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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...
The market is volatile, to say the least, and investors and shareholders are on edge. And why shouldn't they be? Between the failure of the auction-rate securities market, sub-prime woes and hedge fund and investment bank implosions, the market...
Johnne Syverson, a CFP and co-founder of RIA firm Syverson Strege & Company, in West Des Moines, Iowa, has been outsourcing money-manager selection and portfolio construction to SEI since 1995. The firm, which manages $300 million in assets, has...
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...
Mergers and acquisitions activity in the registered investment advisory (RIA) business had been on a three-year run, with new records in dollar volume set each year. But, in the first quarter of this year, M&As slowed dramatically, another...
The engagement letter is here to stay and constitutes best practice for both lawyers and clients in estate planning. But it wasn't always so. Indeed, the use of engagement letters is a relatively new phenomenon. For generations, a simple...
Several states are on the verge of adopting a new type of low-profit entity, the L3C, that could be a new way for foundations to practice venture philanthropy. According to reports in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and...
A series of private letter rulings over the past several years seemed to indicate that a gift to a predeceased spouse would qualify for the gift tax marital deduction and enable use of that spouse's estate tax applicable exclusion amount. In...
