Finance

This is America Saves Week, which is an annual campaign that encourages nationwide discussion on savings and promotes good savings behavior. For those of us in the asset-building field, this is an opportunity to elevate research on the relationship between savings and life outcomes. This research can help justify the importance of good savings behavior, especially when these habits and behaviors start early in life. So in honor of America Saves Week, here are some of the research highlights from the asset-building field. Specifically, these highlights come from our research at the Assets and Education Initiative (AEDI) at the University of Kansas School of Welfare, where we are studying the relationship between children's savings and their financial and educational outcomes later in life.

A top government economist has concluded that the high-speed trading firms that have come to dominate the nation’s financial markets are taking significant profits from traditional investors.

The chief economist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Andrei Kirilenko, reports in a coming study that high-frequency traders make an average profit of as much as $5.05 each time they go up against small traders buying and selling one of the most widely used financial contracts.

by Jay Pelosky

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post. View the original piece here.

For much of the last three decades, policy debates in the United States have been dominated by a quixotic concern about deficits, debt, and demographics. This concern has distracted policy from fundamental economic issues that have much more direct bearing on economic well-being, most notably the growth (and bursting) of the housing bubble in the last decade. While large deficits can have a negative impact on economic growth, this impact has been hugely misrepresented in public debates.

by Jay Pelosky

This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post.

Yesterday, the FDIC released a new report detailing the results of the 2011 Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households (“Households” Survey). The first survey was done back in 2009. The FDIC is required by legislative mandate to survey banks’ efforts to serve the unbanked and will continue doing the Households survey every two years. Key findings from the report, as summarized by the FDIC, are:

• 8.2 percent of U.S.

On Tuesday, July 31, the Asset Building Program hosted an event which investigated innovative savings programs for low-income Americans. “Building Better Savings Products,” moderated by Senior Policy Analyst Pamela Chan, brought together a group of panelists who have all been trying to tackle the issue of access to financial services in various ways.

This presentation is posted with permission from World Economic Roundtable members from Carmel Asset Management.

This post originally appeared at TF Market Advisors.

by Peter Tchir

Last Thursday, The White House hosted the first ever Summit on Financial Capability and Empowerment.  Did you hear all about it?  Probably not – it somehow slipped the evening news.