Donors are reassessing their giving to maximize impact and to ensure their money is being utilized effectively and efficiently by the non-profit organizations they support. Meantime watchdog organizations are grading the non-profit community and posting their ratings online.
Indexed universal life insurance provides a crediting rate tied to the growth of an equity index. With the potential for an enhanced yield and a guaranteed minimum crediting rate, indexed universal life may be an attractive life insurance option, particularly in the current low interest rate environment.
It is our view that inflation should be moderate over the near term. However, we recognize that portfolios of different investors have different sensitivities to sharp increases in inflation. To that end, the discussion here centers on methods to hedge unexpected inflation in those specific portfolios.
We believe one of the most important economic developments to monitor is whether the U.S. economy can wean itself off government stimulus before bond vigilantes take the matter into their own hands. In short, we are in the midst of a cyclical recovery that could be overshadowed at some point by the longer term structural challenges.
The combination of an enhanced European-level policy response, fiscal austerity and structural reform at the national level, plus a more broad-based and secure economic recovery, should bring normalization to the Euro-area sovereign debt crisis by 2012. But if one or more of these expectations is not realized, the crisis may intensify.
Whole life and universal life insurance have been hit especially hard by continued low interest rates. As a result, carriers are introducing products that increasingly shift the risk of future product performance to the consumer. Because of these risks, consumers must make the effort to understand what is behind the assumptions presented by insurers.
We recently have taken an increasing interest in housing and housing-related investment opportunities. While we cannot state with certainty when the recovery will come, we see a road towards redemption and investment opportunities while the market gradually improves.
Euro area countries need to coordinate their economic policies better to prevent macroeonomic imbalances. The proposed set of policy indicators would identify such imbalances and indicate action to be taken if thresholds are too high or low. But this system has structural problems related to timing, response and proactive planning.
As the financial world grows increasingly integrated and jurisdictions share ever more information, taxpayers who continue to hold undeclared taxable accounts are at much greater risk of being discovered. The new voluntary disclosure program may represent the best chance to come clean with the IRS.
This historical study suggests that monthly rebalancing appears to have minimal or no benefit in terms of end-of-year portfolio values except in years of high volatility. A look at rebalancing a 60/40 portfolio either monthly or annually from 1960 through 2009 showed an average annual difference between the two strategies of only 8 basis points.