News & Insights

Over the summer, my family and I spent three and a half weeks in China and Japan, visiting five cities, including my hometown of Shenyang. Experiencing these places again after over a decade in the U.S. revealed how rapidly technology, consumer behavior, and demographics are reshaping Asia’s two largest economies. Here’s what I observed. Automation […]

Last month, we discussed America’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR), the average number of children a woman between the ages of 14 and 49 is expected to have over her lifetime. It’s been falling. After holding steady for some years at around 2.1, a rate which ensures a stable population, America’s TFR has fallen to 1.6. […]

Why is the stock market performing so well given the extreme level of political, economic, and social uncertainty today? We have been getting different versions of this question a lot recently. Making sense of financial market prices can indeed be challenging – on any given day they reflect a mix of both economic forces and […]

Financial innovation is a feature of the investing world. In the not-too-distant past you had to pay $15 per trade or more to buy stocks in whole-share denominations. Nowadays, trades are almost always zero-commission, and you can buy fractional ownership of stocks through exchange-traded funds (ETFs). But innovation has not stopped there. Why buy a […]

Choosing where—and how—you want to live as you age is one of the most important personal and financial decisions. And there are many options, from independent living to assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing facilities. There are also Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) which offer it all on one campus. I sat down with […]

At the start of the global financial crisis in 2008, Spain fell into a prolonged recession, compounded by the European debt crisis in 2010-2012. The country’s real estate bubble burst and the ensuing fallout engulfed the banking sector, leading to a €100 billion bailout from the European Union. Unemployment spiked to around 27% by 2013, […]

Demographics is the study of population and the make-up of that population. Birth and death rates factor into this analysis as do the age and sex breakdown of the population. Some argue that if you know the demographics of the world, you can predict the future. Historically, population growth has driven greater output, increased overall […]

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is becoming widespread, and education is already feeling its impact. The technology will, without a doubt, have broad implications for how we acquire learning and educate our children and the workforce. First, the good: AI can be a huge boon to efficiency. A 2022 survey conducted by Merrimack College found that […]

The U.S. continues to have one of the highest car ownership rates in the world with approximately 90% of Americans owning at least one car and almost 25% owning three or more. A range of factors including high urban home prices, the nation’s dispersed geography, and underfunded public transit systems have all contributed to the […]

The idea that we can create machines that rival what we do as humans is scary stuff. We are not discussing factory robots which do repetitive things, day after day without ever getting tired. We are talking about machines which simulate human intelligence, machines which can actually learn, reason and problem solve. And then you […]

The recent release of Ben Affleck’s The Accountant 2 along with its predecessor are among the few exceptions to my belief that films that deal with finance focus primarily on times of turmoil or excess. While The Accountant franchise twists the relatively staid world of forensic accounting into a dangerous and exciting plot, most films […]