“Men should not know how their laws or sausages are made.”

                                             -Otto von Bismarck

On July 4, 2025, Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful tax bill. Frankly, we would have been happy with a mere open-ended extension of the 2017 tax cuts along with a couple of modest bells and whistles, but, at 887 pages, the 2025 OBB bill was much more than that. Ashlea Ebeling of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote a good Q&A-type recap, the highlights of which we paraphrase/summarize below.

Continue reading “Big?…For Sure, Beautiful?…Eye of the Beholder” →

“Tariffs…the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” – Donald Trump

On Wednesday, April 2, Donald Trump fulfilled one of his most fervent campaign promises: In an elaborate Rose Garden ceremony, he held up a large board on which our trading partners and the tariffs to be levied in each were listed. “Liberation Day” (his words) had arrived. We in the U.S. no longer would be played for suckers, and above all else, manufacturing jobs soon would be flooding back to the U.S. because goods produced in the U.S., of course, would be exempt from tariffs.

Continue reading “Playing With Fire or Solemn Work That Has To Be Done” →

In 1966, the Beatles released “Revolver,” the second of their great mid-decade album trio, and George Harrison’s “Taxman” was the opening track.  His angry anti-tax lyrics were well-founded. U.K. tax rates at that time were beyond confiscatory, and all upper-bracket citizens who could set up shop outside of Merry Old England were thinking about it.

Continue reading “The Year-End Trading Program and Franklin’s Other Certainty” →

Several years ago, a client in the middle of her high-earning years asked us if she was financially able to retire. We told her that there are no simple formulae or shortcuts. Instead, as we explained, answering that question is a step-by-step process. More specifically, the best way to answer her question was to assign numbers to all of the key variables, do the math, and come up with the value of her portfolio at various points down the road. In this and all cases, healthy asset appreciation? The retirement years beckon. Alternatively, serious asset erosion? The client’s timing is not the best. Anyway, in this particular case, we rendered the verdict and concluded afterward that a worthwhile Nottinghill service had been born.

Continue reading “Navigating an Uncertain Financial Future” →

On November 9, 2016, after one of the most astonishing electoral outcomes of our lifetime, we wrote “The Day After.” That piece dealt with a couple of profound ways in which, to us anyway, American politics had changed, and one mega-trend that clearly had driven that 2016 outcome.

Continue reading “The Day After 2.0” →

On Monday, August 5, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off over 1,000 points. Investors were in a snit. Investors sometimes get that way. This time, with the days of 0% interest rates and a wide-open Washington fiscal spigot behind us, their by-product, ruinous inflation, had been taking its toll. To get this inflation to a manageable level, the Fed had raised interest rates several times in 2022-2023 and had kept rates fairly high. Now, as August 2024, got underway, the Fed was being blamed for harming the economy. 

Continue reading ““S-O-Y-H”” →

Four years ago, with ExxonMobil flat on its back at $40 per share, the Index compilers at Dow Jones decided that, after 92 years, the time was right to say goodbye. Salesforce was chosen to replace Exxon in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and why not? Salesforce was an entirely reputable New Economy stock, and, after all, anything involving fossil fuels was a guaranteed loser. In the midst of this drama, we wrote “Exxon Mobil and the Dow… ‘A Blessing in Disguise’.” Now, with Walgreens getting the boot (February 26), the time is right to resurrect and re-work that earlier piece.

Continue reading “Walgreens and the Dow…”A Blessing in Disguise?”” →

“The IBM case was the Antitrust Division’s Vietnam.” – Robert Bork

“Apple is worth nearly as much as Tesla, Meta, Berkshire Hathaway, United Health, and Visa –  the sixth through 10th most valuable American companies – combined.”                –Forbes; June 30, 2023

On January 17, 1969, the last day of the Johnson Administration, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against IBM. The suit was filed under the Sherman Act and claimed that IBM was trying to monopolize the market for “general-purpose digital computers.” There followed six years of discovery and 700 trial days over seven years after that. The latter involved 87 live witnesses, 860 deposition witnesses, 104,400 trial transcript pages, and 17,000 exhibits. On the government side, the case spanned the terms of five Presidents, nine Attorneys-General, and seven Antitrust Division chiefs. On the defense side, the lead firm was Cravath, Swain & Moore, some of whose attorneys worked on nothing else for 13 years. And, after those 13 years, the U.S. Department of Justice abruptly declared the case to be “without merit” and dropped the charges. 

Continue reading “La Pomme” →

Yesterday…all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay.

“Yesterday,” Beatles (1965)

Well, here we are in yet another crazy, mixed-up world with a list of troubles seemingly without
end and seemingly here to stay. At home, we have a work force reluctant to go back to work,
persistently high inflation, an ultra-high federal debt load, and a governing class looking like
two armed camps. Overseas, we’re dealing with two large-scale wars, either one of which could
become a much larger conflict. What’s the investor supposed to do in the fall of 2023? Always a
good question, and we once again were reminded of another time and place and another set of
highly unpredictable outcomes.

September 2020. A good friend and client asked one of us about the upcoming presidential election,
specifically how that election might impact her portfolio and what, if anything, she and we
should do about it. The lengthy email response? Not much that clients and other friends of the
Firm haven’t heard before from us, but a few things you might find interesting. Naturally, we’ve
done some editing of the original email, and, in the immortal words of Jack Webb, “the names
have been changed to protect the innocent.” Anyway, here goes. The subject is the 2020 election,
but to make a few points, as you’ll see, we go back to 2016.

Continue reading “November 2023 —
Anything to Do?” →

The Jury is Still Out

“mor·al haz·ard … a lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences.”

– Oxford Languages

“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

– Everett Dirksen

Haven’t we been here before? The SVB matter in particular has brought back a lot of bad 2008-2009 memories: swirling rumors of bad credits on the balance sheet and inadequate bank capital; bank stocks cratering on Fridays because of weekend uncertainty; shotgun marriages over the weekend; shareholder wipe-outs on Monday. Wasn’t Dodd-Frank supposed to take care of such drama, among other things,

Continue reading “Silicon Valley Bank —“ →