Discussion

This is a fun one:

http://personal.fidelity.com/planning/retirement/retirement_planning.shtml.cvsr?bar=p

Sheesh.....they can't even make their links easy. Follow the "ways to generate income" link under Living in Retirement heading. Click on the Begin button in the Looking For Retirement Income? box. Talk about your analogies for confusing money-speak....

I went to my 403(b) account from my time working at UC San Francisco Medical Center -- a non-profit version of the 401(k). There are no year-to-year graphs.

I recall on my paper statements they used to include graphs for the past several years to show the gains. Now there is only a pie graph of my allocations, and a YTD % change number.

The funds are managed by Fidelity.

The American main steam media when talking about the federal reserve always refers to it as a government owned institution when in fact it is a private banking cartel.All news networks will not talk about this.Why so Robert? Are news reporters afraid of losing there jobs due corporate sponsors dropping air time ads?Or is there something much bigger maybe all main steam media is owned by these families that own the Fed.After all they print the money supply without controll or regulation they can buy what they want.A good example of media control is when the Bilderberg group Held there yearly meeting in American in 2008 in Virginia.Yet the main stream media did not cover it.This meeting had Republicans and Democrats meeting with world leaders and bankers( Ben Bernanke was there) in secrete.Which is a clear violation of the Logan act. The video of the event is on youtube they even have this years event in Greece posted.Just type in Bilderberg group.

By the way Robert thank you for telling the history of the FED and what it really is you are a true patriot my friend!

It’s not just “financial smarts”, but overall, the population has been dumbed down on being self-reliant, possessing “Street Smarts”, and in general ability to exist without the just being presented by the glitz in the media…

Disconnect your tv, then start researching and reading.

Go to:

www.scribd.com

Look up “bilderberg”, web of debt, or any other financial conspiracy, or long term sustainability topic of interest to you…
It is relatively easy to download and store to disks over 20,000 pages of useful documents…

Michael Jackson died several days ago. Yesterday morning (6/27/09) WCBS radio broadcast one sentence saying that five banks had closed. It also broadcast story after story about Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson's family, Michael Jackson's soaring record sales, Michael Jackson's lawyer, Michael Jackson's autopsy results, Micha ... oh, you get the idea already.

Everyone have already said a lot of dumbing us down with useless or misleading information so I'd just like to add another way to dumb down people in general, not only financial. There are substances in the food almost everywhere we go that are directly affecting our ability to think so pay extra attention to what you eat and stay away from processed foods. And who stands besides that? I think that's quite obvious. Here are just two of many links talking about that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDqUpuZu8mY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txiVDY-prk4

It's all the "financial advice" by the financial planners that say "buy mutual funds" through your IRAs and 401K plans. Diversify to spread your wealth. this is putting all my retirement planning in the hands of others and at the mercy of the stock market. Not good.

Apropos of nothing in the discussion, but a few misstatements in the book were up my alley and you may want to correct them:
(1) (Chapter 2, p. 9): Columbus didn't "defy the idea that the world was flat". Everybody had known that the world was round since antiquity -- the Hellenstic Greek Eratosthenes even figured out the circumference, more or less correctly. What the professors said to Columbus was that the distance to China was so great that he could not possibly carry enough food in his ships to reach there. They were perfectly right, too; he and his crew were saved only by the fact, unimagined by any of them, that there was an unknown continent in between. The idea that people thought that the world was flat was invented by Washington Irving in his best-selling biography of Columbus, and has been repeated by schoolteachers ever since. (You can read about this in Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, but it's not controversial; the facts are well-established and well known).
(2) The fact that all (not most) Roman coins are "irregular and oddly shaped" has nothing to do with coin shaving: it was a result of the method of manufacture. The coiner took a disk of metal, put it between two dies, and hit it with a hammer, reproducing on the soft metal the images on the dies. The struck metal "squeezed out" at the edges, producing an irregular shape. If someone offers you a perfectly circular ancient coin, it is a fake. Our modern coins are made by machine.
(3) The calamitous German inflation did not correspond with the Great Depression, but rather with the Roaring Twenties; it peaked and ended in 1923. It was brought about not by printing money to meet depression-caused debt, but by printing money to pay the reparations demanded in the Versailles treaty (though the reality is somewhat more complicated). It ended, interestingly -- and oddly for your thesis -- when the Weimar government introduced the Rentenmark, a currency ostensibly backed by real estate. I doubt that you could really get the real estate if you tried, but people needed a currency they could believe in; and the currency remained more or less stable until the end of the Weimar republic. So even Monopoly money could work, if people really wanted it and if it was treated responsibly -- though you may be right that sooner or later irresponsibility will set in.
(4) The term "payment in kind" does not have anything to do with children; "kind" is simply medieval English for "nature", and "in kind" is a translation of Latin "in natura" for paying with "natural" produce rather than with coin. It is indeed from the same root as the German Kind, but that is all.

David Schaps

Author of The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece (U of Michigan Press, 2004) -- but I'm afraid that wouldn't much interest you (although your books have interested me), because it deals not with the making of money but with the historical question of how coinage came about. I have a cousin who has hundreds of times more money than I do -- all earned honestly through a business he began almost from scratch -- and I admit I felt peculiar giving him a copy, as if I was the one who could teach him about money ...

Apropos of nothing in the discussion, but a few misstatements in the book were up my alley and you may want to correct them:
(1) (Chapter 2, p. 9): Columbus didn't "defy the idea that the world was flat". Everybody had known that the world was round since antiquity -- the Hellenstic Greek Eratosthenes even figured out the circumference, more or less correctly. What the professors said to Columbus was that the distance to China was so great that he could not possibly carry enough food in his ships to reach there. They were perfectly right, too; he and his crew were saved only by the fact, unimagined by any of them, that there was an unknown continent in between. The idea that people thought that the world was flat was invented by Washington Irving in his best-selling biography of Columbus, and has been repeated by schoolteachers ever since. (You can read about this in Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, but it's not controversial; the facts are well-established and well known).
(2) The fact that all (not most) Roman coins are "irregular and oddly shaped" has nothing to do with coin shaving: it was a result of the method of manufacture. The coiner took a disk of metal, put it between two dies, and hit it with a hammer, reproducing on the soft metal the images on the dies. The struck metal "squeezed out" at the edges, producing an irregular shape. If someone offers you a perfectly circular ancient coin, it is a fake. Our modern coins are made by machine.
(3) The calamitous German inflation did not correspond with the Great Depression, but rather with the Roaring Twenties; it peaked and ended in 1923. It was brought about not by printing money to meet depression-caused debt, but by printing money to pay the reparations demanded in the Versailles treaty (though the reality is somewhat more complicated). It ended, interestingly -- and oddly for your thesis -- when the Weimar government introduced the Rentenmark, a currency ostensibly backed by real estate. I doubt that you could really get the real estate if you tried, but people needed a currency they could believe in; and the currency remained more or less stable until the end of the Weimar republic. So even Monopoly money could work, if people really wanted it and if it was treated responsibly -- though you may be right that sooner or later irresponsibility will set in.
(4) The term "payment in kind" does not have anything to do with children; "kind" is simply medieval English for "nature", and "in kind" is a translation of Latin "in natura" for paying with "natural" produce rather than with coin. It is indeed from the same root as the German Kind, but that is all.

David Schaps

Author of The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece (U of Michigan Press, 2004) -- but I'm afraid that wouldn't much interest you (although your books have interested me), because it deals not with the making of money but with the historical question of how coinage came about. I have a cousin who has hundreds of times more money than I do -- all earned honestly through a business he began almost from scratch -- and I admit I felt peculiar giving him a copy, as if I was the one who could teach him about money ...