NEW RESEARCH: Private Retirement Investments Outperform Social Security

Still a Better Deal
Private Investment vs. Social Security
by Michael Tanner

Opponents of allowing younger workers to privately invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through personal accounts have long pointed to the supposed riskiness of private investment. The volatility of private capital markets over the past several years, and especially recent declines in the stock market, have seemed to bolster their argument.

However, private capital investment remains remarkably safe over the long term. Despite recent declines in the stock market, a worker who had invested privately over the past 40 years would have still earned an average yearly return of 6.85 percent investing in the S&P 500, 3.46 percent from corporate bonds, and 2.44 percent from government bonds.

If workers who retired in 2011 had been allowed to invest the employee half of the Social Security payroll tax over their working lifetime, they would retire with more income than if they relied on Social Security. Indeed, even in the worst-case scenario—a low-wage worker who invested entirely in bonds—the benefits from private investment would equal those from traditional Social Security.

While there are limits and caveats to this type of analysis, it clearly shows that the argument that private investment is too risky compared with Social Security does not hold up. With Social Security already running a cashflow deficit today—and facing a $21 trillion shortfall in the future that will make it impossible to pay promised benefits—private investment and personal accounts should be part of any discussion about reforming the troubled system.

Read the rest here.

Grace Wyler

By now, it is clear that the Maine caucuses were a complete mess.

Evidence is mounting that Mitt Romney’s 194-vote victory over Ron Paul was prematurely announced, if not totally wrong. Washington County canceled their caucus on Saturday on account of three inches of snow (hardly a blizzard by Maine standards), and other towns that scheduled their caucuses for this week have been left out of the vote count. Now, it looks like caucuses that did take place before Feb. 11 have also been left out of final tally.

As the full extent of the chaos unfolds, sources close to the Paul campaign tell Business Insider that it is looking increasingly like Romney’s team might have a hand in denying Paul votes, noting that Romney has some admirably ruthless operatives on his side and a powerful incentive to avoid a fifth caucus loss this month.

According to the Paul campaign, the Maine Republican Party is severely under-reporting Paul’s results — and Romney isn’t getting the same treatment. For example, nearly all the towns in Waldo County — a Ron Paul stronghold – held their caucuses on Feb. 4, but the state GOP reported no results for those towns. In Waterville, a college town in Central Maine, results were reported but not included in the party vote count. Paul beat Romney 21-5 there, according to the Kennebec County GOP.

“It’s too common,” senior advisor Doug Wead told Business Insider. “If it was chaos, we would expect strong Romney counties to be unreported, and that’s not what’s happening.”

The Maine Republican Party won’t decide which votes it will count until the executive committee meets next month. But Wead points out that even if Mitt Romney holds on to his slim lead, it will be a Pyrrhic victory.

“He will have disenfranchised all of these people,” Wead said. “It could be a costly victory — it is a mistake.”

The (alleged) bias against Paul may also be the product of an organic opposition to the libertarian Congressman and his army of ardent fans. Paul volunteers tend to be young and relatively new to party politics, and their presence has many state GOP stalwarts feeling territorial.

“People feel threatened — they don’t want to see a bunch of kids who may have voted for Barack Obama take over,” Wead said. “They feel a sense of ownership over the party — but there has to be an accommodation.”

But state party machinations are already starting to backfire. The Paul campaign believes it has won the majority of Maine’s delegates — and the perceived election fraud has galvanized Paul supporters to demand their votes be counted in the state’s straw poll ‘beauty contest.’

Caucus chaos has also proved to be fertile ground for Paul’s quiet takeover of the Republican Party. Since 2008, the campaign and Paul’s Campaign for Liberty PAC have made a concerted effort to get Paul sympathists involved in the political process. Now, tumult in state party organizations has allowed these supporters to rise up the ranks.

While we worry about future threats like global warming, and present threats like Iran’s escalating nuclear program, the sun’s propensity for belching out monstrous solar flares (like the Carrington event of 1859) could almost instantly create a world without modern conveniences, or even electricity.  The sun could literally “bomb us back to the stone age”.

Imagine a world without iPhones, and you’d understand why Homeland security rates New York and Seattle the highest for likelihood of major social unrest. Humans don’t do well in the dark. DHS has taken notice.

First some history, from NASA:

At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England’s foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.

On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and “being somewhat flurried by the surprise,” Carrington later wrote, “I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled.” He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear.

It was 11:23 AM. Only five minutes had passed.

Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.

Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.

“What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun,” explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Read the rest, including the Department of Homeland Security Report, here.

By WSJ Staff

By Erik Holm

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKA, BRKB) revealed new investments in DaVita and Liberty Media, though both holdings were small enough to suggest they may not have been made by the company’s famed leader.

Berkshire held 2.68 million shares of DaVita, one of the largest U.S. providers of dialysis services, as of Dec. 31, according to a regulatory filing released Tuesday. The stake was worth $203 million.

The 1.7 million Liberty Media shares were valued at $132 million at the end of the year. The company is a media conglomerate controlled by John Malone.

In addition, Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire more than quadrupled its stake in DirecTV, holding shares valued at $870 million at yearend.

All three companies have been favorites of new Berkshire investment manager Ted Weschler. His hedge fund, Peninsula Capital Advisors LLC, owned the stocks last year before he began winding down the fund to join Buffett’s conglomerate.

Buffett had said Weschler would join Berkshire in early 2012, but some of his stock picks appear to have arrived in Berkshire’s portfolio before he did.

Read the rest here.

Billionaire John Paulson sold his entire stakes in Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. (C) in the fourth quarter before the bank’s shares rallied.

Paulson & Co. sold 25.1 million shares of Citigroup valued at $643 million as of Dec. 31, according to a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The hedge fund sold about 64.3 million shares of Bank of America worth $394 million.

Source

A recent survey of U.S. bankruptcy attorneys found a major jump in student loan debtors seeking their help, pointing the way to a possible mortgage-style debt crisis.

Now that state attorneys general across the country have reached a $25 billion deal with the major banks on their investigation into “robo-signing” and other foreclosure abuses, the next financial crisis may be on the horizon, one group is warning.

A survey and report released Tuesday by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys found that 81 percent of the bankruptcy attorneys polled said that potential clients with student loan debt have increased “significantly” or “somewhat” in the past three to four years. Overall, 48 percent of the bankruptcy attorneys in the survey reported significant increases in such potential clients.

Read the rest here.

abnormalreturns February 14th, 2012

This is not a novel theme for us.  Indeed one thing we note in our forthcoming book, Abnormal Returns: Winning Strategies from the Frontlines of the Investment Blogosphere, is that investing has never been “cheaper or easier.”  Some of this has to do with the rise exchange traded funds.  In other respects it has to do with the blossoming of the options markets.  In large part, it has to do with technology.  In short, never before have investors had access to data, analysis, opinion and social tools that are commonplace today. Let’s take these points one by one.

Read the rest here.

For the first time since February 3rd, 2011, bullish sentiment has climbed above 50%.

Source

Joe Weisenthal

This morning, our editor Henry Blodget wrote a post on Warren Buffett’s brilliant explanation of the absurdity of gold.

The gist is this: If you had $10 trillion, you could buy a cube of all the gold in the world, or you could buy boatloads of productive assets

An interesting read from Calculated Risk which analyzes the recent publication of The BuildFax Residential Remodeling Index.

President Barack Obama’s budget for 2013 will set off a vitriolic battle. Republicans will rail against the Democrats’ “class warfare” and Democrats will rail against the Republicans’ “coddling of the rich”. Yet it is mostly for show. The rich will win in their fund balances while probably losing at November’s presidential polls, and the poor and working class will probably re-elect Obama but suffer a continuing decline in relative and perhaps absolute incomes.

Read the rest here.

London, 13 February 2012 — As anticipated in November 2011, Moody’s Investors Service has today adjusted the sovereign debt ratings of selected EU countries in order to reflect their susceptibility to the growing financial and macroeconomic risks emanating from the euro area crisis and how these risks exacerbate the affected countries’ own specific challenges.

Moody’s actions can be summarised as follows:

– Austria: outlook on Aaa rating changed to negative

– France: outlook on Aaa rating changed to negative

– Italy: downgraded to A3 from A2, negative outlook

– Malta: downgraded to A3 from A2, negative outlook

– Portugal: downgraded to Ba3 from Ba2, negative outlook

– Slovakia: downgraded to A2 from A1, negative outlook

– Slovenia: downgraded to A2 from A1, negative outlook

– Spain: downgraded to A3 from A1, negative outlook

– United Kingdom: outlook on Aaa rating changed to negative

Read the rest here.

Ian Stewart

The Black-Scholes equation was the mathematical justification for the trading that plunged the world’s banks into catastrophe.

It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run. It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the sub-prime mortgage market turned sour, the darling of the financial markets became the Black Hole equation, sucking money out of the universe in an unending stream.

5 Incredible Pictures

Joe Fahmy

When should traders be in or out of the market?

There are times when traders should NOT be in the market. There are other times when the market is rocking and traders should get aggressive. How can you tell the difference? Here are 5 helpful tips.

Read the rest here.

American billionaire George Soros slammed German Chancellor Angela Merkelin an interview published on Sunday, warning that her policies could lead to a repeat of the Great Depression.

“I admire Chancellor Merkel for her leadership. But unfortunately she is taking Europe in the wrong direction,” the financier and philanthropist told the weekly Der Spiegel.

Soros warned against addressing the crisis with spending cuts, urging the injection of funds instead.

“Otherwise we will repeat the mistakes that plunged America into the Great Depression in 1929. That’s what Angela Merkel doesn’t understand,” he said.

Read the rest here.

By Myles Miller

Medical insurance premiums in the United States are on the rise, the chief architect of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul has told The Daily Caller.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who also devised former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s statewide health care reforms, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House in support of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informing officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under the reforms.

In an email to The Daily Caller, Gruber framed this new reality in terms of the same human self-interest that some conservatives had warned in 2010 would ultimately rule the marketplace.

“The market was so discriminatory,” Gruber told TheDC, “that only the healthy bought non-group insurance and the sick just stayed [uninsured].”

“It is true that even after tax credits some individuals are ‘losers,’” he conceded, “in that they pay more than before [Obama’s] reform.”

Gruber, whom the Obama administration hired to provide an independent analysis of reforms, was widely criticized for failing to disclose the conflict of interest created by $392,600 in no-bid contracts the Department of Health and Human Services awarded him while he was advising the president’s policy advisers.

Gruber also received $566,310 during 2008 and 2009 from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a study on the Medicare Part D plan.

In 2011, officials in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Colorado ordered reports from Gruber which offer a drastically different portrait in 2012 from the one Obama painted just 17 months ago.

“As a consequence of the Affordable Care Act,” the president said in September 2010, ”premiums are going to be lower than they would be otherwise; health care costs overall are going to be lower than they would be otherwise.”

Gruber’s new reports are in direct contrast Obama’s words — and with claims Gruber himself made in 2009. Then, the economics professor said that based on figures provided by the independent Congressional Budget Office, “[health care] reform will significantly reduce, not increase, non-group premiums.”

During his presentation to Wisconsin officials in August 2011, Gruber revealed that while about 57 percent of those who get their insurance through the individual market will benefit in one way or another from the law’s subsides, an even larger majority of the individual market will end up paying drastically more overall.

“After the application of tax subsidies, 59 percent of the individual market will experience an average premium increase of 31 percent,” Gruber reported.

The Federal Reserve secretly selected a handful of banks to bid for debt securities acquired by taxpayers in the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc., and the rest of Wall Street is wondering what happened to the transparency the central bank said it was committed to upholding.

“The exclusivity by which the process has shut out smaller dealers is a little un-American,” said David Castillo, head of sales and trading at broker Further Lane Securities LP in San Francisco, who said he would have liked to participate. “It seems odd that if you want to get the best possible price that it wouldn’t be open to anyone who wants to put in the most competitive bid.”

After inviting more than 40 broker-dealers to take part in a series of auctions last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked only Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and Barclays Plc (BARC) to bid on the full $13.2 billion of bonds offered in two sales over the past month. The central bank switched to a less open process after traders blamed the regular, more public disposals for damaging prices in 2011. This week, Goldman Sachs bought $6.2 billion of bonds in an auction.

Read the rest here.

Some favorites from the post:

• When we get hot and steamy, you make me Too Big to Fail.
• NPR’s Planet Money @planetmoney: I’ll be your lover of last resort. #FedValentines
• Austan Goolsbee @Austan_Goolsbee: Roses are red. Violets are pink. Don’t listen to goldbugs. No one cares what they think.
• Joseph Weisenthal @TheStalwart: Roses are red, violets are blue, my balance sheet is expanding, just thinking of you.
• jimgeraghty @jimgeraghty: I love you. Do you love me? Submit your information for review & clearance under Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, PL 104-13.’