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Warren Buffett had some comments on the life insurance and...

A recent study from Cerulli Associates indicates that registered investment advisors (RIA) are more than hesitant to recommend annuities to their clients.

The report surveys and compares the views of various forms of financial advisors.  Not surprisingly, financial advisors’ product views are tightly related to the financial incentives that support their business models.  Consider, for example, the following:

1. Only 7% of insurance company representatives would be reluctant to
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Professor James Galbraith provided a keynote address at a recent industry conference sponsored by NAVA—the Association for Insured Retirement Solutions. 

Professor Galbraith comes from the Economics department at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.  A Keynesian and an author most recently of The Predator State, Professor Galbraith has been a consistently strong and vocal advocate of government stimulus and intervention in response to the financial crisis.

Professor Galbraith’s basic message is that...

The first time I visited New York I was taken in a sidewalk shell-game within 45 minutes of being in the city—no kidding.  Shell games involve trying to guess where a card or any other item might reside after being shuffled among various covers by a dealer.

There are basically three reasons why I lost $40 within 45 minutes of arriving in NYC: 1) I was naïve; 2) I was overconfident in my card-spotting abilities, and; 3) there was a large amount of asymmetric information—in other words, the “dealers” (to use a polite term) had a heck of...

Bloomberg reports that there is continued strength in fixed and immediate...