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Non-Tech : The ENRON Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Baldur Fjvlnisson who wrote (3236)	3/2/2002 7:22:38 AM
From: Baldur Fjvlnisson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5185

President Bush on Rice: "Dr. Rice is not only a brilliant person; she is an experienced person. She is a good manager. I trust her judgment. America will find that she is a wise person, and I'm so honored you're joining the administration." usinfo.state.gov

To: Baldur Fjvlnisson who wrote (3236)	3/3/2002 1:51:02 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 5185

"Calling all used car salesmen, investment bankers are looking for a few good Stock analysts to liquidate the next round of equities for their clients. Better yet, lets put out the call for all the hucksters who sold Dr. Feel Good elixir off the side of a buckboard wagon. The point being, let's call the Stock analyst what they truly are, not advisors but salesmen. The product is not cars, but equities. Excerpt from, "Analysts cover their faces in shame! " By: Jeffrey Scott damonvickers.com And Bush sides with the equity crooks. He tries to force Americans to invest part of their retirment funds into 401ks. If he is successful, just imagine what kind of financial kick backs he and his staff will get once they leave office. JMOP

To: Baldur Fjvlnisson who wrote (3236)	3/3/2002 2:31:08 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 5185

Bush Uses Own Brand of Math on Social Security The New York Times March 2, 2002 By EDWARD WYATT In promoting the benefits of his proposal to overhaul Social Security, President Bush adopted an example this week that few financial planners would be likely to embrace, and one that more than doubles the potential of the recommendations of his own commission on Social Security. In an address on Thursday to the National Summit on Retirement Savings, Mr. Bush maintained that a person who directed the investment of his Social Security taxes into the stock market would have three times the monthly retirement income of someone who had depended on Social Security. "Someone retiring today after 45 years of work would be entitled to a monthly benefit of $1,128 a month from Social Security," Mr. Bush said. "If that same retiree, if those Social Security taxes had been invested in the stock market over the last 45 years, during the same period of time, that person would now have a nest egg of $590,000, or income of more than $3,700 a month." But to get that $3,700 a month, a person would have to invest every penny of his retirement savings or Social Security payroll taxes in the stock market his entire work life. "That is ill-advised at best and unconscionable at worst," said Harold Evensky, a principal at Evensky, Brown & Katz, a financial planning firm in Coral Gables, Fla., that is part of the Alpha Group, an influential caucus of financial planners. Not only does the example require the investments to have been made in the best period of stock market investment returns in history, Mr. Evensky said, but it also does not account for how an investor would probably have reacted in periods of stock market losses. "You might ask why fiduciaries of pension plans don't keep 100 percent of their portfolios in equities," Mr. Evensky said. Rather, those professional portfolio managers keep 40 percent to 60 percent of their assets in stocks, with the remainder in bonds, to balance the volatility and potentially higher returns of the stock market with the need to protect principal. That more conservative posture of professional money managers mirrors the assumptions used by the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. In December, the commission released its report laying out three models for an overhaul of Social Security. The proposals would allow a worker to redirect up to two-thirds of his payroll taxes, or up to $1,000 annually, into a personal retirement account, in exchange for giving up the right to an offsetting amount of traditional Social Security benefits. But the commission assumed that workers would rarely have more than 50 percent of a portfolio in stocks at any time, and noted that only the youngest workers typically have 80 percent or more of retirement assets in equities. Under the commission's assumptions, that would produce retirement benefits in 50 years measuring, at best, $1,983 a month - 88 percent better than the worker could assume under the current Social Security system, but barely half the $3,700 a month in the Bush example. Claire Buchan, a White House deputy press secretary, said Mr. Bush's illustration was not intended to portray an actual experience that could result from one of the president's proposals or even the portfolio that an actual investor would probably choose. "It was for the purpose of example," Ms. Buchan said. "It was very clear what he was saying." nytimes.com