HAS
APPLE PEAKED?
Probably
not, and it’s a national treasure, for sure . . . but – if you can
stand some sharply off-color language from cartoon characters – here is a VERY funny
video that compares my iPhone 4 with the HTC Evo I must admit I am now
beginning to yearn for.
MAKE
YOUR OWN CLIP?
As
if you had time for this – you can now apparently make your own
laugh-out-loud video, like the one above, with this. Free. Easy. (Is it? I
haven’t tried it.)
TREES/PERSON
Trees
take CO2 out of the air and convert it to oxygen. Today, there are roughly
400 billion trees and nearly 7 billion people – 60 trees for each of us.
When I was born, there were roughly 50%
more trees and 4.5 billion fewer people – so roughly vaguely 240 trees
per person. Discuss.
THE
ANSWER?
Hard
to imagine it could be this
simple – I haven’t a clue – but I love thinking
it could work: a solar-powered process that takes CO2 out of the air and
turns it into fuel. They talk of returning atmospheric CO2 levels to
pre-industrial levels within a decade of ramping up.
BUILDING
AMERICA BONDS
Bob
Fyfe: “I
recently heard about Build
America Bonds and after a small amount of research feel that they may be a
good fit for an IRA, especially in a Roth. I’d like to hear your thoughts,
and on the PowerShares Build America Bond fund (BAB)
in particular.”
☞
I’m all for building America but would not jump at this. As you probably
know, these are federally taxable municipal bonds (so keeping them in an
IRA makes sense) subsidized but not guaranteed by the United States
Treasury (so you are accepting some risk).
Actually,
you are accepting two risks.
The
first is that rising interest rates could depress the values of these long-term
bonds as they would depress the value of any other fixed-rate long-term bonds.
(Who wants to pay full price for a bond yielding 5.7%, say, if new bonds of
similar quality and maturity are yielding 8%?) You’d still get your
interest, and repayment in full decades from now if you held on to maturity;
but if there had been a bout of inflation along the way, the $25,000 you invested
today would have greatly diminished purchasing power when the bond matured.
The
second, lesser but real risk is that the issuer might default. One imagines an
individual issuer that got in trouble would likely be rescued by the
state – lest investors demand higher rates on all future bond offerings
from within that state. And one imagines that if an entire state got into
trouble, the Federal government would step in for the same reason. But in a
worst case scenario, where many states were looking to the Federal
government for a bail-out, one can imagine some sort of grand restructuring
plan where the Treasury does not simply print enough money to bail
everyone out 100 cents on the dollar.
So
if it’s safety and peace of mind you’re after for your IRA, you
might consider TIPS. The Treasury will not default. And if we have inflation,
the value of your bonds will rise with it, at least in large part. (The
government’s calculation of inflation may not match the inflation you
experience.) I would stick with recently issued TIPS so they that
don’t yet have much “inflation accretion” built into the
settlement price – lest deflation deflate that accretion.