With strong indications that the Federal Reserve will hike interest rates in September, noted short-seller Bill Fleckenstein is getting ready to jump back into business. Fleckenstein told CNBC that the Fed's hands-off policy with the economy leads him to believe that "the market is uniquely crash-prone." The Fleckenstein Capital president said he's aiming for an Oct. 1 launch of his new short fund. He closed his last fund in 2009 after correctly predicting the 2007 financial crisis. "The critical thing is, from a short-selling standpoint, ... the Fed is out of the equation. They may hike, they may not be able to hike, but they can't ease," he said. "So the market's kind of on its own, and it's sort of tenuous under the surface. It's a lot weaker than what the averages look like."
One out of five Americans financially supports an adult child or aging parent, on average spending $12,000 over the past year to do so, according to a new study by TD Ameritrade. While most said it doesn’t cause financial hardship, TD found that they are, on average, $100,000 in debt and delaying major life changes to provide the help. “The financial downside of living longer may mean not only planning for our own extended retirement years, but also caring for aging family members in ways that can take a solid bite out of any well-laid plans,” said Matthew Sadowsky, director of retirement at TD Ameritrade.
U.K.-based Open University, a public distance learning and research institution, has teamed with Innovate Finance to launch a new course based entirely around financial technology. The fintech course covers topics such as bitcoin, the evolution of payment systems, digital banking and cyber security. The online course takes 50 hours for participants to complete and is specifically aimed at analysts, managers, and senior level executives. According to Innovate Finance, there are an estimated 135,000 people now employed in fintech in the U.K. alone.
Private institutions are getting a much larger slice of federal work-study aid, according to a new report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teacher College. Statistics from the study indicate that about 25 percent of students enrolled in private four-year colleges in 2012 got federal work-study money as part of their financial aid packages, compared to six percent of students in four-year public schools. The research found that work-study students have higher retention and post-graduation job placement rates than their peers, but surprisingly, they carry more debt in the form of student loans.
