M ore than four months have passed since Deborah Smook began searching for financing for her small packaging business – four months of false starts and dead ends. That’s how she ended up here, under the fluorescent lights of a cafeteria on the sixth floor of a labyrinthine government office in lower Manhattan. She’s patiently waiting her turn to speak to lenders at an event aimed at matching small companies with sources of funds. “It’s a very hard time for small businesses,” she says. Further uptown, only a couple of days earlier, the picture couldn’t have been more different. In the skyscrapers that house the country’s largest banks, traders handily sold a huge bond offering by Kraft Foods in a matter of hours, swelling the firm’s coffers with the $9.5-billion (U.S.) in cash it needs to swallow a takeover target. The demand for…

There has been lots of blather about the profligate ways of the government and the meaning of the economy coming out of recession. In particular, massive amounts of broadcast time and print space have been dedicated to the immense spending of the Obama Administration and its impact on inflation. Less but still considerable time has been spent talking about the economy and the stock market recovery. The key to the stock market outlook is earnings. What about earnings? The stock market had a fabulous year in 2009. The S&P 500 stock index was up 26.5%. But this result was hugely concentrated in two sectors, technology and financials. Stock prices in these tow sectors rose without the benefit of earnings, resulting in very stretched valuations. Here is my assessment of both inflation and earnings. More Inflation? Not Likely! The justification for higher inflation expectations is rooted in the massive increases in the money…

Over the years, many financial institutions have conducted studies to get a better picture of the true state of the retiree in the years ahead. The results that I have seen are troubling. If workers do not change their courses of action soon, many households are headed for financial problems in their most critical years – during retirement. Employees don’t understand fees According to a recent survey, many retirement plan owners realize that fees are an important consideration in choosing 401(k) investments. However, similar to our lack of understanding about credit cards and their fees, many employees do not know how much they are paying in fees and expenses with their retirement accounts. Many also do not feel knowledgeable about the impact that these fees can have on the growth of their retirement savings. The survey of retirement plan owners found that approximately two in…

You don’t have to tell me that investing in the stock market is hard! I’ve had my fair share of losses over the years because of wrong choices that I’ve made against my better judgment. It’s easy to go with your gut instinct and then lose your shirt because you made the wrong decision. The sort of thing keeps many people out of the stock market and the thus keeps them from making decent returns for their retirements accounts. One way to invest in the stock market without all of the risk that are often involved in picking individual stocks is investing in a solid mutual fund. But mutual funds are not right for everybody, so how do you know if they are right for you? That’s what I’m going to talk about in this article today. There are many things that influence the future values of any stock in…

Picking individual stocks for your portfolio can be really difficult under the best of circumstances. Under the worst of circumstances it can be downright dangerous because if you make just a few bad choices you can lose your shirt quicker than you would think. One way to save yourself from the dangers of investing in individual stocks, or even of investing in the stock market at all is to invest primarily in mutual funds. The problem then becomes, which mutual fund should you select? There are thousands of funds and it can become a dizzying exercise in futility to pick the right one. Fortunately that is exactly what I’m going to talk about with this article today. In order to select the best mutual fund for you and your specific portfolio requirements and risk aversion, you should follow five basic rules. Those rules are one, diversify; two, analyze the funds…

Investing in the stock market is too dangerous and too risky for many people. The fact of the matter is, unless you’ve had fairly specific training and a lot of experience doing it, investing is very hard and since we’re talking about people’s lives and their retirements, you don’t want to take any chances that you don’t have to. But you have to invest in something, and so luckily we have mutual funds which allow people without the necessary investment skills to, nonetheless, invest for the future and for their retirements. But of course this begs the question, which mutual funds should you invest in? In this article today I want to discuss several secrets that I have for picking the best mutual funds. Anybody can take advantage of these secrets, you just need to know a few things that I will be discussing right now. First I should mention…