Submitted by CARPE DIEM

The Phoenix Affluent Marketing Service announced today that New Jersey has become the state with the largest percent of millionaires to total households. Ranked second past two years, New Jersey vaulted past Hawaii, which fell to fourth in the 2007 rankings.
Phoenix’s annual market sizing analysis and aggregate wealth rankings shows that New […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

The chart above is from the FDIC’s website. Notice that despite the “subprime crisis,” there was only 1 bank failure in the fourth quarter of 2007, out of almost 9,000 FDIC-insured institutions. It’s true that subprime troubles have fallen much harder on other sectors of the financial sector, but it’s also good […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
BOSTON GLOBE–Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino today blasted a state decision that paves the way for CVS Corp. and other retailers to open medical clinics inside their stores (see previous CD post here).
In a statement, the mayor said the decision yesterday by the state Public Health Council “jeopardizes patient safety. Limited […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

Interesting chart above (click to enlarge) showing the performance of the U.S. stock market in election years (green line) vs. non-election years (blue line) from 1900-present, showing about a 10% average annual stock market return in non-election years, vs. about a 14% annual return in election years. In that case, we can […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

BOSTON GLOBE: After state regulators cleared the way yesterday for store-based medical clinics, CVS Corp. said it plans to open more than two dozen inside Massachusetts drugstores this year, dispensing treatment for bronchitis and earaches a few aisles away from shelves of candy and nail polish.
The vote by the Public Health Council […]

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Submitted by The Capital Spectator
There’s more than one way to run a central bank, which inevitably leads to the possibilities of success or failure. The trick is figuring out if one or the other’s likely and if the expectation is already priced into bonds and other assets.
With that setup, we turn to the yesterday’s […]

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Submitted by Econbrowser
I thought it might be helpful to summarize some of the background on how we got into our present mortgage mess.
Once upon a time, when you needed to borrow money to buy a house, you went to a bank (in the old days it was often called a “savings and loan”). The bank […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
University of Rochester economist Steven E. Landsburg (author of Armchair Economics) comes out in support of Huckabee’s national sales tax in his most recent Slate.com column titled “Huckabee’s Tax Plan Is Brilliant: So why is it getting trashed?”:
A national sales tax is the exact equivalent of an income tax with a provision […]

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Submitted by A Dash of Insight
Over the last several days at “A Dash” we have been developing some important themes that will help investors in 2008. Today’s events provided strong support about each of the following ideas:

1. The gap between perception and reality, on the market, the Fed, and the economy;
[…]

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