A Few Dollars More

“Right smack dab in the middle of town I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof (up on the roof) And if this world starts getting you down There’s room enough for two Up on the roof” By Gerry Goffin and Carole King Green roofs are nothing new. They’ve been around since biblical times. Here in [...]

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Two years in the making, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is 2,319 pages long. It will cost upwards of $30 billion to implement and under the legislation, a minimum of 12 new government reports, 44 studies and more than 243 new rulemakings will be required. Depending upon your political philosophy, this [...]

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You may have heard the term or even read the book “Black Swan” by Nassin Taleb sometime over the last few years. Most people mistakenly believe that a so-called “Black Swan Event” was all about the inability of Wall Street to manage risk leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 but that’s only partially [...]

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Newspapers around the world heralded the news that China was easing their currency peg. Global markets soared overnight Sunday and into Monday on the announcement. At last, crowed the pundits, the Chinese had caved into pressure from its trading partners to drop the two-year old Chinese practice of pegging the value of the Chinese Yuan [...]

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Whether it’s real life earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or make believe “end of the world” themes like the mother of all blizzards in the movie “The Day after Tomorrow”, we devour stories recounting the human pain and misery that accompanies these disasters. What we fail to realize, however, are the cumulative costs of weather and natural [...]

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Beneath the rough, weather-roiled waves of the Gulf, blue fin tuna and other species of ocean life are spawning right now. Above those schools, a river of oil has depleted oxygen in the water. The tuna and their young are forced to the surface for more oxygen. As they break the surface, the thick, reddish [...]

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My column last week “Why Greece Matters to You” should be hitting home about now. Since then, the subject of Europe, the Club Med nations and Greece, in particular, has taken over the front pages of just about every media publication in the world. While I believe the Club Med crisis in Europe is a [...]

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Why would a country about the size of Alabama with a population less than a third of California’s matter to you? Yet, the lowering of Greek’s sovereign debt rating to “junk” status on Tuesday drove world stock markets down by over 2%.

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Aviation, probably more than any other mode of transportation, is at the mercy of weather and natural calamities. The Icelandic volcano-related troubles occurring over the skies of Europe right now illustrate that point, but this rather dramatic illustration is actually a minor blip in the airline’s ongoing battle with weather.

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Every now and then the topic of replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency tends to hit the front page. The subject has come up yet again over the last few weeks largely prompted by a Chinese Central Bank proposal. The proposal by Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor of the People’s Bank of China, would be [...]

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