Big news, but will it make a big difference? On February 9, the Justice Department announced it had struck a settlement approaching $26 billion with the major U.S. mortgage servicers. This is the biggest multistate settlement of any kind since the Big Tobacco payout of 1998, with five big banks (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Ally Financial and Wells Fargo) agreeing to make amends for robo-signing and other consumer abuses. Other lenders may join them in the deal.1,2 While this is all well and good, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan conceded to the press on February 9 that...

Anticipation is high. Facebook filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 1, taking its first big step toward going public. It aims to raise $5 billion through its upcoming IPO. Some of the details from the S-1 form...

True or false? You may have heard this claim before (or something like it): “Many Americans are being forced to retire later because their savings and investments took a hit in the Great Recession.” Recently, a big-name economist disputed that belief. In a commentary for Bloomberg, former White House budget director Peter Orszag wrote that some of the statistics don’t seem to back up this conventional wisdom, but perhaps it all depends on which statistics you cite.

Most regular investors don’t get a chance to hear directly from their investment managers – at NEXT Financial Group, we believe communication is critical to a great relationship. Here is your chance to listen to what an institutional-quality money manager has to say and to ask your questions directly.

It only makes sense - yet many retirees live without one. You won’t be able to withdraw an unlimited amount of money in retirement. So a retirement budget is a necessity. Some retirees forego one, only to regret it later.

China, China, China—China this, China that. The news sure seems to be full of talk about China. Do you think so? I understand China holds dangerous amounts of American debt, our trade deficit with China is growing and Chinese children are outperforming American children in school. But with all this fear-mongering, it’s important to take a look and see just how different the average Chinese person is from an American—and there are obviously many ways to look at this. An interesting article was sent to me, written by a Chinese-American, that looked at how the average Chinese person looks at money—the following is a summary of this article.

Memories of 2008 are still fresh: The credit crisis; the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual; the federal takeover of Fannie and Freddie; the market downturn. There’s little doubt Wall Street would like to erase it all from its conscience, and maybe it has. Part of the anger of the Occupy Wall Street movement comes from the perception that nothing has changed. While the Dodd-Frank Act (designed to make the financial system more accountable and transparent) is now taking effect, the Volcker Rule (intended to stop banks from trading for their own accounts) may be watered down or put off. Beyond that, the U.S. economic recovery from the Great Recession has sputtered and made people question the recent bullish sentiment. Stocks have rebounded strongly since 2009, but there are still many factors to worry about; this may lead to a little contrarian thinking.