Fourth Quarter 2012|Jim Williams| Earlier this month, a gridlocked Washington managed to pass a tax bill. After twelve years of uncertainty about tax rates at the end of the "Bush tax cuts" which were always temporary, tax rates are "permanent."
Third Quarter 2012|Jim Williams| Until recently, the only way to secure guaranteed income has been as an add-on to a variable annuity. But now there is an alternative.
Second Quarter 2012|Jim Williams| Last quarter I wrote about the Behavior Gap, primarily as it relates to investing, and suggested some simple ways to close the gap. This quarter the focus is on some factors that support behavior change.
First Quarter 2012|Jim Williams| It has been well documented that the overall performance of mutual funds is almost always quite a bit better than performance received by individual mutual fund investors. How can this be?
Fourth Quarter 2011|Jim Williams| Since our approach is one that does not change with short-term swings in the markets and does not depend on our predicting market turns, our story is essentially a one-time story which doesn’t lend itself to a new version each quarter. Still, it’s a good thing to revisit first principles from time to time just to keep the thought process grounded.
Third Quarter 2011|Jim Williams| The newest Nobel Prize (shared) winner in economics, Thomas J. Sargent, seems to be a man of few words. His research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy focuses on expectations; how they are formed, how they matter, and how they might be measured in macroeconomic models. The effort toward extending theories of expectations is particularly relevant these days.