Words from the Wise

Don't look at this if you want to have faith in Experts.

Auto-workers take note

Somebody wrote in Wikipedia:

"Although non-fraudulent in intent, a pension fund can share some of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme in that, except during the final period of the fund's life-span, the outgoing cash used in any month to pay pensions is usually taken from the incoming contributions of the active members of the pension scheme. In a year of poor equity returns such as 2008, a pension fund can often perform worse for its members than a Ponzi scheme."

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatttt?????????

"Last year, Madoff's niece, Shana Madoff, married former SEC attorney Eric Swanson, who worked at the SEC for 10 years."

One Puzzle Unexplained

Regarding Madoff, what I don't get is how he could have gone 50 years like that. I guess it helped that big banks, a lot of them European, got sucked into the greed as well. But still, seems to me his deal should have collapsed long ago as the image shows.

Madoff Aftermath: Some Durn Good Advice

Particularly haunting in this article: "... my poor neighbor had all of her retirement money in a Madoff fund. All of it"

And something else that has been bugging me regarding the current meltdown regarding Retirees: don't blame the financial advisor if you got slaughtered because of the stock market: no financial advisor worth a durn would ever tell you to have a bunch of your money in stocks and then go and retire! Another mistake this lady made, evidently.

Bill Ayers

Forget Obama's guilt by association. Voters rejected the notion.

But don't buy into the spin that Bill Ayers is an OK guy without anything to answer for. Or that we need to be unconditionally accepting his resurfacing in public life. This Washington Post article seems pretty balanced.

Yeah, I think Obama needed to answer questions about this.

Just a hunch: not impossible that some of the Chicago political dirt might not have gotten scrubbed off clean for Obama's presidency. For the sake of our country, I hope it did.

How Mad Are You?

I don't know about the rest of you, but for me, the stuff that is surfacing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has me the most steamed about our current economic fun and games.

I usually don't watch Hearings, but I am going to be tuned in to these. I say heads should roll... then again I said that about the Savings and Loan fiasco a couple of decades ago. I was dreaming.

And you thought Mugabe was the villain!

Matt has me keeping up with Zimbabwe and South Africa. Now here's something I didn't know, it's actually greedy shopkeepers that are causing all the problems.