Thursday, December 31, 2015

Friday, December 25, 2015

BeCos(play) It's also Friday

 More not safe for festivities below the break, and as always bonus nerd points for recognizing characters.

Merry Christmas

I think this says things better than I would be able to, so Merry Christmas readers.

Friday, December 18, 2015

BeCos(play) It's Friday

 More not safe for recent premiers below the break, and as always bonus nerd points for recognizing characters.

Friday, December 11, 2015

BeCos(play) It's Friday

  
 
 More not safe to ogle three times below the break, and as always bonus nerd points if you recognize characters.

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Close to the Flag Pole

Large Quantity of Cellphones Bought By “Immigrants” at Rural Missouri Walmart Sets Off Alarms

Another High Cost of Public Pensions

Another moral hazard of defined benefit pension plans are a lack of incentives to control costs.

 

US Pensions Squander Retirees' Cash On Fees For Underperforming Hedge Funds

Underscoring just how poorly these investments have performed especially considering the fee structure, Jeff Hooke, a managing director with Focus Investment Banking in Washington conducted a study with five state pension funds over five years which showed that the median return on hedge-fund investments a full 6 percentage points lower than a 60/40 equity-fixed income index fund managed by Vanguard. The expense ratio on the Vanguard fund: 0.23%. That’s a hell of a long way away from 2 and 20. 
Hooke’s conclusion: “Hedge funds have cost the states tens of billions in opportunity costs the last five years.” 
So amusingly, public pension funds probably could have closed their funding gap by just buying the S&P and watching the Bernanke/Yellen put work its magic, but instead, they went out and plowed retirees’ money into hedge funds that ended up massively underperforming and now, it’s too late to take advantage of the equity gravy train because the FOMC is about the yank the punchbowl. 
We hope someone has learned a lesson here, but we seriously doubt it, because as Donald Boyd, senior fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government told Bloomberg, the longer pension fund managers cling to unrealistic return assumptions in a ZIRP and NIRP world, the more they’ll reach and the more they’ll likely lose which means “taxpayers and those who count on government services and investments will pay the price.”

 

The real take away is that absent significant performance differences( that are missing here), conventional wisdom is go with the lower expense ratio.

Friday, December 4, 2015

BeCos(play) It's Friday

 More not safe for sanity below the break, and as always bonus nerd points if you recognize characters.

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Actual War On Christmas

I know this is like speculating how fast a Top-fuel car went at the drag strip, but how long do you think it took the self hating narcissists on the left to start blaming the Christmas party for the San Bernardino shooting?