The Envestnet Edge from March 2015
Read moreHillary’s Not the Problem
For Hillary Clinton—and most of Washington—email-gate may be a relatively new issue, but it is an issue with a decades-long pedigree in American history. Once upon a time, in the era before email and whose “server” was whose, it wouldn’t have been an issue at all: Dean Acheson, for instance, lived in no fear that the public would have access to his personal letters musing about the intentions of Stalin or the presence of possible Soviet spies in the State Department alleged by Joe McCarthy, or any number of other matters of state. Long before that, presidents in particular were free to keep or dispose of their papers as they saw fit; one obscure president, Chester Arthur, sealed his obscurity by instructing his family to burn his papers after his death.
Read moreIs 2015 Really the Year for Foreign Stocks?
Famed Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller made some waves recently when he suggested that he might sell his holdings of U.S. stocks and instead buy European equities. The reason? “Europe is so much cheaper.”
Read moreA Shameful Climate Witch Hunt
Let the climate inquisition begin. The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, has written to seven universities about seven researchers who harbor impure thoughts about climate change.
Read moreWhy the Jobs Report Means Diddly
The monthly ritual known as the jobs report made its appearance last week, followed metronomically by the monthly ritual of commentary and political reaction to the jobs report. It was a good report, as they go, with “ better-than-expected” job creation, more workers returning to look for work (hence a slightly higher unemployment rate of 5.7 percent) and major upward revisions to reported job creation in November and December of 2014.
Read moreReinterpreting Jobs Report
CNBC Contributor Zachary Karabell, weighs on the nature of U.S. jobs growth and higher wages.
Read moreDon’t Turn America Into Europe
The Europeans—some of them, anyway—are finally beginning to concede that austerity has gone awry. There’s less growth, more structural unemployment, little bank lending and economic contraction. And now, of course, we have a political backlash in the person of Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Greece’s Syriza party, who upon winning the prime ministership last Sunday declared grandly (and probably over-optimistically) that Greece will now “leave behind the austerity that ruined it.”
Read moreSolving the Active Vs. Passive Investing Debate
Active versus passive. No, it’s not a debate to stir the passions of the public, but in the world of investing and deciding how to gain exposure to sectors, it is a rivalry up there with the Hatfields versus the McCoys, the North versus the South, the Yankees and the Red Sox. Proponents of active investing tout the ability of astute fund managers to beat the managers and add “alpha,” that amount of outperformance attributable to the skill of the manager. On the flip side, advocates of passive investing point to the long-term inability of most active managers to beat the market and to the high fees charged for sub-par performance, not to mention the tax inefficiencies. And so the debate goes.
Read moreWhere Was Obama When the Middle Class Needed Him?
Six long years into presidency, Barack Obama has finally made the middle-class an explicit priority— placing “middle-class economics,” as he called it repeatedly in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, front and center on his agenda. But what the president is asking for may be too little and it’s arriving far too late. While his proposals are sensible— lowering the tax burden on middle-class families and expanding access to education, job training and retirement, in part by closing loopholes and raising taxes on capital gains—very few of them have much chance of passing.
Read moreA Dynamic World Demands Dynamic Scoring
One of the first things the new Republican Congress voted on this week was to mandate a change in how the Congressional Budget Office analyzes (“scores”) spending bills. A technocratic change in how Congress assesses the impact of its proposed bills is not typically the stuff of great drama. This time is different.
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