In September 2006, an SEC official gave a remarkably prescient speech to an obscure organization (well, obscure to me, anyway). Martha Mahan Haines, chief of the SEC's Office of Municipal Securities, presented a short speech to about 400 women...
Despite current laws that reduce the estate-tax bite, survivorship life insurance is making a comeback as an estate-planning tool among some advisors. With Democrats in control of Congress, and a good chance that a Democrat will take the White...
New York City's Independent Budget Office estimates that the city could lose over 20,000 jobs in the financial sector over the next two years as the mortgage credit crisis squeezes Wall Street profits. New York Stock Exchange member firms that...
Are closed-end fund preferred-auction securities safe? We consider CFPs to be the conservative's conservative security. Defaults are even rarer than failed auctions. We are comfortable with the safety of auction securities from closed-end funds...
In February, stock fund investors did a curious thing. Instead of running for the exits as the S&P 500 continued falling, they pumped large sums of new money into U.S. and international stock funds. Are investors getting smarter, buying when the...
Talk about embarrassing: The credit debacle has shown just how dumb and greedy the (supposedly) smart money really is. Bear Stearns, natch, is the poster boy: The 85-year-old investment bank lost about 90 percent of its value in 2008, because, it...
Editor-in-Chief David Geracioti spoke with Krawcheck about a recently announced reorganization in the wealth-management division. Registered Rep.: For a Smith Barney advisor, you guys have had a pretty good year in 2007. Smith Barney revenue...
Back during the Great Buying Panic of the 1990s, when making money in stocks was as easy as putting in a buy order for QQQ, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was called, The Maestro. Greenspan was considered to be a magician in his nearly 19...