The recent market crisis has made many people question the idea of investing in mutual funds. Many people have seen their retirement portfolios plummet by as much as 50%. To add insult to injury, Bernie Madoff’s theft of $50 billion of investor money has made people wonder whether the government is protecting them at all.

One of the problems with mutual funds is that they charge high fees. These fees are described as just a few percent of the portfolio value. A few percent sounds like a very small amount, right? They sound small but they are big. Over time, these fees eat up most of the portfolio profit. How did this happen?
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Investing, Money, Success
congress, financial success, government, hidden fees, Investing, lobbying, mutual funds, washington
Crowdsourcing is word that describes the ability to bring masses of people together to accomplish a task or reach a goal. And it’s been pretty effective, too.
I would like to nominate Congress for “Dumbest Financial Move of the Week” and introduce a new term: Congress-sourcing. Congress-sourcing is the ability to bring masses of pompous, self-entitled bureaucrats together to bungle a task or fail to reach a goal and, in fact, make things worse.
Congress-sourcing was responsible for not just the dumbest financial move of the week, but a whole assembly line of them this week.
Congress first approved a bill that allowed retention bonuses for AIG executives. In other words, money that we paid in taxes could be used to retain executives who failed miserably. The legislation was fine, as long as the public didn’t find out.
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Business Strategy, Investing, Money, Online Investing AI, US Economy
AIG, capitalism, CEO, congress, dumb financial move, finances, government, socialism