On The Daily Show, Helaine Olen, who wrote the book "Pound Foolish", talks about the way personal finance gurus tend to tell us about all these things and yet, they’re all still end up leaving us less informed than before. And asks why we should need to worry about retirement if we work hard. (HT: Manish’s excellent post)
Some of the same concepts are exactly what we are told today. Invest in real estate, it won’t go down. Invest in dot com stocks. Buy infrastructure stocks.
The rest of the episode is on the Daily Show website. One part of this goes:
Alan Greenspan, the “Yoda” of the entire industry, wrote in his book that the one thing we didn’t foresee was that the banks wouldn’t be able to regulate themselves. And we’re like
“Really, you didn’t foresee it?”
It’s like coming home and finding your dog’s gone through your garbage and saying, “I had no idea he would do that!’”
Hah.