This week’s Monday Money Minute challenges you to talk with your friends, family and colleagues about money. After our exciting experience with #Phroogal’s Road to Financial Wellness last Friday night, we’re pumped about people’s interest in talking about money. We learned from talking with every day people, not in anyway connected to finance, that they …
A couple of weeks ago, we started a two-part series about stock trading rules to educate our readers of potential trading violations they, their broker or financial advisor can cause. Trading violations can happen by mistake, so hopefully this series eliminates those mistakes for you.
The following trading violations pertain to margin trading violations.
I know this sounds vague, but something I heard on the radio a number of years ago had a profound impact on my economic understanding. I was listening to American Public Radio’s MarketPlace and a biographer was talking about the economic climate at the time (2008 or 2009, the start of the Great Recession). She was being interviewed about a biography she had written of a deceased and well-known economist. I don’t remember the author or the economist’s name, but her point was that there were significant layoffs occurring and she said this economist would be ashamed by what business leaders were doing. Businesses were laying people off in droves to support their bottom lines when the country’s long-term needs should have been put above that of a company’s near-term profits. She surmised that what this economist wrote about would highlight the short sightedness of businesses afraid to ride out a quarter or two of lower profits and lower stock prices in order to keep the economy going at a macro level. In essence, her subject would have put some blame for the deteriorating economy on business leaders who were quick to lay off workers to prop up stock prices and their own wallets.
If you only watched the news, you might think there are no rules on Wall Street. This, in fact, is not true. There are a lot of rules on Wall Street, maybe even too many. Quite honestly, it’s hard to keep up with all the rules, the various ruling bodies and all their changes. Some say, this makes it hard to enforce the rules that exist. That may or may not be by design.
We recently started following and engaging with #QU4ARK, a radio show on WIRN: World Internet Radio Network, and have been asked by two of the hosts about money and economic sustainability. When I thought about this, I was reminded of Aesop’s fable, The Goose with the Golden Eggs, and how it parallels what’s happening today in the US and in many other developed countries.