McDuck's Account Talk

[fabijo]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

Isnt socially responsible really a morality issue? And morals are up to individuals.

Tis true. They shouldn't be able to force people how to invest their money, but it would be nice if there was another stock fund geared at socially responsible. At least it gives those individuals the choice for morality.

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

This is how the funds are doing YTD:

G 2.13%
F 0.45%
C 5.99%
S 8.32%
I 8.15%

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

06/14/07-cob 50%_G 50%_I

I'm taking 50% out of the I-Fund.
I hope there isn't a -UfV. A +UfV would be nice.

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

06/15/07-cob 100%_G

Getting out today to hopefully get back in next week at a lower share price.

A +UfV today would be nice !

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

Vanguard ETF tracking MSCI EAFE begins trading

By John Spence
Last Update: 9:54 AM ET Jul 26, 2007

BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- Vanguard Group said Thursday an exchange-traded fund tracking the MSCI EAFE, a popular index for international developed-markets stocks, began trading on the American Stock Exchange. The Vanguard Europe Pacific ETF (VEA) has an expense ratio of 0.15%, undercutting the fees on iShares MSCI EAFE (EFA) , which levies 0.35% and is one of the largest U.S.-listed ETFs. The Vanguard offering is structured as a separate share class of an existing index mutual fund.

MarketWatch Copyright © 2007

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

It's been a lovely week

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

 

[smine]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

I'll drink to that!

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

 

[nnuut]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

OK Greg I understand how you feel, but hold it down PLEASE!View attachment 1817

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

OK Greg I understand how you feel, but hold it down PLEASE!

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

Don't forget what happened to him right after he shouted that word for the last time.....OUCH! :blink:

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

Funerals for Hispanics present challenges for funeral directors
8/6/2007, 4:32 p.m. ET
The Associated Press

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Language barriers, longer visitations and shipping bodies internationally are some of the challenges facing funeral directors in Alabama as the number of Hispanics living — and dying — in the state grows.

Albertville Funeral Home sees about 20 Hispanic funerals a year, with families coming from DeKalb, Etowah, Blount, Madison and Marshall counties, said general manager Rick Brown.

Heidi Alvarez of Southside said she was called to Marshall County three years ago to help translate for a Guatemalan family after a young woman was seriously injured in a car accident. The woman died soon after, and Alvarez stayed for several days to help the family organize the funeral.

"I don't think her husband could read and write," Alvarez told The Birmingham News for a story Monday. "I ended up doing a lot for them, even singing at the service."

With friends and family working different hours, Hispanic funerals sometimes require longer visitations. Brown said he has kept the funeral home open as late as 11 p.m. for visitors getting off late at the nearby chicken plant. Alvarez said the family took up a collection at the Guatemalan funeral she translated so the visitation could stretch past normal visiting hours to midnight.

Brown and Bobby Berryhill, the Madison County coroner and owner of Huntsville's Berryhill Funeral Home, said most Hispanic families want the bodies shipped back to their home country. They said that involves a complicated process that can take three weeks or longer.

A death certificate and an "apostle seal" — the legal authorization to ship the body out of state — must be sent to Montgomery. Then about six forms have to be prepared and translated for the trip. For Mexico, for example, the funeral home must provide an embalming certificate, certify the dead person had no infectious diseases, get a transit permit and provide other papers.

Once all those steps have been completed, it can take up to 10 days to arrange a flight for the body. And airlines generally won't transport a body unless a funeral home in the destination country will be there to receive the body.

The arrangements can cost up to $6,000. Brown told the News that most families he sees deal in cash because they don't have checks or credit cards. Often lacking life insurance because they're illegal, families frequently rely on their immigrant communities for donations.

Brown said he remembers one family paying a $5,000 funeral bill with Wal-Mart bags full of crumpled bills.

Even Hispanics who speak fluent English may be too overcome with grief to make funeral arrangements in their second tongue. But Berryhill said funeral directors know what grieving families need.

"You may not understand," he said, "but you know what's going on."
___
Information from: The Birmingham News
Copyright 2007 Associated Press.

 

[McDuck]

Comptroller General: USA Should Learn From The Fall Of Rome...

Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned

By Jeremy Grant in Washington
Published: August 14 2007 00:06 | Last updated: August 14 2007 00:06

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

Mr Walker’s views carry weight because he is a non-partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often described as the investigative arm of the US Congress.

While most of its studies are commissioned by legislators, about 10 per cent – such as the one containing his latest warnings – are initiated by the comptroller general himself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Walker said he had mentioned some of the issues before but now wanted to “turn up the volume”. Some of them were too sensitive for others in government to “have their name associated with”.

“I’m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake-up call,” he said. “As comptroller general I’ve got an ability to look longer-range and take on issues that others may be hesitant, and in many cases may not be in a position, to take on.

“One of the concerns is obviously we are a great country but we face major sustainability challenges that we are not taking seriously enough,” said Mr Walker, who was appointed during the Clinton administration to the post, which carries a 15-year term.

The fiscal imbalance meant the US was “on a path toward an explosion of debt”.

“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks,” said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm.

Current US policy on education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq also was on an “unsustainable path”.

“Our very prosperity is placing greater demands on our physical infrastructure. Billions of dollars will be needed to modernise everything from highways and airports to water and sewage systems. The recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis was a sobering wake-up call.”

Mr Walker said he would offer to brief the would-be presidential candidates next spring.

“They need to make fiscal responsibility and inter-generational equity one of their top priorities. If they do, I think we have a chance to turn this around but if they don’t, I think the risk of a serious crisis rises considerably”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk



MARKETS BRACE FOR SEISMIC SEPTEMBER

By SUZANNE McGEE

September 4, 2007 -- The Labor Day weekend is over, the kids are back in school and Wall Street traders have returned to their desks, bracing themselves for a bumpy ride.

But this year investors shouldn't count on the "Santa Claus rally" to rescue them from the tumult created by the subprime market implosion.

" People talk a lot about October, because that's when the big crashes - 1929, 1987 - have happened, but actually it's September that is usually the worst month of the year for stock indexes," said Tobias Levkovich, U.S. equity strategist at Citigroup.

This September promises to be extraordinarily interesting. Next week, investors will get the first signals of how badly major financial services firms have been hit by the subprime market's collapse and the credit market fallout.

A week later, on Sept. 18, the Federal Reserve's policy makers meet to discuss whether the credit market carnage has damaged the economy. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has made it clear that he will act promptly to slash rates at the first hint that this is occurring, and there is less chance of the market getting the jitters if the rate cut follows a regularly scheduled meeting.

Even if investors emerge unscathed from September, October has more perils. Hedge funds will have reported at the end of the third quarter and at least some of those funds will permit investors to sell their holdings.

The subsequent forced sales of hedge fund holdings could further rattle markets."

"There is a huge unknown risk that is going to have to work its way through the market, and that is going to take months," warned Stephen Wood, senior portfolio strategist at the Russell Investment Group.

"We should expect to see financial stress of the kind that we haven't seen since" the collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Wood said.

Copyright 2007 NYP Holdings, Inc.

 

[Birchtree]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

Let's continue to scare'em silly - we don't want individual speculator participation. Especially if they're exiting the real estate industry.

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

U.S. economic growth expected to fall behind

Destabilized currency markets could lead to more trouble than the subprime crisis, UN says; analyst say possibility of economic catastrophe is minimal.

September 5 2007: 12:41 PM EDT

GENEVA (AP) -- The U.S. economy will slow sharply this year and fall behind growth rates in most of the world, according to forecasts in a U.N. report released Wednesday.

Woes in the housing market will drag U.S. gross domestic product for 2007 to a modest 2 percent growth, compared with 3.3 percent last year, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development said in its flagship annual report.

For the first time since 2001, both the European Union, at 2.8 percent, and Japan, 2.3 percent, are predicted to have higher GDP growth than the United States.

China, at 10.5 percent, and India, 8.5 percent, should experience economic growth rates similar to the last three years, the report said.

Global growth, meanwhile, is pegged at 3.4 percent, down from 4 percent in 2006, largely because of the U.S. slowdown, the report said.

For now, the world economy is going through a "golden period," Supachai Panitchpakdi, the former World Trade Organization chief now heading the U.N. agency, told reporters in Geneva.

High commodity prices continue to boost growth in developing countries, which accounted for a 37 percent share of global trade last year, the report said. A decade ago their share of trade was 29 percent.

Economies in Africa are predicted to grow by 6 percent, Latin America and the Caribbean by 4.7 percent, and ex-Soviet bloc states still outside the European Union by 7 percent.

"There might be some downward revision," Supachai said.

"All this depends on the degree of adjustments coming out of the U.S. economy," he said. Further economic turmoil from risky lending practices - like subprime mortgages for borrowers with weak credit histories - was possible, Supachai said.

Holger Flassbeck, a senior official at the agency, said large-scale currency speculation was also a threat to financial markets and, by extension, the global economy.

Banks and hedge funds have been taking advantage of widely differing interest rates across the world in recent years to borrow large sums of Japanese yen or Swiss francs and invest them in high-yield accounts elsewhere - a practice known as "carry trade."

Sudden changes in exchange rates could cause panic selling and destabilize currency markets, creating a domino effect that would be worse than the subprime crisis. That could affect entire economies, Flassbeck said, adding that Japan was particularly vulnerable.

Analysts said the possibility of such an economic catastrophe was minimal.

Investors are already showing greater caution on currency deals, said Charles Goodhart, emeritus professor of banking and finance at the London School of Economics.

"When people get increasingly concerned about risk, as they have done recently, then they tend to close out their carry trade positions," he told The Associated Press, noting that the value of the yen has been rising amid risk concerns.

Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt, concurred.

"The unwinding of the yen carry trade is something that has already happened," he said.

 

[McDuck]

Re: Greg's Account Talk

Slowest job growth since '03

ADP tally shows weak employment gain.

September 5 2007: 8:57 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Private sector employers added the fewest workers in August in more than four years, according to a closely-watched employment reading that is watched for clues as to what the Labor Department will report on labor market strength later this week.

Wednesday's reading from payroll services firm ADP found only a 38,000 net gain in jobs in the private sector in August, down from a 41,000 job gain in July. It was the smallest job gain in the ADP report since a 7,000 decline in jobs in June 2003.

The report showed that manufacturers cut 33,000 jobs in the most recent month, while the rest of the goods producing sector, primarily construction, cut an additional 16,000 jobs. But those cutbacks were offset by a gain of 87,000 jobs in the private sector.

The government is due to report on the overall labor market outside of farming jobs this Friday. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com are forecasting that there was a net gain of 110,000 jobs at both private sector and public sector employers in August, up from the 92,000 rise in July. The unemployment rate is forecast to remain at 4.6 percent.

The employment readings are being particularly closely watched this month due to the uncertainty about what the Federal Reserve will do with interest rates at its next meeting on Sept. 18. Many investors and economists are forecasting an interest rate cut, but a much stronger than expected job report could dash those hopes for a rate cut.