» Posted by Martin Weil on October 28, 2007

Amitosh concentrates as he pulls the loops of thread through tiny plastic beads and sequins on the toddler's blouse he is making. Dripping with sweat, his hair is thinly coated in dust. In Hindi his name means "happiness." The hand-embroidered garment on which his tiny needle is working bears the distinctive logo of international fashion chain Gap. Amitosh is 10.

From The Guardian.

Gap is by no means alone in finding children toiling at many of the firms it outsources to. To their credit however, the Guardian continues:

Gap's own policy is that if it discovers children being used by contractors to make its clothes that contractor must remove the child from the workplace, provide it with access to schooling and a wage, and guarantee the opportunity of work on reaching a legal working age.

One wonders if the rest of the consumer products industry can say the same?

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 23, 2007

The horrific Southern California fires remind us that disaster generally does not provide much warning to its victims. The LA Times posts an excellent checklist that every homeowner (and renter) may wish to read, "What Your Fire Insurance Can Do." (registration may be required) Not mentioned is our recommendation of adding a "replacement cost rider" on personal articles to all home and renter policies.

One very useful suggestion is to videotape your home, room by room, providing a narrative as you go. Make sure to open and record the contents of all closets, drawers, garages, attics and basements. It should take an hour or two. Fire victims report one of the main tasks they face after the event is creating lists, everything from furniture to how many pairs of underwear they owned. A videotape (obviously stored offsite) is an excellent inventory record for this purpose.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 20, 2007

Brian Harris makes a 30 percent annual return on his Roth individual retirement account, but his money is not invested in a soaring biotechnology stock or a hot currency fund.

Instead, Mr. Harris, a music teacher from Tucson, owns about 25 marimbas, xylophones and timpani. Using the money in his retirement account, Mr. Harris buys the instruments for less than $1,000 each. He then rents them to his students for up to $60 a month. The rental income flows straight back into the I.R.A.

From the NY Times' "Exotic IRA's..."

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 17, 2007

Yet what's different about today's wealth boom is that you can be in the top 1% of wealth or income and still feel middle-class. To get into the top 1% of Americans by wealth, you need about $6 million net worth, including the value or your home. I've interviewed plenty of people worth between $5 million and $10 million and believe me, they don't feel wealthy.

So writes Robert Frank on his WSJ Wealth Report blog. Frank adds that you would need at least $500,000 in annual income to be counted as rich in the US today. That is unless you live in New York City, in which case count on needing at least 50% more.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 10, 2007

With higher interest rates depressing housing prices, the game is over. As America moves to, say, a 4% savings rate (still small by normal standards), aggregate demand will weaken, and with it, the economy....It is one thing to borrow to make an investment, which strengthens balance sheets; it is another thing to borrow to finance a vacation or a consumption binge. But this is what Alan Greenspan encouraged Americans to do. When normal mortgages did not prime the pump enough, he encouraged them to take out variable-rate mortgages - at a time when interest rates had nowhere to go but up.

The Nobel Prize-winning Stiglitz writes in House of Cards in the Guardian.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 08, 2007

The Consumerist (a great site by the way) posts this guide to resolving difficult consumer issues. If, as the site says, "you're ready to stop getting mad and start getting results," this is a great place to start.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 07, 2007

Your predecessors on the Senate Banking Committee, in the celebrated Pecora Hearings of 1933 and 1934, laid the groundwork for the modern edifice of financial regulation. I suspect that they would be appalled at the parallels between the systemic risks of the 1920s and many of the modern practices that have been permitted to seep back in to our financial markets.

...every time I hear a high public official or a Wall Street eminence utter the reassuring words, "The economic fundamentals are sound." Those same words were used by President Hoover and the captains of finance, in the deepening chill of the winter of 1929-1930. They didn't restore confidence, or revive the asset bubbles.

The fact is that the economic fundamentals are sound -- if you look at the real economy of factories and farms, and internet entrepreneurs, and retailing innovation and scientific research laboratories. It is the financial economy that is dangerously unsound. And as every student of economic history knows, depressions, ever since the South Sea bubble, originate in excesses in the financial economy, and go on to ruin the real economy.

Robert Kuttner, financial journalist and author, in testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 06, 2007

Presenting the improbable (because it is my blog and I can)

Medicine - Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."

Physics - L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.

Biology - Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.

Chemistry - Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.

Linguistics - Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

Literature - Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.

Peace - The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

Nutrition - Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.

Economics - Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Aviation - Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

Frankly, I think last year's winners were a far more impressive bunch.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 05, 2007

Happiness among American men and women reaches its estimated minimum at approximately ages 49 and 45 respectively. This the conclusion in a recent NBER paper, Is Well-being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle?. Blanchflower and Oswald study happiness and life-satisfaction data for half a million Americans and Europeans ... The authors emphasize that, because their research controls for many other influences upon happiness and life satisfaction -- including income, education, and marriage -- these results should be read as truly describing well-being.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 04, 2007

Did you know, or even imagine, that you could buy an abandoned ICBM missile silo on Ebay?

There's a hot market for demilitarized ICBM silos. There are three of them on offer at eBay right now, with the asking price of $500,000 per silo, which includes underground and above ground support facilities. Hundreds of ICBM silos have been sold off in the last twenty years ... Most of these are located in remote areas. For example, the three silo complex being offered on eBay sits on 57 acres in central Washington State.

From GeekPress

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 04, 2007

So says new research from ASU in a recent MarketWatch article.

Robert B. Cialdini, a social psychologist and Regents' Professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University in Tempe, has been researching relationships between psychology and pro-environmental action since the early 1990s. He addressed the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education last week with some of his recent findings.

Cialdini pointed to a pair of studies that he conducted that began with a simple survey distributed to about 3,000 Californians... "They indicated that their neighbors' behaviors would be of little impact on their own," Cialdini said of the survey's respondents. But when he looked at what they did, compared to what they said, "the only factor that had any significant impact on whether they conserved energy was their perceptions of what their neighbors were doing."...

"I can absolutely see the social pressures working," [the Sierra Club's Howard] Page said. "If you're a mom in a neighborhood where everyone else on your block drives an SUV, you probably don't feel too bad. But if everyone else drives a hybrid, well, that pressure works both ways."

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 03, 2007

I'll give you a hint. It's not the Wall Street Journal, they of the "less regulation and oversight" school, the argument being basically that more oversight would make the US less competitive internationally.

Well, the UKs Association of Pension Investors and a similar group in Australia beg to differ, according to this article in the Financial Times, describing a letter to our own SEC signed by several large European institutional investors.

"Rights to provide real director accountability to shareholders are sorely needed in the US," said Daniel Summerfield, co-head of responsible investment at the Universities Superannuation Scheme, the UK's second-largest pension scheme and a signatory to the letter to the SEC.

Seems these investors, along with many in Europe, have been badly shaken by the failure of our regulatory system to prevent the widespread damage to investors caused by the subprime credit meltdown.

» Posted by Martin Weil on October 01, 2007

From The Big Picture