I just finished doing the taxes for last year. When approached properly, doing one's income taxes is a sort of financial "count your blessings" exercise. It's especially bittersweet when you realize now earn too much to qualify for some deductions and credits you used a few years ago. On the one hand, you're paying more in taxes. On the other, you' ( Read more... )

So, you know how self-described Conservatives have been objecting to the government's expansion of the money supply as part of keeping us out of a replay of the Great Depression? It turns out that the most prominent economist who agreed with them was Karl Marx. One wonders if they would change their stand, if this coincidence was pointed out to

Nearly seven months after I had first expected to, I signed mortgage papers today. I paid off two loans with a third loan, and converted a co-op unit into a condo. Along the way, the appraised value of my unit jumped enough that I no longer have a mortgage under water. The payments also went down by about $250 a month ( Read more... )

So, over the last couple of years, we've learned that the largest banks spent most of the last decade making insanely risky mortgages, packaging them up into bondlike securities, and selling them on the open market. And then buying everyone else's mortgage-backed securities to hold as capital, as if they thought they were the only ones selling ( Read more... )

In an earlier stage of my life, I spent an unreasonable amount of time, both on-line and in-person, with a community of science fiction fans. As can happen, I wound up with an author that, despite only seeing in person once, I consider a friend, Dave Freer.

Over the last few years, he's reluctantly come to the conclusion that it's no longer safe ( Read more... )

For most of the week, the phone here hasn't worked. This normally isn't a problem, as most of our calls come from those who (feel they are, and sometimes really are) exempt from the telemarketer Do Not Call law. However, it's a bit annoying to pick up the phone, and have there be static or a dead line instead of a dial tone ( Read more... )

One of the things I've learned (often the hard way), is that there are often things that the management of a company did, that they don't want the investment community to know they did. An awful lot of those things, they're required by law to specify, largely because investors got ticked at other companies which did the same sorts of things, and ( Read more... )

The Federal Reserve is supposed to regulate the economy. When the economy gets too busy, and there are bidding wars over illegal immigrant labor, they're supposed to cut off the flow of gas money. (Failure to do this, when it became obvious a housing bubble was inflating, is the reason that Alan Greenspan has gone from Wizard to Village Idiot, in ( Read more... )

This is something I meant to post on Wednesday, but, well, didn't ( Read more... )

After spending all week feeding .qif files to GnuCash, I've found out why the bulk job I did Sunday blew up. One of those files is apparently corrupted; it's failed to load on three separate attempts so far ( Read more... )