People who’ve known me for a while are aware that my background includes stints as a CPA and corporate lawyer prior to going into real estate 13(!) years ago. That financial and legal background comes in handy daily handling real estate transactions. It also provides a useful vocabulary for religious holidays, such as the Jewish...Read More
Lender Beware, or, Regular vs. “Premium”(?) Investors This week’s headlines announcing Spider-Man’s closing didn’t exactly come as a shock: the exorbitantly expensive play was suffering from bloated costs and declining ticket sales. The surprise was who’s bearing the losses. Or perhaps more to the point, who isn’t: The show’s lead producers, Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris, acknowledged...Read More
A Brief Accounting (& Parenting) Primer As a former accountant (my first post-college job was as a CPA), I learned these inventory terms: FIFO: First in, First Out LIFO: Last in, First Out Weighted Average method: what it sounds like. To those, I’d add one more: FILO, for “first in, last out.” Specifically, that’s what harried...Read More
Explanation for Jumpy Markets Want a(nother) reason for heightened stock market volatility? More investors are switching from buy-and-hold to “FIFO”: first in, first out — and ask questions later. Such is the aftermath of a decade-plus of negative overall stock market returns. And that’s before inflation. As I’ve blogged before, welcome to “risk without return.”...Read More
FIFO, LIFO & LILO “Where is the money [created by the U.S.] going? Where the problem’s going to be: Asia. You can see asset prices going up, not only in Korea, in Taiwan, in Singapore and in Hong Kong, going up to levels that are incompatible or inconsistent with the economic fundamentals.” –Donald Tsang, Hong...Read More
