A collection of carnivals and links from the week of September 28.

Carnivals and awesome links for the week starting September 21.

A few years back my cousin visited me while I was still in school. Since he had never been to Vegas, my roommate and I decided to take him there... as soon as he landed in Los Angeles. Hilarity ensued... and nothing was learned at all about retirement saving except how not to approach it.

Carnivals and posts for your required reading list.

When the United States, and even the individual states find themselves in turbulent financial times, a commonly repeated theme they tend to repeat is that taxes need to be increased in order to shore up revenues. When states and countries find themselves with budget gaps, instead of trimming programs (so called 'belt-tightening' in the private population) they tend to attempt to keep the same level of programs by increasing the tax rate. Is this practice sustainable?

I will write this article in two pieces. First, in this article, I will cover the theoretical aspects of why this is not automatically true. In the next article I will give you some empirical data which you can examine and either agree or disagree with me. Let's begin.

A collection of awesome articles and carnival hosts for the week.

How did you react to the stock market's (defined, in my mind, as the S&P 500 index) recent precipitous drop? If you're like many investors, you moved out of 'risky' assets such as stocks and into 'safe' assets such as money market funds and stable value funds. Unfortunately, the seeming safety of fixed income investments is a mirage... hidden forces, such as the danger of inflation, make 'safe' investments less safe than first glance. Paradoxically, the recent movement to safer portfolios has put many people at risk for a reduction in the real value of their money in inflation adjusted dollars.

As noted in a CNN article today, one way to gauge the market's reading of current conditions is by reading the bond yields. Twice I've taken a look at how you can use Treasury Inflation Protected Securities plotted with the Daily Treasury Yield Curve to get a glimpse at the market's inflation expectations (TIPS adjust their value due to CPI). Some other interesting ratios are presented, the treasury yield curve on its own, and the spread between junk bonds and government debt.

A collection of good links and carnival hosts from the week starting August 31.

Ever made a mistake in investing? Yeah, I bet you have. I have too.

The reasons that investors make mistakes are numerous and hard to detail, but the Wall Street Journal took a really good shot at it today. Covering everything from the pain of selling at a loss to mental accounting, it's one of the best personal finance articles I've read in a long time. Oh, and I read a lot. Everyone has biases which make mistakes possible, the question is how can we recognize them and adapt? Read on...