The growing number of retirees, their increased life expectancies and the size of their savings led us to wonder: How much accumulated income-producing wealth is needed to maintain a desired lifestyle? In other words, given a target level of...

A lot can happen in a few years. Back in 2005, Morgan Stanley was at risk of losing its wealth management business during a very public conflict between then-CEO Philip Purcell and its shareholders. Today, Morgan is on the verge of creating the...

Yes, it's true that the commercial real estate industry is suffering from increasing vacancies, decreasing rents and declining property values. Call it a trifecta of bad news. Yet, for bottom-feeders er, contrarians this might be a good time to...

Bernard Madoff’s astonishing fraud has accelerated calls for regulatory overhaul that had already begun with the credit crisis. then again, the regulatory system was antiquated. The real problem for retail financial advisors: Your clients no...

When you read the 2005 Markopolos letter to the SEC, which warned the regulator about Bernard Madoff, what jumps out at you is how many professionals on Wall Street were actually suspicious of Madoff's business.

With markets collapsing last fall, Nicholas Rowe, a financial advisor with Focus Capital, a registered investment advisor in Bedford, New Hampshire that clears trades through Schwab Institutional, began buying inverse exchange-traded funds (ETFs)...

We are not sounding an alarm that there will be a collapse of charitable giving in 2009. Clearly, conditions are ripe for both an economic and philanthropic breakdown. We may suffer a worst-case scenario: the Dow Jones Industrial Average declining...

Back in the summer,1 I warned that the financial markets were headed for serious problems. But even my worst fears pale in comparison to what actually happened: nothing less than a near-death experience for western finance. The markets survived...

In an article titled Retirement Casino, on p. 46 of our November 2008 issue, we made an error. In the graphic of an excel spreadsheet on that page, in the row corresponding to Retirement Alpha, the equation should read (2*(D14 +2*H16)/(D15^2 + H16...