see-h- yperinflation
All the previously big spending baby boomers are retiring, don't have the money they once had and will no longer be driving the economy. Read some of Harry Dent's economic predictions. Whether you agree with him or not, he makes a lot of sense.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
Kind of like the "productivity" gains, which in reality in much of the working world are just less workers doing more work, afraid to complain or lash out as they don't want to lose their job to cost cutting "job creators" who seldom have to answer to what they have wrought.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
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2015 Kia Soul, 2021 Subaru Forester (kirstie_h), 2024 GMC Sierra 1500 (mr. kirstie_h)
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2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460