I’M PLAYING ECONOMIST today, looking ahead to third-quarter GDP, the first estimate of which will be released Thursday. No, I won’t be offering a forecast. There are plenty of highly capable economists doing just that. Rather, my goal is to discuss what few in the media are talking about. Could a recession be in the offing?
According to economists Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, a recession is defined as “a period of significant decline in total output,

THE GAMBLING TRUISM says you can’t beat the house. That brings me to a recent HumbleDollar article that discussed choosing either a Medicare Advantage plan or traditional Medicare with an accompanying Medigap policy. Almost two dozen readers weighed in with comments.
My two cents: Never forget that the managed-care companies offering Advantage plans are mostly for-profit companies that are publicly traded. The government’s purpose is to transfer its insurance risk to those companies.

DO I SOUND LIKE a broken record? Last week, the performance gap between U.S. and foreign stocks widened even further. Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (symbol: VTI) has now returned 21.6% so far in 2021, while Vanguard FTSE All World ex-U.S. ETF (VEU) is up just 9.4%.
International funds’ relative weakness has become so routine that it rarely makes the financial news. What’s different this time: The economic landscape would seem to favor foreign shares,

WE ALL HAVE OUR OWN indicators for where the cost of living is headed. These are the kinds of things that hit us viscerally. Last weekend, we had family visiting, and we decided to order pizza and wings. Two large pizzas, two dozen wings and an order of chicken tenders for our grandsons cost $103. A large pepperoni pizza alone was $26.
On Sunday morning, my wife and I took our two older grandsons out to breakfast.

BACK IN THE 1950s, economists Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller developed a theory that, even today, is taught in virtually every finance class.

To understand the theory, suppose you’re running a company and want to build a new factory. To raise money for the project, you generally have two options: You can sell shares to investors or you can borrow money. No one disputes that basic framework, but Modigliani and Miller added a twist: They argued that,

NOBODY, INCLUDING ME, wants to spend their hard-earned money on health care. That, of course, is illogical if you’re being treated for an illness or relieved of discomfort. Nevertheless, we don’t want to use our own money. That’s why we have health insurance—to cover everything. Or at least that’s our expectation.

When I ran employee benefits, I had many debates with workers about their health care bills. When a doctor charged significantly above the reasonable and customary fee,

THE S&P 500 STOCKS are up roughly 100% since March 2020’s market low. I’m 100% clueless about how much longer this remarkable run will last. But I’m 100% confident that, when the next downturn comes, many investors will rush for the exit, fearful that their stock holdings will soon be worth little or nothing.
Which brings me to one of the most important investment concepts: intrinsic value.
No, intrinsic value isn’t a simple notion and,

NOW THAT I’M RETIRED, I use two metrics whenever I’m faced with opportunities that require an investment of time or money.
First, there’s ROTI, or return on time invested. I use this metric to determine if something is worth my time. I want to invest the bulk of my time in things that’ll make me happy. Some examples of high-return time investments are:

Seeing family and friends
Going on new adventures
Making new friends
Starting a business
Learning something new
Going fishing

Recently,

HAVE YOU EVER HELD a stock for years and grown to love it? What if your research now says it might be time to break up?
Many years ago, I bought AT&T. It was the perfect stock for a dividend investor like me. It was a dividend aristocrat, meaning it had increased its dividend for at least 25 years. In fact, AT&T had been increasing its dividend for more than three decades.
But while the dividend was always generous,

I RECENTLY WROTE about the fallacy of time diversification. Time diversification is the widely held belief that market risk declines as our holding period lengthens. It’s one of the cornerstones of many investors’ approach to asset allocation and risk management.
Financial theory, however, refutes time diversification because market risk—as measured by standard deviation—actually increases with longer holding periods. The math tells us that the dispersion of potential results widens with longer time horizons. This counterintuitive insight rests on the assumption that total returns have a normal,

MY MOM JUST SOLD her house. A few months ago, she interviewed three real estate agents. Each offered her a different opinion of how much her home was worth. All three also charged different commissions.
In the end, she selected the agent with the highest fee. I was skeptical when she told me her 1,100-square-foot home would be listed for $500,000. My mom’s house and mine are nearly identical in size, age, location and condition.

I ALMOST NEVER MAKE fast decisions. But I bought a used car in August immediately after seeing it. If I hadn’t, I might still be looking.
Inventories for new cars are at record lows. Prices for used vehicles are at record highs. This was not the year to buy another car, but I wanted to replace my 14-year-old Mazda sedan with a more reliable vehicle for long trips to see my children. I was tired of months isolated at home,

REMEMBER JULY 2008? The financial system was faltering following Bear Stearns’s March 2008 forced merger with J.P. Morgan Chase. That summer, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needed special assistance. The Global Financial Crisis was almost upon us.
But many folks forget that, at that time, another crisis was coming to a head—a global energy squeeze.
In 2008, I was a busy 20-year-old driving my 1998 Toyota Camry around Jacksonville, Florida, taking summer classes and working a part-time job.

IN 1994, AMERICANS could find out what was going on in their communities by reading one of the 1,534 daily U.S. newspapers. Most of them were published in individual cities and towns where they served subscribers defined by geography, rather than by political persuasion or socio-economic class.
These newspapers were trusted voices. They provided common knowledge and community forums for everyone from bank presidents and doctors to plumbers and teachers.
As of 2018, 255 daily newspapers had stopped publishing,

LAST WEEK’S NEWS that Social Security recipients will receive a 5.9% cost-of-living adjustment for 2022 might seem like a nonevent. After all, those larger monthly checks will be fully devoured by today’s higher prices.
Or maybe not.
September’s report for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) showed that inflation for medical care services—a big cost for retirees—was quite tame over the past 12 months, rising less than 1%. Seniors also spend significantly less on transportation,