Entries from January 2009 ↓

Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury – washingtonpost.com

Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies.

Back in August, I posted about 10 health experiments you’re probably participating in. One of them was the great high fructose corn syrup experiment. We’re beginning to see how that experiment is turning out, aren’t we? Thank goodness there are alternatives available.

Update (1/29): Also via Daring Fireball, comes the rebuttal that sounds perfectly rational. I still think that we’re likely to find, over time, that HFCS is bad stuff, but it doesn’t look like mercury is going to be the reason that it’s bad.

Obama takes steps to reverse Bush climate policies | U.S. | Reuters

U.S. President Barack Obama began reversing the climate policies of the Bush administration on Monday, clearing the way for the government to allow states to set stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

Immediately after the 2004 election, I announced that I’d be saying “I told you so” to the folks that voted for Bush. I was certainly correct. Bush’s second term was terrible, and I’m quite happy that we voted for a break in policies.

Obama has been in office for less than a week. He’s got a lot of problems to deal with in his presidency (not all of which are Bush’s fault, mind you, but they certainly have gotten worse under Bush). You can certainly tell that he’s making some changes, starting with the executive orders on ethics and transparency and then in today’s change in direction for the EPA.

Sure, Obama will have his missteps, but I’m happy to see what he’s starting off with.

Gold has gone up quite a bit over the past few years. Generally speaking, you don’t want to invest in things when they’ve just had a run up. On the other hand, with the US government printing trillions of dollars to try to get our economy out of the toilet, it is a certainty that inflation will come along with that at some point. Maybe not this year, because things are a mess and there’s still a risk of deflation. But, sometime soon we’ll have to pay the tab on all of that printing/borrowing.

It turns out that it’s pretty easy to invest in gold, and you don’t have to have a stack of gold bars at your house (mind you, I wouldn’t mind it if someone sent me a stack of gold bars).

The most “virtual” thing you can do is invest in GLD. GLD is an exchange traded fund that is intended to track the price of gold. Right now, gold is $854 an ounce and GLD is $84 a share. GLD has the benefit of being easy to trade using your current investment account, and has a relatively small expense ratio of 0.40%.

Less virtual than that is a precious metals account at EverBank. You can buy your way in for $5,000 and put your money into a pool that is used to buy gold, which doesn’t sound entirely unlike GLD. Or, with a $7,500 minimum, you can have EverBank store actual gold for you. If you pay them some money, they will even ship it to you. But, the main point, is that you can put money into an account that is backed by physical gold that EverBank holds for you.

The advice to buy and hold index funds over the long term is pretty common. Charts depicting the growth of the stock market over decades can be pretty compelling. Here’s a compelling chart (from the always-a-great-read The Big Picture):

Once you adjust for inflation, you can see that the Dow Joines Industrials Average did not go anywhere in real terms from 1929 to 1995. When people talk about bear markets and bull markets, they don’t talk about secular bear and bull markets often enough. We are in a secular bear market right now, which means that the stock market is going to continue to return basically nothing for the next several years and, even worse, inflation is likely to get worse and cause some serious losses.

Take a look at the section of the chart from the 1970s. If you bought and held stocks during the ’70s you would have lost a ton of money in real terms, due to inflation.