Hussman Funds Talking Points for the “Occupy Wall Street” Protesters

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Economics, finance, occupy wall street

Hussman Funds – Weekly Market Comment: Talking Points for the “Occupy Wall Street” Protesters – October 10, 2011.

From a real economist.

• “Failure” only means that corporate bondholders don’t get every penny
• The Federal Reserve’s purchases of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s debt obligations were illegal
• Creating shell companies to buy Wall Street’s bad assets is not “discounting,” and was therefore also illegal
• The skewed distribution of wealth in the U.S. is worsened by policies that misallocate capital and divert public funds to bail out investments that have already gone bad.

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Quicken Windows to Mac. Major Pain!

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finance, mint, quicken

Update 1/10:  I have decided that Quicken for Mac is junk and removed it from my system. I managed to get over $3k out of sync with my Bank of America checking account, and kept complaining that Discover was sending it invalid dates. Good riddance to  a crappy application!

So far I like Mint.com , though I’m not sure I am psychologically ready to have only an online checkbook. Must be the baby boomer in me talking. For now I still have my Quicken on my old XP laptop. One idea is to move this to Parallels (which I already have) on my Mac.

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As part of our family’s move from Windows XP to Mac OS X, we installed Quicken for Mac. Should be easy: just install the Mac app, copy the quicken files, load them into the new app. But nooo …. It was a major pain in the you-know-where. Firstly, the data files are so dissimilar that one has to export all to a set of .qif files which are then imported into the Mac version. There are many limitations and gotchas here. If you have a relatively simple and straightforward check register you are OK. If you have a complex financial life with multiple retirement and investment accounts, you are in for much trouble.

Gary’s set up was not too bad, he has a few accounts in his Quicken. It only took a couple of tries, less than 2 hours. My data was a different tale. I have investment history going back to the stone age. Plus lots of accounts. I spent much of the day fighting this monster. The import process randomly assigned transactions to what ever account it felt like – I found a $10K transfer from an IRA to a checking account which existed only in the mind(less) of Quicken. This will not do. I finally gave up trying to import transactions and just downloaded as much data as I could from various financial institutions. This was fine with credit cards, but the Bank of America web site only has 13 months of data per account. My E*Trade accounts are totally screwed up for cash balances – I had to make some bogus balancing entries and I am not sure how this will pan out going forward.

I’m seriously thinking of trying out Mint and junking Quicken. Anyone try this site? I have been using Quicken for a long time it’s become my way of doing personal finance. And I am not sure about putting all my financial info on a web site, though what I have read about Mint seems OK.