Author: Vivian Lewis

It is paradoxical that just as China is allowing its people to invest in American tech stocks, thanks to the creation of a Nasdaq 100 Index Exchange Traded Fund in China, it will be harder for Chinese to use or buy the...

  Wen Jiabao of China happily announced today that the country would be running a trade deficit in March. He added that China is not seeking to have a trade surplus but merely to achieve balance between its imports and...

  Last night we saw a play of a Dostoyevsky story called The Double, about mid-19th century identity theft. It was a brilliant and convincing variant on the psychodrama original, showing that Golyadkin was not a madman in...

AC asked me about the origin of my London address on the Isle of Dogs. The Mudchute, a fertile high hill, grew from the dump of 17th-19th century Thames River dredgers. It now is a municipal farm, with nature walks and horse...

  It is time to come in for a landing. I flew high over the Atlantic overnight and the stock market did the same. According to Tom McClellan and savvy reader DW (who is amongst my richest readers) it is time for a...

Yesterday I got a corrected 1099 from E-Trade but despite its having come a day before St. Patrick’s Day, it still shows that my now-sold shares of Cryptologic (CRYP of Dublin, Ireland) as having been subject to...

Apologies for an error in my note about converting to a Roth IRAs yesterday. The tax you pay when you convert an IRA to a Roth is not at the capital gains rate but at your statuatory income tax rate. Note that the city and state...

Your editor has been trying to Roth her IRA with E-trade but faces a major problem. US law requires that the taxpayer doing the conversion pay capital gains tax on the non-Roth IRA account when converting it to a Roth. You have...

Reader NT asked me what the financial analyst discovered in the TelMex books two decades ago which led me to sell the shares of the company of the world’s richest man. It was not a Lehman-style sophiticated scam. Mexicans...

  Just what linkage is there between Carlos Slim Helu being selected as the richest man on earth by Forbes, and the outlook for his native Mexico? In my view, nada. To be sure Matthew Miller, the senior editor of the...