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.

Quicken Windows to Mac. Major Pain!

Tags

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.