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One of Frank Sinatra's signature ballads was a hauntingly beautiful song by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke called "Here's That Rainy Day," which starts with words similar to those above. (It's a timeless classic, and you can find it on Sinatra's 1959 "No One Cares" album, which I'm pretty sure is in the "Capitol Years" collection.)...keep reading

It is the evening of July 3. Tomorrow, we will observe our national day of reverence and celebration of the historic decision by a colonial people to break free of their subjection to an imperial power--and to build, on the strength of that decision, a new world of freedom and opportunity....keep reading

1. There's an especially bounteous harvest of resources this month, beginning ...
2. Speaking of nifty things to send clients, consider either or both of two other...
3. I'm not entirely sure why I shied away from Roger Lowenstein's The End of ...
4. I have, in my own very small way, experience as an ignored (indeed scorned) ...
5. Although it's nowhere near the scale of importance of any (much less all) of the ...
6. I mentioned last month that my bride and I would be in Normandy, never having ...

Financial advisors are accustomed to holding public companies to very high standards of compounding earnings. We insist on compound annual growth rates (CAGR) well into double digits, and expect companies to be punished for failing to deliver....keep reading

The long-held (and correct) view of this newsletter -- right up until the market's collapse from mid-September on -- was that the credit crisis was essentially a financial event, and that the broad economy, housing excepted, had yet to hear of it....keep reading

Robert Boswell...keep reading

The tensions in a capitalist democracy, as Jesus said of the poor, are always with us....keep reading

Last year at this time, I wrote that it seemed almost impossible to me that this newsletter was beginning its tenth year of publication. A year later--as we begin our eleventh--you can take out the word "almost."...keep reading

Resources...keep reading

Resources...keep reading

1. I fully expected to love Roy Diliberto's new book Financial Planning--The Next...
2. It has long (and loudly) been the position of this resource that most of ...
3. I've always been bedeviled by a particular historical/biographical conundrum...

Roy Diliberto...keep reading

Resources...keep reading

John Kenneth Galbraith, Nicholas Joseph Hugh Murray, Bruce Springsteen, John Maynard Keynes, The Wall Street Journal...keep reading

1. The best book-length account I've seen so far of the development of credit and ...
2. I also strongly recommend an astonishing book of financial history--from the ...
3. Longtime readers of this newsletter's Resources section may have concluded ...
4. Since 1970, the world has consumed twice the oil reserves that were known at ...
5. The clearest, most accessible, most dispassionate analysis of the global ...
6. Subscriber Fred Dent passed along a useful piece from Lord Abbett's Milton ...

Something made me go back, one day last month, to one of my all-time favorite books: Robert L. Bartley's The Seven Fat Years. Written during and after the bear market and recession of 1990-1991, the insider trading scandals and the collapse of the savings-and-loan system, The Seven Fat Years had a simple and compelling premise....keep reading

Squibs...keep reading

1. An exceptionally useful primer on the Fed's ability to intervene in financial ...
2. Brian Wesbury hits it out of the park nearly every time he comes to bat, and did ...
3. I did a conference call in February for MFS called "An Opportunist, Not A ...

Squibs...keep reading

Dizzy Gillespie, Alan Greenspan, Roadside sign in Jamesport, NY...keep reading