News

Medical science has made tremendous strides over the past 100 years. New vaccines and antibiotics together with our understanding of the need for clean water and better food have helped global life expectancy levels more than double. And as Eric points out on page 2, the outlook for further progress is bright. But from an […]

We are talking about saving for retirement. Back in the days of Defined Benefit Plans if you worked for a company for 25 or 30 years you were guaranteed a retirement payment of as much as half your ending salary, for life. When you combined this with Social Security, you were all set. Sadly, those […]

Is the delight of a chocolate recipe extraordinaire. Each year since 1998, we have scoured the very ends of the earth for the right chocolate recipe for our December issue. This year’s comes from Art Wright, and it’s a winner. Don’t forget the whipped cream and enjoy. Happy holidays from all of us. Ultimate Bread […]

Wall Street has a long history of coming up with “innovations.” Some new products such as Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have truly benefitted investors. But for every one of these good ideas there have been many more that did investors harm; the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that played such a central role in the 2008-2009 […]

From August through October my wife Yang Xin was in China helping to care for her father. Xin lives in Zhoushan, a series of islands off the coast of Zhejiang Province, once remote but now connected by high-speed expressways. Shenjiamen, the principal town of Zhoushan is a prosperous fishing port, a major oil terminal for […]

Health care is an enormous issue. For the elderly (over 65) it is not just about cost but also availability and choosing the right plan. Medicare, the government program covering hospitalization and outpatient physician costs for the elderly, was enacted under Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Before that you had to be lucky enough to have […]

According to Google’s Community Mobility data, we are visiting supermarkets and drugstores at the same level we did before the pandemic, and we are almost back to pre-pandemic levels when it comes to visiting restaurants, shopping centers, and recreational spots like theme parks, movie theaters, and museums. But the one place we still are not […]

Team Hanson+Doremus had a great time running in the 2021 Vermont City Marathon Relay! The event looked a little different this year, with everyone running the same 5-mile course at the same time (instead of handing off to each other across the regular marathon route). This was great for us because we could all keep […]

Eventually some version of Joe Biden’s big social spending bill will pass. While we don’t know the final price tag, we can be sure of one thing: higher taxes will be needed to pay for the wide range of health care, education, childcare, and climate initiatives embedded in the bill. To understand the proposed tax […]

Installing solar panels has been a goal since I bought my home in 2019. As my little ranch house is a classic 1971 fixer upper, my solar dreams have gotten shelved somewhere between asbestos abatement and eradicating carpenter ants. This changed for me in August with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report that we’re […]

We are almost there now…but this is not the timing the authors had in mind. The book, Dow 36,000, was written by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett and published in 1999. Their thesis was that stocks were worth a lot more than they were then trading at. In fact, an awful lot more. […]

How worried should we be? The list of potential investing headwinds is growing. The economy looks like it’s decelerating as the Delta variant, supply chain constraints, and hiring challenges throw sand in the cogs of growth. Inflation is running hot. Some are even talking about stagflation, the combination of low growth and high inflation that […]