ECONOMICS IS ABOUT supply and demand. Call me biased, but I think why people demand particular goods and services is a whole more interesting than how suppliers do their thing.
It seems, however, that the topic of supply is unavoidable these days. We’re all hearing about supply chain woes. We’re all tired of seeing the empty shelf where our favorite crackers used to sit.
Even though economists will scream from the tallest Federal Reserve Bank building that supply and demand are separate and independent variables,

I REMEMBER TALKING to a guidance counselor in high school. The meeting was supposed to help me decide which career path I might follow after graduation. As part of my assessment, I’d taken a skills inventory test designed to narrow down jobs I was potentially suited for. Nearly 40 years later, I still remember three of the suggested occupations: tour bus driver, police officer and veterinarian.
In the end, I didn’t choose any of those careers.

MARKET STRATEGIST and economist Ed Yardeni says the current bull market is “the most hated and feared bull market that any of us have experienced, maybe in history.” This quote came from an interesting interview published in ThinkAdvisor, a magazine for financial professionals.
Worried about today’s lofty stock prices? You may find Yardeni’s views comforting. When asked about his market outlook, he commented on the strength of the current bull market, which started in 2009.

“HELP, I’VE FALLEN AND I can’t get up.”

It wasn’t too many years ago that I viewed that commercial as humorous. No more. A few days ago, my wife slipped on a curb and fell. No serious injury, just a cut on her lip and a scraped leg. But she couldn’t get up. Thankfully, my sons were there to help. I couldn’t do it on my own. My wife’s arthritis makes it difficult for her to walk long distances or climb stairs,

I HATE BUYING CARS. I can’t think of too many sales transactions that are more loathsome. When I look back at all the times I purchased a car, the one with my father in 1976 was the most memorable.
I needed a new car. I was living in San Diego and often driving to Los Angeles to visit family and friends. My 1966 Volkswagen Beetle couldn’t take too many more trips.
I asked my father if he wanted to come with me to look at new cars.

QUANTITATIVE EASING, or QE, has been the Federal Reserve’s policy of choice since interest rates reached their lower bound of 0%. The brainchild of then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, QE was launched in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. Quantitative easing is simply a euphemism for bond purchases—Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities—by the Federal Reserve.
In theory, QE should lead to lower interest rates, as reflected in bond yields. Bond prices are, of course,

READERS HAVE CAST an eye on more than 13 million HumbleDollar pages over the past five years. Not surprisingly, many of those pageviews were garnered by the homepage, the latest articles page and the main money guide page. But what about the site’s articles? Here are the 30 best-read pieces since the site’s launch on Dec. 31, 2016:

Terms of the Trade (2019) by Jim Wasserman
Nobody Told Me (2020) by Jonathan Clements
Farewell Money (2019) by Richard Quinn
He Gets,

NO DOUBT ABOUT IT, cryptocurrencies have had a raucous 2021. From bitcoin and ether’s fast start in January, to the rise of dogecoin in April and then the shiba-inu October shenanigans, folks owning seemingly any digital currency likely experienced big gains if they were owners since early 2021.
What if folks got in later in the year? Despite being all over the financial press and having inked all sorts of sponsorship deals—including the naming rights to what was once the Staples Center in Los Angeles—total crypto market cap today is pretty much unchanged from the peaks reached in May and September,

LAST WEEK, I REFERRED to the stock market as a hall of mirrors. That was perhaps too kind. With its erratic and often illogical movements, the market also has elements of a pinball machine, a rollercoaster and maybe a clown car. This has always been the case, but it feels especially true this year. There’s one silver lining, though. The market’s recent behavior highlights many of the behavioral biases we read about in textbooks.

TAX-LOSS HARVESTING is a popular strategy at this time of year. It works best with mutual funds and exchange-traded index funds, for which very similar investments exist. By swapping your losing funds for similar investments, you can realize your tax losses and maintain your market exposure without violating the wash-sale rule.
By contrast, tax-loss harvesting is difficult to implement with individual stocks. Is there a “nearly identical” investment for a company such as Tesla or Amazon?

IT’S NEVER GOOD TO be self-indulgent, and that’s doubly true on a day like this. Still, while the rest of you relish the gifts that came your way this holiday season, let me offer a guided tour of my most prized possessions.
I now have a firm idea of what they are, thanks to a ruthless process of subtraction. I’ve spent the past four months throwing out and selling countless things I don’t greatly care about. 

THERE ARE FEW certainties in life, but December always brings a few. Our neighbors will decorate their houses with bright lights, our mailbox will be stuffed with letters asking for charitable donations and the financial pundits will speculate whether there’ll be a Santa Claus rally this year.

If you’re a regular reader of HumbleDollar, you know that a Santa Claus rally has the potential to fill our portfolios with extra dollars via higher stock and mutual fund prices.

I GAVE THE BEST PEP talk I could muster, but it didn’t help. Our family of four entered Walmart in solidarity, planning to buy gifts to fill an Operation Christmas Child shoebox. Two of us left early in disarray.

I had to wrestle my screaming two-year-old all the way to the car because she knew only one way to approach the toy department—with herself in mind. Eliza melted down over her refusal to part with a cheap plastic toy.

AS ANOTHER YEAR draws to a close, I sometimes wish I could slow time down. As I grow older, it feels like life is moving way too fast. Maybe the reason is that I’m enjoying life more. I’ve always felt my life has gotten better as I’ve grown older.
Even though we’re having to deal with the fallout from COVID-19, I like my life. I wouldn’t want to turn back the clock and be young again.

IF YOU’RE A NUMBERS geek who’s also interested in Social Security, the recently released OASDI Beneficiaries by State and County 2020 report is for you. Put out by the Social Security Administration (SSA), the report provides a wealth of interesting statistics.
Here are some basic numbers for context. As of December 2020, the U.S. population was 329,484,123. The population age 65 or older was 55,659,365, or 16.9% of the total. The SSA provides benefits to retirees,