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I spoke with a certified financial planner at Vanguard last week. For security in the event of a U.S. stock market meltdown, he recommended holding some bonds via a fund. Which fund? One that invests exclusively in U.S. municipal bonds. That’s right, the folks that have signed up for pension and retiree health care obligations that they can’t even understand, much less pay (the shortfall is supposedly around $3 trillion, but since nobody knows how long people will live or how much health care will cost in the future, it could be much more). Also, in many cases, these are the bonds of sovereign entities that can default without leaving investors any recourse in federal courts (see this Brookings Institution article). Finally, given enough inflation in the U.S., these bonds would be paid back in “mini-dollars”.

The idea of California bonds as a hedge against the risk of a collapse in the price of Intel strikes me as a poor one. Would an investor be better off with a mixture of bonds from different economies worldwide and in different currencies? I’d feel a lot more comfortable holding bonds from Germany than from the city of Chicago. If the U.S. government’s money printing operation generates out of control inflation, it would be much nicer to be paid in Australian dollars (now worth more than the U.S. dollar, for the first time since 1983, when the currency began to trade freely) than in U.S. mini-dollars. And if the world muddles through more or less unchanged… the currency variations should average out to null and the interest rates on those foreign bonds should also be about the same as on dollar bonds.

One potential disadvantage to this plan is that foreign bonds don’t get the tax exemption on interest that U.S. municipal bonds get. Perhaps the sophisticated investor would buy the municipal bonds and insure them against default (and hope that, in the next crisis, whoever succeeds AIG as the biggest bond insurer also gets bailed out with money from the suckers (i.e., taxpayers)).

Another disadvantage seems to be high fees, in the neighborhood of 0.5% per year. The yield on a 10-year German bond is 3.14% (Pi, as far as a computer scientist is concerned), so fully 1/6th of the return goes to a manager. The expense ratio on a typical Vanguard bond fund is around 0.12%.

Does anyone have specific funds to recommend? Or perhaps a strategy of simply buying individual long-term bonds and holding them? (I have to believe that the trading fees for an individual buying a foreign bond are going to be much higher than what a fund would pay.)

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Folks: I have two PCs at home that are both fairly new and running Windows 7. They connect (sometimes) to several shared directories on an HP Mediasmart server. At times the shared directories can be browsed as though they were local; at other, unpredictable, times, an application will hang for 5-10 seconds waiting to get a directory listing. The HP Mediasmart, which is running Windows Home Server, seems to be one of the crummiest IT products ever designed. It can take a minute or two to log in to the admin console (when the computer and server are four feet apart and connected via gigabit Ethernet). Instead of using a standard operating system RAID1 arrangement, the Mediasmart duplicates information from disk to disk on a per-folder basis. When you copy a few GB of new data onto the server, the performance becomes even flakier for a day or so. The only thing that I can say in favor of the Mediasmart is that it has a good backup and restore service.

I didn’t like my previous NAS box, a ReadyNAS (now Linksys), because the admin console (viewed from a Web browser) was very slow to load, but the underlying SMB service was much better (I am pretty sure that it was running Linux and SAMBA), and the mechanical/fan noise from the box was too loud for domestic use.

What are my options? I have a hard time believing that this is the best that Windows can do with a shared drive, since I know that corporate slaves all over the U.S. are working off networked drives all day every day.

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My favorite thing about the protests surrounding state capitols (story) is that, in each state, thousands of unionized government workers are able to spend Monday-Friday, 9-5, demanding that politicians act on their behalf. How come the private-sector workers (e.g., the 67-year-olds working at Walmart who support the $100,000+/year pensions of retired 50-year-old former public workers) aren’t counter-protesting in similar numbers? Probably because they have to work! What better proof could their be of the superior situation of government workers relative to their private counterparts?

[I like the New York Times article because they cite just one example of a retired government worker. He is 50 and, the Times reports, has a pension of just $19,500 per year. The reporter did not seek out the Ohio equivalent of Bruce Malkenhorst, collecting $510,000 annually from the taxpayers of California (see this list of the 9111 California pensioners; see this Forbes magazine article for how Malkenhorst vaulted to the top).]

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The latest New Yorker magazine has a good article on where U.S. tax dollars flow in Afghanistan.

[Note that the writer makes some of the same points that I made 1.5 years ago in http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2009/11/18/who-finances-the-taliban-and-al-qaeda-we-do/ ]

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Living in the western suburbs of Boston, surrounded by Millionaires for Obama, seemingly every third car is a pavement-melting SUV, purchased by rich parents anxious to protect their precious children. Spending $50,000 for a Volvo XC90 or $70,000 for a BMW X5 and enjoying less interior space than a Hyundai Sonata sedan seems like a great deal to them because Precious Little Johnny’s safety will be guaranteed. What if the parent had cheaped out and bought a $10,000 minivan being discarded by a rental agency instead? Conditional upon an accident actually occurring, the minivan kid would have half the risk of death or injury. That’s right! A child in an SUV accident, even after adjusting for all possible age factors, is twice as likely to be killed or injured compared to the same child with the same driver in a minivan accident. Read the full article from Injury Prevention.

[I learned this while researching a new review of the Honda Odyssey on which comments/corrections would be appreciated. I’ll be adding photos soon.]

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A friend emailed me The Experience Economy, by David Brooks. Brooks is responding to Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation in which, supposedly, Cowen says that the U.S. grew fast until 1974 by doing the easy stuff, e.g., exploiting our cheap land and other natural resources. When the growing got tough, the Americans stopped growing, according to Cowen, at least at the individual income level (the population has ballooned from around 200 million people to over 300 million, so of course the GDP is larger).

Brooks says that young people have become less materialistic. They are seeking “meaning not money” and that’s why they are so likely to be unemployed and poor.

I’m beginning to wonder what the qualifications are to write for the New York Times. Random bloggers don’t have paid research assistants, fact checkers, and all day every day to hunt down sources. So you might expect them to write something like this in 20 minutes and then head off to their day job. But for David Brooks this is his day job and he does have a lot of institutional resources on which to draw.

Why couldn’t he find “Is Materialism Rising in America?” from the September 2000 issue of Society in which Terry Nichols Clark says that most surveys indicate that “private materialism has risen since the 1960s among the young”. Although there is some disagreement among sociologists, there is certainly no convincing evidence that materialism is on the decline. With the cost of a college education having risen so much faster than inflation, it isn’t even clear why one would expect a decrease in materialism. With the increased crowding of the United States has come a huge increase in the real cost of houses in nice neighborhoods that entail short commutes. When a young person learns that a prestigious college degree costs $250,000 and a desirable house less than a one-hour drive from work is $1.5 million, you would have to question his intelligence if he didn’t answer “financial success is very important to me”.

Nor does Brooks address the OECD study that found a 20 percent increase in per-capita hours worked in the U.S. from 1970 through 2002. Without citing any sources, Brooks says “For the past few decades, Americans have devoted more of their energies to postmaterial arenas and less and less, for better and worse, to the sheer production of wealth.” Perhaps he means that Americans are at work but they’re wasting time on Facebook instead of trying to produce wealth?

If this is the best that traditional media can do, I can’t figure out why the New York Times maintains that it is somehow higher quality than the average wordpress.com blog.

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If you’ve wondered how so many unionized Massachusetts state employees manage to earn over $200,000 per year (plus pension and other benefits worth at least another $100,000), this Boston Herald story provides a small clue. As a 2011 gift to taxpayers, Deval Patrick and our one-party Legislature decided to force cities and towns in Massachusetts to keep offices open and “appropriately staffed” on Evacuation Day and Bunker Hill Day, two holidays not recognized anywhere else in the United States. Meanwhile, union agreements require the government to pay the workers double-time.

[Background: Visit http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/specials/2010_state_salaries/ and select “department of state police” (and no other options), for example, to see the difference between nominal and actual cash compensation; note that the system is restricted to just those civil servants who earned more than $100,000 per year (the median wage in Massachusetts is about $18/hour or $36,000 per year (source)). Remember that pensions are based not on the nominal salary, but on actual compensation during an employee’s last few years of work. So a Massachusetts worker whose “salary” is $75,000 per year can easily get a pension, starting at age 45, of more than $100,000 per year. The retiree also gets state-paid health insurance whose current funding shortfall will cost the average Boston family about $100,000 (source) in addition to whatever level of taxation the family is currently paying.]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14Salmon.html says that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s regulations for public companies are so onerous that all of the real investment is happening in the private equity world:

“Only the biggest and oldest companies are happy being listed on public markets today. As a result, the stock market as a whole increasingly fails to reflect the vibrancy and heterogeneity of the broader economy. To invest in younger, smaller companies, you increasingly need to be a member of the ultra-rich elite.”

An interesting statistic is that the number of U.S. public companies is down from a 1997 peak of 7000 to just 4000 today. That’s impossible to argue with, but perhaps the author is wrong about the reason.

The S.E.C. certainly is a rich source of annoyance for public companies, forcing them to file a lot of paperwork and making the CEO sign a statement that he is only looting as much as the buried disclosures say he is. But isn’t it possible that it is investors who are shying away from the public markets? The S.E.C. regulations don’t stop employees from looting from investors by issuing themselves enough options to dilute the cash investors by 30 or 50 percent (I wrote about this is my economic recovery plan). Nor do the S.E.C. regulations stop employees from repricing those options whenever the stock falls (so an executive whose job was to push the stock price from 50 up to 100 gets the options repriced at 20 after the stock falls due to some ill-advised decisions).

Let’s look at Robert Nardelli, named by CNBC as one of the “Worst American CEOs of All Time”. He received a mostly-unconditional $500 million in salary for trashing Home Depot and leaving its shareholders with a worn-out shell. At Chrysler, however, under the thumb of the private equity owners, Nardelli earned only $1/year and anything additional was to be based on the company’s success (Nardelli joined Chrysler in August 2007; the company went bankrupt in April 2009 (Home Depot paid $210 million just to get rid of Nardelli; you’d think that Chrysler would have handed him at least a few million of the taxpayer dollars that the Obama Administration gave them, but press reports suggest otherwise)).

Perhaps the Russians who are financing Facebook are too savvy to subject themselves to the depredations of U.S. public company executives. If companies aren’t going public, couldn’t it be because they can’t get the money that they need through an IPO? That the folks with the big dollars prefer to keep a closer eye on their money than is practical in the U.S. public market?

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I looked at today’s New York Times and saw stories about Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, refusing to step down in the face of protests, and New York Representative Christopher Lee, resigning in disgrace after emailing a shirtless photo of himself to a hot 34-year-old “government employee” (plenty of time for sex when you have to work only 15 hours/week!). It then occurred to me that perhaps this is the way angry citizens will get rid of unwanted politicians: Photoshop a shirtless image of the hated leader and then distribute to folks advertising in the personals section of Craigslist.

As U.S. politicians are mostly older and not very computer-savvy and the people whose future income they are spending are young and often very able digital photo editors, perhaps those who aren’t able to vote will finally have a way to fight back against state and federal legislators who, through unfunded public employee pension commitments or explicit borrowing, are squandering what might have been their future wealth.

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I have drafted a brief review of the book Dreaming in Chinese and would appreciate comments/corrections.

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