There's no shortage of doubt about most investments these days. (Are emerging markets in a bubble? Are Treasuries a trap for the wary?) But there is no doubt about gold. The yellow metal keeps hitting records, this morning at over $1,200 an ounce. What's more, it's hard to find a...

My child is applying to college.

As those who've gone before me can well imagine, those six words are a death sentence for peace, sanity and intergenerational detente in my household. They also add up to a body blow to the family's tangible net worth, since it's likely to take...

Nouriel Roubini, aka Dr. Doom, put himself back in the headlines last week by predicting the next great financial crisis. Roubini, as you know, became a household name for seeing just how severe the financial crisis would be, at a time when most economists were confident it would be...

Financial literacy is today's Very Worthy Cause. If only regular people understood more about money, they wouldn't have created the real estate asset bubble, or gorged on credit cards, or--close to my heart in this blog--blown their nest egg in their 401(k)s.

It's curious how much reverence towards financial literacy...

Jeremy Grantham's long awaited quarterly letter made the rounds earlier this week. Most reporters, including MoneyWatch's own Conrad de Aenlle, focused on the guru's sarcastic evisceration of Bernanke and Geithner and his gloomy outlook for the stock market in general. But buried in the letter was a...

Raj Rajaratnam, the putative head of the alleged insider trading ring at the Galleon Fund, may not have a firm grip on his moral compass. But he clearly knows one thing about stock picking -- namely, that the only way to win consistently is to have information the...

Take a long enough perspective, and it is no surprise that what some had been calling the GGBAT (the Greatest Global Boom of All Time) ended with the GGRSGD (the Greatest Global Recession Since the Great Depression). Both the boom and its panicky finale fit neatly into a...

Are you tired yet of the Dow at 10,000? I am, as most financial reporters are, even as we can't seem to help but follow each uptick over the line as if it really meant all our economic troubles were over.

So by way of putting...

Now that Time Magazine and the New York Times have joined CBS MoneyWatch at beating up on the 401(k), it's only fair to ask what the country ought to have instead. The traditional pension that worked out fine in the Mad Men era turned...

This week's Time Magazine cover story looks at the nation's de facto retirement program, the ubiquitous 401(k), and pronounces it inadequate. Welcome to the club, Time. This blog has been calling the 401(k) a failure since June. In August, the New York Times weighed...

The dollar, the punching bag of global currencies, took another pounding in Asian currency markets today. It is not, as Vladimir Putin would have it, a sign of American eclipse. But don't be afraid to take a hint, either. If all your money is in investments tied to...

Just in case there was any doubt that Social Security won't be able to keep the promises it is making to anyone younger than, say, 55, the Congressional Budget Office now projects that Social Security will start operating at a deficit next year. Neither the CBO nor Social Security itself...

As I pointed out in a post a week ago, getting Uncle Sam out of real estate is shaping up to be tougher than anyone would like. The Federal Reserve's statements since I blogged -- including this speech Friday from Fed governor Ken Warsh -- bear...

Ben Bernanke and company meet today to further advance the process of winding down various financial rescue packages. The Feds should be cheered that the Treasury quietly closed its guarantee program for money funds last week and the world did not end. That is, unless Armageddon has just...

Today the president outlined, in general terms, the principles of the financial reform package that he would like to see. Good thing: I was worried that the health care debate and the stock market recovery had made him forget all about it.

My colleague Jill Schlesinger...

This weekend, the President announced a handful of new initiatives designed to make it easier for American workers to save more for retirement. The initiatives make use of research from behavioral economics, the arm of the dismal science that incorporates the way people really act into the design...

So the headline number on unemployment is 9.7%. That alone might be enough to send people into the last weekend of summer with the sense that the economy has a long winter ahead of it. But ugly as that 0.3 percentage point jump in the closely watched number is, a...

So we taxpayers actually made money on the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- at least so far. Goldman Sachs (GS), JP Morgan (JPM) and others have repaid the loans from the government, with interest, and the equity stakes that we hold in Citigroup (C) and Bank...

The final scorecard is out on the cash for clunkers program: In return for taking on $2.88 billion in additional debt, Uncle Sam helped the auto industry sell 690,000 new vehicles. Whether this was a winning trade is debatable -- as this MoneyWatch story points out, and this...

The New York Times editorial page added its two cents to the retirement reform debate with a piece on Sunday by Teresa Tritch. The editorial focused on the 401(k), as well it should. You can't head off the looming retirement crisis until you acknowledge that the 401(k)...