Is the Stock Market Rigged? Is Rain Wet?

More than 50 percent of U.S. investors believe the stock market is rigged, according to a Bankrate survey. When you look at the wild price swings of a stock like ViacomCBS, exacerbated by massive trades that backfired on a family hedge fund and shook the investment banking world, the obvious question arises:

Why isn’t it 100 percent? 

How to Raise Taxes?

Here’s The Washington Post’s wish list for revenue-raising tax reform. A number of the comments are enlightening. A few offer comic relief. Like, "Wealthy people who set up Trusts need to be reigned in.” (Not to be confused with Meghan and Harry, who needed to be reigned out.)

Maybe the 2020’s Won’t Roar ’til 2024

Energized by hope that COVID 19 vaccines will be plentiful by summer, the exuberant stock market is already looking beyond the pandemic. Too hasty? 

A Yale professor who has studied pandemics believes the end of this one is not yet nigh. "Given what we can learn from history," Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis warns, "I don’t think people should just imagine that we’re going to rapidly and easily return to normal.” 

Even if we achieve herd immunity this year, the good times won’t roll.

If you look all the preceding centuries of epidemics, then it’s clear that we’re going to have an intermediate period in which we come to terms with the pandemic’s psychological, social, and economic toll. I think that will last through 2023, approximately. We need to recover from the terrible shock of this experience. Millions of businesses have closed. Millions of Americans are out of work. Millions of children have missed significant amounts of school. Millions of people have lost family members to the virus. Many will have chronic disabilities from contracting it. We need to come to terms with all of these things, which will take time.

Christakis expects that "sometime in 2024 — the timing isn’t precise — we’ll enter the post-pandemic period. And I think that’s going to feel a little like the Roaring Twenties in the last century.”

If so, all investment managers and financial advisers have to do is help wealthholders survive another two years or so. Then, party on!

Provenance, Provenance, Provenance!

This painting, just sold at Christie's in London, practically gushes provenance. Borrowed from the French, the word serves the art world as a posh term for "a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality." 

Though this artist wasn't a big name in the art world, he was a big name. Winston Churchill painted Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque after the 1943 Casablanca Conference and gave it to Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In 2011 Brad Pitt bought the painting from a dealer and gave it to the seller, Angelina Jolie.

Expected to sell for perhaps $3 million, the only painting Churchill created during WWII sold for almost four times as much: $11.5 million.

World War II history, Churchill and Roosevelt, Hollywood stars …what more could the unidentified buyer ask?

We Couldn’t Have Said it Better

The great thing about sustainable investing is it can be whatever you want it to be.

                                     – James Mackintosh in The Wall Street Journal 

Investors had no trouble gliding past the death and economic devastation wrought by the pandemic last year to drive the market to record highs. An increasingly healthy economy is what’s making them panic.

                       – Matt Phillips in The New York Times