Thanksgiving – An Almost Uniquely American Feast
For more than fifteen years, during the 1980s and 1990s, I spent a considerable amount of time in the Citibank offices in Geneva, Zurich, Lugano, Paris and London, with occasional visits to Barcelona and Madrid. No less than a dozen times a year, I’d fly across the Atlantic for a seven-to-ten-day trip packed with meetings, and more meetings; wonderful meals and equally wonderful wine;, and great opportunities to shop (when the U.S. dollar was strong.) I never tired of those sojourns—wanderlust is part of my DNA.
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“The Time Has Come,” the Walrus Said.
It is apt today, as we await with anticipation the decision next week regarding a possible reduction in the level of the Fed Funds’ rate, to replace “the Walrus” with “Jerome Powell,” the current chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed).
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The Mexican Election Got Me Thinking
This blog was inspired by the results of the recent democratic election in Mexico. The outcome of the election was not surprising, given that the candidate Claudia Sheinbaum is a protégée of the outgoing and highly popular president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. However, it did represent the first time in the country’s two hundred years of independence, a period during which it has had sixty presidents, that a woman has been elected to the presidency. Of the three largest North American countries (out of a total of 23), Mexico is the second to elect a woman as leader. Canada elected Kim Campbell in 1993 for a short-lived term of but a few months. As we all know, the United States has yet to elect a women as president.
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A Mother's Day Tribute
It was Mother’s Day weekend 1986, and I had left the madness of the world of investing behind in New York City to spend time with my mother in Boston. “I want to buy a house on the ocean,” she said with an air of confidence the moment I walked into the house. It was as though she had already made up her mind. “Will you go in on it with me?”
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Health Care – The Right Way
So often we hear of the travails of patients in the course of medical treatment—from bureaucracy to overbilling, from complications regarding insurance to the inability to get an appointment, and on and on. On what seems like far few occasions, there are good news tales of health care provided at the highest level of quality. With permission from my husband, John, I am relaying a story of skilled nursing and rehabilitation done to perfection.
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Breaking Glass: Tales from the Witch of Wall Street
Normally, I prefer to discuss the economy or to tell other people's stories, but this time is a little bit different. This time I have news to share with you that I think is very exciting and I hope you will too. Here is the press release for my new book, being released next month.
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The Stock Market “As Goes January, So Goes the Rest of the Year”
In my column on the stock market a year ago, I referenced the above long-quoted observation that I had come to know from my earliest days as a neophyte on Wall Street. That epigram, commonly called the “January Barometer,” refers to the year’s direction of the S&P500 stock index. The measure has been uncannily accurate, correctly forecasting nearly 90% of the time since 1950. It worked in spades last year, and with a strong stock market now behind us in January this year, one could anticipate that 2024 might well be another positive year for stock market returns.
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Moonshot by Dr. Albert Bourla - Give This Book as a Holiday Present to Yourself!
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Albert Bourla, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Pfizer. The event took place at the Bruce Museum—a Connecticut-based museum of both science and art—an appropriate setting to hear from a man of science, who had recently published a book, Moonshot, with the subtitle: Inside Pfizer’s Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible.
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My New Favorite Pastime...
I’m an early riser—sometimes an exceedingly early riser—and it is in those pre-dawn hours that I have found a new and pleasurable pastime. It’s best enjoyed in an environment of solitude because it takes a certain amount of concentration.
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There’s a Place… In Westerly, Rhode Island
An unpretentious coastal town off US Route I-95, in the southwest corner of the smallest state in the country, with a year-round population of about 20,000—it’s not likely that you’ve heard of the place unless you’re a New Englander.
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Friends
Friends are the flowers in the garden of life—they come in many varieties and they blossom when the conditions are right. Some take their time to show their colors, while others burst into bloom as if by magic. Occasionally, there are those who hibernate, but when they re-emerge, they are the same flower.
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Thoughts at the Three Quarters of a Century Mark
One day, when I was seven years old and had just learned how to do long subtraction, I took a piece of lined paper and wrote the number 2000 at the top of the page. Beneath it, I wrote the number 1948, put a minus sign to the left of it, a line under it, and did the subtraction. The result was fifty-two. That was how I discovered, to my horror, that I would be fifty-two years old at the beginning of the next century.
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Green Shoots on the Stock Market Horizon for 2024
In 1980, shortly after being hired at Citicorp Investment Management, Inc. (CIMI was how we referred to ourselves), I was introduced to Bob Davis, a full-blooded Texan, who ran the company’s investment office in Houston. We had important things in common—primarily, our youth (we were both thirty-two at the time) our passion for the world of investing, and our endless drive.
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Charitable Giving in the USA Needs Credit Card Company Support
Americans are among the most generous people in the world. Charities Aid Foundation, a UK-based charity compiling data from 140 countries, creates an annual country-by-country index of charitable giving. It is constructed from three forms of activity: donating money, volunteering time, and helping strangers. In 2022, the United States ranked #3, closely behind Indonesia and Kenya, two countries where religion plays a strong role in the culture of giving.
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Telehealth: Medicare Needs to Get With the Program
Three months ago, at the end of December, President Biden signed into law a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package that covered the gamut from defense appropriations, to funding for Ukraine’s military in its war with Russia, to emergency disaster assistance for the west and southwest areas of the country impacted by natural disasters. Buried deep inside that 4000 page document was also a two-year extension of a number of telehealth provisions for Medicare patients. Some may react by saying, “That’s great.” However, I say, “Why was that extension for only two years? Why not forever?”
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What's Good For The Goose.....
Some of the greatest scandals in the world of investments have involved insider trading, which is taking advantage of significant non-public information to reap personal profits from stock transactions. Anyone who has worked in the financial industry can appreciate and understand the validity of both the letter and the spirit of the regulations surrounding inside information.
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The Stock Market – A Lookback At 2022 and What May Be In Store for 2023
It may seem like an understatement to say that 2022 was an unpleasant year in the stock market when the total return on the S&P500 was a negative 18.1%, but as down markets go, there have been far worse. Remember 2008 when the index declined a whopping 36.5%?
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The Economy, The Stock Market, The World A Word of Advice to Millennials and Gen-Zs
It’s been well over a dozen years since the last sustained “bear market” in this country, defined as a twenty percent correction in stock prices from a recent high. The COVID-related crash in March of 2020 was technically a bear market, but its duration was so short and the subsequent bull market so strong, that it created little to none of the anxiety associated with a traditional bear market.
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The Parking Lot at the Train Station Tells the Story: The American Workplace Has Changed Forever
There was a time, not more than three years ago, when the waitlist to purchase a commuter parking space at the local train station (in my suburb of New York City) was between eighteen and twenty-four months. By 6:15am on any Monday through Friday, the parking lot that clung to both sides of the tracks had not a single empty space.
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It’s Time for Americans to Sacrifice on Behalf of Ukrainians
It’s of value to remember the quote from the great American statesman, Senator John McCain, who, in 2015 upon returning from a visit to Ukraine, said, “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.”
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