It’s open enrollment season, but if you are like most people, you will probably default to what you did last year. That’s a shame, because spending some time with your options can help you save money. Health Insurance: For the 151 million Americans, who participate in employer-sponsored health insurance plans, there is some good news: the pace of premium increases is slowing down.
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The Senate’s passage (51-49) of the budget blueprint last week paves the way for Republicans plan to tinker with the tax code with just GOP votes, which means that tax negotiations have entered a new phase. Last week, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers argued thatPresident Trump's tax plan, which aims to reduce the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, would boost the average American family’s income by $4,000 under . Critics, including former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, questioned the $4K promise.
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Is Dow 23,000 a reason to celebrate or a warning signal of a stock market correction, or even worse, a crash? Perhaps it's a little bit of both. The International Monetary Fund recently upgraded its global growth projections, but also issued a caveat, noting that the economic bounce back was breeding “complacency,” that was “spawning financial excesses...While the waters seem calm, vulnerabilities are building under the surface [and] if left unattended, these could derail the global recovery.” Amazingly, these words could have been the exact same warning from ten or thirty years ago.
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An administration in a seemingly constant state of chaos, escalating threats with North Korea, uncertainty over Iran, the potential unwinding of NAFTA, the dismantling of key components of the Affordable Care Act…and stock markets continue to rise. The MSCI World Index of large and mid-cap stocks from 23 countries hit an all-time high on Friday, as stock indexes in the US, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany, the UK and New Zealand all reached multiyear or record highs last week.
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