Personal Finance

A Painless Way to Triple Your Savings

June 1, 2002

From The President’s Desk Published in Ideas on Liberty June 2002 by Mark Skousen “The human mind is charming in its unreasonableness, its inveterate prejudices, and its waywardness and unpredictability.” —LIN YUTANG1 “Behavioral” finance is the hot new field in the rapidly growing “imperial” science of economics. Consider the titles of recent books on the [...]

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Can Money Buy Happiness?

April 1, 2002

Personal Snapshots Forecasts & Strategies April 2002 “I’m tired of Love: I’m still more tired of Rhyme. But Money gives me pleasure all the time.” —Hilaire Belloc I came across a very interesting book the other day called Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being (Princeton University Press, 2002), by Bruno [...]

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Are You A Company Man or An Entrepreneur?

May 1, 2001

Forecasts & Strategies Personal Snapshots May 2001 By Mark Skousen The most dangerous advice you can give a child is “Go to school, get good grades, and look for a safe, secure job.” —Robert T. Kiyosaki, author Rich Dad, Poor Dad I don’t normally write about the same book twice, but I received so many [...]

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What If Social Security Was Like a 401(k)?

December 1, 2000

Forecasts & Strategies Personal Snapshots December 2000 by Mark Skousen “Of all social institutions, business is the only one created for the express purpose of making and managing change…. Government is a poor manager.” -Peter F. Drucker, “The Sickness of Government,” The Age of Discontinuity (1969) In the ongoing debate over the privatization of Social [...]

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Bankrupt Millionaires

October 1, 2000

Personal Snapshots Forecasts & Strategies October 2000 Bankrupt Millionaires by Mark Skousen “In the midst of the biggest economic boom ever, millionaires are going bankrupt.” – Forbes (October 2, 2000) Last March, I reported the findings of Professor Thomas J. Stanley, author of The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind, that the rich are [...]

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The Gap Between Rich and Poor Is…Narrowing!

April 30, 2000

Personal Snapshots FORECASTS & STRATEGIES April 2000 by Mark Skousen “The poor remain poor and the command of income by those in the top income brackets is increasing egregiously.” — John Kenneth Galbraith “The poor have not gotten poorer. The average family below the poverty line today is doing as well or better than middle-class [...]

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Will the Savings Crisis Lead to Stagnation?

March 29, 2000

Economics on Trial IDEAS ON LIBERTY March 2000 by Mark Skousen “There is a virtuous cycle in which high growth promotes high saving, and high saving in turn promotes high growth.” — Joseph Stiglitz, Chief Economist, The World Bank “America’s Expansion Cannot Be Sustained.” — The Economist, November 6, 1999 In a return to the [...]

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The Exuberant Wade Cook

December 1, 1997

Ideas Matter FORBES By Mark Skousen The first time I met Wade B. Cook was at a seminar for small investors in the early 1980s, when real estate and other inflation hedges were the rage. Cook gave a workshop on how to buy and sell mortgages–”discounted paper”–for quick profits, which he called the Real Estate [...]

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How to Keep off The Forbes Four Hundred

October 20, 1997

Ideas Matter FORBES How to Keep off The Forbes Four Hundred By Mark Skousen “You see that man over there driving that tractor,” my father asked me as we drove by a farm. “He’s a millionaire.” This was in the 1950s. There weren’t a lot of millionaires around in the 1950s. Only my father, who [...]

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