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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