Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | July 15, 2016 9:19 am ET With bonds producing near-record-low levels of income worldwide, there’s never been a worse time to invest in government and corporate debt. You earn next to nothing now and, if interest rates finally rise, you will get clobbered later. That’s the conventional wisdom,...
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Image Credit: Marinus van Reymerswaele, “The Money Changer and His Wife” (1539), Museo del Prado By Jason Zweig | July 14, 2016 6:47 p.m. ET It’s weird, all right, but probably isn’t as weird as you think. Measured before inflation, interest rates have never been so low in so much of the world. On July 5, the day after the U.S.’s 240th...
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By Jason Zweig | July 11, 2016 10:15 am ET Image credit: Edward Collier, A Trompe l’Oeil of Newspapers, Letters and Writing Implements on a Wooden Board (ca. 1699), Tate Britain In a column this past April, I wrote about fund manager Geoffrey Abbott’s quest to read approximately three dozen letters to shareholders per day until he had gone through...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | July 8, 2016 11:10 am Almost exactly a year ago, this column called gold a “pet rock” and said investing in it is “a leap in the dark.” Gold traded then around $1,130 an ounce. This past week, it surpassed $1,360. Gold is up 20% since I ridiculed it; the U.S. stock market, measured by the S&P 500 with...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | June 30, 2016 5:30 am ET For years now, big banks and brokerage firms have been urging their wealthiest individual clients to get into private-equity funds. Buying such a prestigious fund can make you feel like a big cheese with privileged access to the high returns corporate deal making can...
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