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61 percent of Canadians voted against conservatives but they are governing with vengeance and using their majority to impose all sorts of laws that are not supported by the vast majority of Canadians but they do have majority, they are governing as if they ...LPL Financial and Retirement Benefits Group™ Announce Addition of Five Top Retirement Consultants to Retirement Benefits Group™ Platform - Yahoo Finance
SAN DIEGO, May 30, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- LPL Financial LLC, the nation's largest independent broker-dealer* and a wholly-owned subsidiary of LPL Investment Holdings Inc. (LPLA), and Retirement Benefits Group™ ("RBG"), a highly specialized retirement plan consulting firm based in San Diego, CA, today announced the continued expansion of Retirement Benefits Group through the addition of five top retirement plan consultants to the firm. The five advisors - Matthew Haerr, Christine Soscia, Amir Arbabi, Peter Littlejohn, and William Brown - will provide retirement guidance to institutional clients in the areas of plan design assistance, compliance updates, and investment due diligence, as well as participant communication and education. These new advisor additions will be based out of the San Diego, CA, Akron, OH, Las Vegas, NV, and Idaho Falls, ID offices of Retirement Benefits Group.
Retirement Benefits Group is supported by the Retirement Partners division of LPL Financial LLC, which is focused on supporting retirement plan-focused advisors.
Darrell Alford, Principal of Retirement Benefits Group, said, "In an increasingly complex retirement landscape for participants, plan sponsors are looking for advisors with fiduciary expertise to help them choose plan structures and investment options that have the potential to offer greater retirement security for their workers. We are proud that Retirement Benefits Group has expanded over the years as a leader in this space by acting as just such a partner to plan sponsors. Our rapid growth continues with the addition of these five leading advisors who have many years of experience in the retirement plan space. With new offices in Idaho and Nevada, we now cover most of the western United States and will continue to expand east, even as we maintain our total focus on providing retirement plan financial advice that is second to none. Equally important, we are delighted to work with LPL Financial Retirement Partners, which has acted as a strong enabling partner in our ongoing growth."
Bill Chetney, Executive Vice President of LPL Financial Retirement Partners, said, "We congratulate Retirement Benefits Group for their continued successful growth as a leading firm within the retirement plan space. We are proud to be an enabling partner to Retirement Benefits Group and other advisor practices focused on this space as they work to help Americans realize their retirement aspirations, and we expect to see strong continued growth in this area."
Matthew Haerr has been a Financial Advisor for over 20 years. He has worked with company sponsored retirement plans, family and personal wealth management, and personal retirement planning throughout his career. Matt has helped business owners and corporations develop strategies for company retirement plans including 401(k), profit sharing and pension plans.
Christine Soscia has been in the financial services industry for over 15 years. She works with business owners in helping design, audit and implement employee benefit programs. Christine also specializes in working with business owners in the areas of strategic tax planning, wealth management, business planning, estate planning and succession planning.
With her primary focus on 401(k) plans, in 2004 Christine was one of the first to graduate from the 401(k) Coach program. In 2006, she purchased a TPA firm and managed more than 160 plans. She has appeared on CNBC and Fox Business and has been quoted in various financial publications. Christine holds Series 63, 7, 24, and 66 registrations with LPL Financial and Life and Health licenses and is a founding member of the Professional Business Advisor group in Las Vegas.
Amir Arbabi assists companies on plan design, fiduciary oversight and investment due diligence. Utilizing his years of experience with retirement planning, Amir creates customized plans to meet his clients' unique goals and needs. In addition to his expertise in plan consulting, Amir has extensive knowledge of wealth and investment management from his training at firms such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.
Peter Littlejohn joins the Retirement Benefits Group as the practice leader in the Midwest, currently domiciled in Akron, Ohio. Peter has over 27 years of retirement plan experience, most recently at Highmark Capital Management in San Francisco, where he led the DCIO advisory business beginning in 2009. Earlier he led retirement businesses at Ivy Funds, Wells Fargo, Strong Capital Management and Cigna Retirement and Investment Services, where he was responsible for sales, marketing, client service and strategic development.
About Retirement Benefits Group
Retirement Benefits Group™ ("RBG"), one of the premier retirement plan consulting groups in the country, offers access to brokerage and related retirement-plan services to corporations, governmental agencies, non-profit organizations and their employees through LPL Financial. RBG, which is headquartered in San Diego, CA with additional offices in Irvine, Riverside, Westlake Village, CA, Phoenix, AZ, Gresham, OR, Las Vegas, NV, Idaho Falls, ID, Temecula, CA, Akron, OH, and White Plains, NY, consults on more than $7 billion in retirement plan assets. Visit www.rbgnrp.com for more information.
Financial consultants of RBG are registered representatives with securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through Retirement Benefits Group, a registered investment advisor and separate entity from LPL Financial.
About LPL Financial
LPL Financial, a wholly-owned subsidiary of LPL Investment Holdings Inc. (LPLA), is the nation's largest independent broker-dealer (based on total revenues, Financial Planning magazine, June 1996-2011), a top RIA custodian, and a leading independent consultant to retirement plans. LPL Financial offers proprietary technology, comprehensive clearing and compliance services, practice management programs and training, and independent research to over 12,900 financial advisors and approximately 680 financial institutions. In addition, LPL Financial supports over 4,400 financial advisors licensed with insurance companies by providing customized clearing, advisory platforms and technology solutions. LPL Financial and its affiliates have approximately 2,700 employees with headquarters in Boston, Charlotte, and San Diego. For more information, please visit www.lpl.com.
*Based on total revenues, Financial Planning magazine, June 1996-2011
LPLA-A
LPL Financial Media Contacts
Joseph Kuo / Chris Clemens
Haven Tower Group LLC
(206) 420-3851 or (206) 420-1525
jkuo@haventower.com or cclemens@haventower.com
RBG Media Contacts
Larry Deatherage
Retirement Benefits Group
(858) 551-4015
ldeatherage@rbgnrp.com
Financial Collapse Fearmongering Is Getting Out Of Hand - The Business Insider
"Ireland is in a death spiral" -FT
"After the November President election the U.S. is facing a fiscal cliff" -Federal Reserve staff
"Eurogeddon!" -The PolyCapitalist
On and on go the warnings of cataclysm and pending financial doom.
One frustration among some of us with economics training is with the financial collapse scare mongering that has gone on over the past several years. Technical jargon and existential risks are bandied about in frightening fashion, leaving the general, non-economically trained public with very little ability to understand what's actually happening or just how bad things could really get if say Greece leaves the Eurozone, or another country defaults, or something like this occurs.
This blog is not entirely innocent of this criticism, so this post is a brief attempt to quickly address the question of whether our global financial system is on the precipice of a financial collapse if say something 'really bad' happens in Europe?
The short answer is no.
Now before I answer that, let me clarify something very important: this post is about financial collapse and not about the extremely high levels of unemployment, which have reached approximately 50% for young people in countries such as Greece and Spain. The youth and general unemployment problems today are serious and something to be very concerned about. But this post is not about that but instead about whether another Lehman-style event could occur where the world's financial system risks implosion if say a country like Greece pulls out of the euro, the current 'bank jog' in Spain accelerates, etc.
So why isn't the risk of financial collapse as bad as some would have use believe?
For starters, we have to keep in mind that our financial world is a virtual world. Today, money is largely a set of numbers on a computer. This means that even in the most extreme scenario of financial disorder, where policymakers completely blow it and the ATMs stopped working and the stock market tanked, that everything that is real and tangible - the houses, the food that is farmed, the physical assets - none of this goes away and will all be here the next day when you wake up in the morning.
Now having said that, a financial implosion would definitely have a major impact on our lives, particularly for those with fewer resources or who are unprepared. But life will go on for nearly everyone and could actually rebound quite quickly given other historical cases. For example, Argentina began recovering within months following its utterly complete financial meltdown in 2001 even though the country achieved the relatively rare trifecta of a currency collapse, a banking crisis, and a sovereign default all at once. Iceland has had a relatively quick turnaround following its 2008 financial implosion. And other Asian countries in the late-90s also turned the corner pretty quickly following major financial crises.
In the case of Argentina, dozens of people died in Dec. 2001 riots, so I don't want to minimize the very real suffering and dislocation which comes with a financial collapse. But Argentina's experience is a far cry from the level of suffering of say a war or severe natural disaster. In short, a 'cataclysm', it was not.
A further point needs to be made about the above examples, which is that they were all relatively isolated, contained crises that did not threaten a systemic collapse. But this leads me to point number two, which is that a systemic collapse is extremely unlikely, particularly given two facts:
- what was learned from the recent Lehman-experience in 2008 by the current crop of policymakers
- the world's central banks, especially the Federal Reserve, still have loads of financial ammunition.
Regarding what was learned with the 2008 Lehman experience, current policymakers got a first-hand glimpse of just how interconnected the world's financial system is and how the failure of a seemingly small cog in the wheel could threaten to topple the whole system. So while yes, Greece's financial implosion could lead to a chain reaction that threatens the entire global financial system, it is utterly inconceivable in the wake of the Lehman crisis that policymakers would sit back and let that happen given what they learned and how they responded in 2008-2009.
So I hear you asking whether all our problems are solved then because central banks like the Federal Reserve are all powerful, financially speaking, and able to contain any crisis which comes its way? Over the long-term, I would say no, they are not all powerful financially. But in the short-term, meaning right now and over the next few months at least, they are all powerful financially, and here's why.
Central banks like the Fed, ECB, Bank of Japan, and Bank of England which operate fiat currencies have an extraordinary power, which is that they can create an unlimited amount of money.
'Unlimited', meaning a truly infinite amount of money? Yes
What this means is that even if, for example, all the depositors in Spain and Greece withdrew every last euro from their local banks the ECB can supply all the notes that citizens want to hide under their bed mattresses. In short, the ATMs should never, ever run out of money in a fiat money system which is being managed by competent professionals.
But earlier I alluded to the fact that even though central banks can print an unlimited amount of money that they were not in fact financially omnipotent over the long-term, so what did I mean by that?
With the magic that is the computer a central bank could literally go and create and infinite amount of money. But there are side effects with central banks creating a lot of money, namely inflation. Without getting technical, simply put inflation is a rise in prices. Hyperinflation is a very large, sudden rise in prices.
But here is the crucial point to remember: rising inflation acts as a brake on a central bank's ability to create money. In other words, a rise in inflation is perhaps the key to understanding when central banks would be constrained in any effort to bail out the financial system.
Today, most of the world's advanced economies (North America, Europe) have relatively modest inflation, meaning low single digit annual percentage increases in official measures of core inflation. And even though they would say otherwise, the central banks in these advanced countries would be more than willing to trade an increase in inflation to stem the risk of a systemic financial collapse.
So how much more inflation would central banks be willing to tolerate as a tradeoff for not risking financial collapse? As the Bank of England has demonstrated in the past couple years, inflation creeping up towards 5% is not enough of a concern to prompt a significant deviation in policy. So my guess (it is a guess) is that at the extreme central banks like the Fed could tolerate up to 10% if they perceived the risks of collapse to be great enough before they would think twice about pulling another post-Lehman style bailout of the world's financial system. And since we're still in low single digit inflation this gives the Fed a decent amount of runway to maneuver.
This room to maneuver is what is meant when it is said that the Fed, which controls the world's most important reserve currency, and other central banks still have lots of ammunition.
The existence of this ammunition is likely a factor behind why given all the current distress in Europe that the stock markets haven't fallen further. In other words, the markets expect central banks to step in and flood the financial system with money if Greece leaves the euro or a banking run accelerates. Even the supposedly hemmed in by the Germans/hard-money crowd ECB. After LTRO and all the sovereign bond debt purchases, anyone who still thinks the ECB won't step in to save the system if things go completely pear shaped by creating a lot money is living in a fantasy. And this flood of central bank money would likely be very bullish for stocks in the short-term.
Should inflation increase significantly, then the ability of central banks to rush in and save the day could be diminished. But for now, they have the power to act, and that's why (for now) a general financial collapse is not on the immediate horizon.
So in sum, if you want to understand when it might be time to get worried, keep an eye on official measures of core inflation, particularly if it starts creeping up near the 5% level as that is about the time a proper central banker will begin to twitch.
Now, in terms of how you want to position your investment portfolio given the above, the very first post on this blog just over two years ago argued for allocating some of your portfolio into gold, which is arguably the best hedge against excessive central bank money printing. Even though the price of gold has gone up significantly in the last two years this blog still stands by that recommendation for long-term investors.
Eurozone faces 'financial disintegration' unless it acts again, warns commission - The Guardian
The eurozone is confronted with the prospect of "financial disintegration" and should use its new bailout fund to recapitalise distressed banks directly while embarking on a transnational banking union, the European commission said today.
Delivering more than 1,000 pages of diagnosis and policy prescriptions on the dire condition of the European economy and how to try to end almost three years of euro crisis, the commission also talked up the merits of eurobonds or pooling of eurozone debt, a proposal gaining in traction but strongly resisted for now by the biggest economy, Germany.
With international attention focused on Spain wrestling with an escalating banking crisis, the commission was surprisingly critical of Mariano Rajoy's attempts to chart a way out of an extreme predicament – recession, soaring national debt, a ballooning budget deficit, the highest unemployment in Europe, and the banks sitting on tens of billions of toxic assets from the bust property bubble.
"The policy plans submitted by Spain are relevant, but in some areas they lack sufficient ambition to address the challenges," the commission's Spanish report card said.
On banking regulation, administrative reform, labour market changes, growth and competitiveness policies, "the national reform programme does not contain any specific plans for addressing the challenges".
Tax system reforms, meanwhile, were going "in the opposite direction" to that recommended by Brussels.
"Spanish banks still have large exposures to the real estate and construction sectors (amounting to about 10% of total consolidated assets in December 2011). Over a half of this exposure is already problematic and may eventually rise further as developers prove unable to sell their assets and make repayments," the commission said.
Overall in the eurozone, the sovereign debt crisis of the past 30 months had fostered "a very dangerous" degree of "interdependence of weak banks and weak sovereigns".
The European Central Bank's intervention last December, throwing a trillion euros of cheap three-year loans at European banks over a period of three months, had brought a respite. But the commission said that this was merely temporary and that investors' confidence was again evaporating. Despite the liquidity help, the banks were failing to lend, raising the chances of a credit crunch in Europe wrecking growth prospects and causing unemployment to rise from current 15-year highs.
"At this stage, there is no clear-cut evidence that the deleveraging process has become excessive or disorderly with disruptive consequences on the real economy. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity across member states is large and the aggregate picture may hide different situations at country level," the commission said.
Given the gravity of the situation, the commission, whose recommendations are to be put to a summit of EU leaders in Brussels at the end of next month, outlined a quantum leap in fiscal and economic union going beyond the scope of the EU's Lisbon treaty and which would require a new EU charter.
While also hedging its bets, the commission stressed the merits of eurobonds, a eurozone banking union, deploying the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) – the permanent bailout fund being made operational in July – for direct loans to banks rather than to governments, as required by the ESM treaty.
"Additional reforms to economic governance may be considered to complete the institutional structure of monetary union," the commission said. "The changes made so far have in some cases touched on issues traditionally tied to national sovereignty. In some instances, they appear to have exhausted the scope of action possible under the [Lisbon] treaty … The question remains as to whether stronger co-ordination of economic policies will be sufficient or whether there needs to be progress towards closer integration of economic policy-making. The crisis experience has underlined the importance of this issue."
The commission said that there were signs of banks deleveraging, retreating behind national borders and divesting their foreign subsidiaries.
"To counter this trend of financial disintegration, more co-ordination at European level is required in supervision and crisis management frameworks. More specifically, closer integration among the euro area countries in supervisory structures and practices, in cross-border crisis management and burden sharing, towards a 'banking union' would be an important complement to the current structure of monetary union."
"To sever the link between banks and the sovereigns, direct recapitalisation by the ESM might be envisaged," it added. The proposal is again fiercely resisted by Berlin, but supported by the new French president, François Hollande, by Washington, and is also gaining support at the European Central Bank.
Talking up the advantages of eurobonds, the commission sought to appeal to German reservations by stating that "the net effects of common issuance will be positive only if the potential disincentives for fiscal discipline can be controlled".
Stocks sink amid euro zone crisis fears - msnbc.com
Stocks sank Wednesday, as investors worried about a spiraling of the euro zone's debt crisis.
The Dow Jones industrial average was lately down about 130 points.
Rising bond yields for Italy and Spain and the latest poll results in Greece worsened fears about Europe’s crisis. Yields on 10-year Spanish bonds moved closer to the 7 percent level, a point at which other nations in the bloc were forced to seek a bailout.
Spain is expected to issue new bonds shortly in an effort to fund its troubled banks despite the increased borrowing costs.
Adding to the concern, Italian 10-year yields topped 6 percent for the first time since January at a bond sale, raising concerns the region is vulnerable to a contagion.
The latest poll from Greece showed the radical leftist SYRIZA party has taken the lead over the pro-bailout conservatives ahead of a national parliamentary election next month that may determine whether the debt-laden country stays in the euro zone.
"It seems inevitable the euro has got to break up, it's just how long can they drag it out and what are the ramifications," said Nathan Snyder, portfolio manager at Snow Capital Management in Sewickley, Pennsylvania.
The region's fiscal woes sent the euro to its lowest level in 23 months against the dollar. U.S. equities have been closely tethered to the currency's fortunes, with a 50-day correlation between the euro and the S&P 500 index at 0.91.
"The longer they drag it out, the less severe are the ramifications of a break-up and then who actually ends up exiting - so much of this is unwritten it is hard to put any sort of odds on how this plays out," Snyder said.
The European Commission said the euro zone should move toward a banking union, consider eurobonds and the direct recapitalization of banks from its permanent bailout fund as well as boost growth and cut debt.
Research In Motion shares tumbled as the company hired bankers for a far-reaching strategic review and to look for partnerships as the BlackBerry-maker warned it would likely report a shock fiscal first-quarter operating loss.
Speaking at the All Things Digital conference, Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook said technology for televisions was of "intense interest" but stressed the company's efforts would unfold gradually amid speculation the iPad and iPhone maker was on the brink of unveiling a revolutionary iTV.
Footwear retailer Finish Line Inc raised its profit estimate for the first quarter as it now sees sales better than it had initially thought.
Pep Boys-Manny, Moe & Jack plunged after the automotive parts and service chain said the sale of the company to private equity firm Gores Group has been called off.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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