16
So are you planning on getting the new talking credit card, Visa Voice?
Actually, there’s no such thing, but for a few seconds, before I realized I had stumbled onto the satirical fake news website, The Onion, I completely bought into its fake press release.
The Onion “reported” that Visa held a press event earlier this week to introduce “Visa Voice,” a new series of credit cards that talk to the cardholder.
08
Now is the time for all good investors to get in touch with their inner Robin Leach. Spring is when most publicly traded companies send out annual reports and so-called proxy statements. The latter allow investors to vote for corporate accountants and directors and on a handful of other key matters.
But the real excitement of proxy season is in the nuggets of information about the often eye-popping pay and perks provided to senior executives. Details about the cost of joy rides on the company jet, country club memberships, enriched pensions, and corporate drivers offer voyeuristic interest, to be sure. But more important is what this data reveals about the character of a company.
11
Believe it or not: The housing market is recovering in most states. Home price indexes for 38 states ended 2011 above their early-year lows. And while prices arent yet up to prerecession levels, 30 states had more than two quarters of growth under their belts by the end of 2011, according to data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
But the national index is still falling, dragged down by pricing drops in the worst-hit states. Itll drop another 2% in the next six months before starting to climb in the second half of the year. There are just a handful of states dragging down the national average Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan and Nevada all of which saw home prices drop by more than 50% from 2006 levels. T
08
Credit cards have a politician problem.
Of course, nobody’s talking about that. Everyone’s discussing Mitt Romney, and how he has been getting a lot of grief for one of his advisers making a crack about political campaigning being like an Etch-a-Sketch. But since I write a lot about credit cards, I’ve been thinking about how frequently politicians seem to invoke credit cards whenever they want to make a point about the state of the country’s financial affairs, and it’ll probably just heat up as the national election gets closer.
I have a few examples of what I mean below, and then I’ll make my larger point.
31
Don’t ring the death knell for defined-benefit pensions just yet. A new effort is under way to rehabilitate these plans.
For workers struggling to manage their 401(k)s, employers’ decades-long shift away from traditional, professionally managed pensions seems relentless — and potentially disastrous. But now, one plan administrator is bucking the trend, backing away from a 401(k) that wasn’t working for participants and adopting a new type of defined-benefit plan designed to reduce risks for both employers and workers.
At the start of this year, roughly 4,500 Boston-area hospitality workers belonging to the Unite Here Local 26 union became participants in a new defined-benefit pension plan.