The realization that the retirement money of middle-class workers should not be invested in crazy expensive hedge funds is now hardening into conventional wisdom.

Today, more evidence that pensions are a slow-moving disaster that will in your lifetime consume our nation like the inexorable creep of hot lava down a volcano’s edge consumes everything in its path.

Are you planning to retire with a pension? I’m sorry to hear that.

Management experts speak of every company as having “stakeholders”—all of the different people affected by what a company does. If you can rearrange the hierarchy of stakeholders, you can change the world.

A new survey of investors around the world finds that people have a very simple expectation when they invest their money: they want to get rich, soon, no strings attached.

In our American oligarchy, political influence is, broadly speaking, for sale. A new study confirms a straightforward relationship between corporate lobbying and higher profits.

Many financial types are very confident that China will have a financial meltdown in the near(?) future. The fear is so widespread that you can make a lot of money if China’s stock market doesn’t go to hell.

A recent survey of investors in hedge funds found that 94% of them expected their hedge funds to return at least 9% profits last year. The actual returns of hedge funds last year: -2%.

Pensions are good. Pensions are worth preserving until something better comes along. But pensions that make impossible promises and cultivate lies are not the pensions we should hope for.

The hedge fund industry is in the midst of a slow-motion disaster, as its biggest investors come to the realization that the fees hedge funds charge make most of them a scam. One hedge fund guy is embodying the industry’s clueless resistance to change, in hilarious fashion!

As the “Empire State of Mind” beat filled the packed CenturyLink Arena in Omaha, the chorus slid in: “At Berkshire, financial strength is what dreams are made of, there’s nothing you can’t dooooo….” The white, middle-aged crowd of investors jammed. Is this is the humble setting from which champions arise?

New York City’s $60 billion civil employees pension fund has just decided to drop all of its investments in hedge funds. That’s the sound of one more nail being hammered into a coffin.

In the history of the modern American stock market, the chance of an extreme one-day crash is about 1% in any give six month period. So why is everyone constantly terrified that it will happen?

That odd sound you hear this morning is the groaning of a million financial con artists who are complaining that their business model—ripping people off—is being undermined by good governance. Dang.

Perhaps the best reason to worry about Wall Street money managers ripping off investors is that most of those investors are regular people—via retirement plans. The extent of the Wall Street skim is truly shocking.

Paul Ryan—the lovable Republican, who cares in theory about poverty. Right? My friends, I’m afraid that the only thing Paul Ryan demonstrably cares about is breathtaking levels of pro-Wall Street doublespeak.

A study finds that a cheap, simple portfolio of three Vanguard index funds achieved better returns over five and ten years than almost all of the college endowments in America, which pay huge fees to hedge funds and elite money managers. Keep fuckin that chicken, smart people.

Each and every hedge fund investor in the world believes that he is paying all that money to a hedge fund manager because he has one of the really good hedge funds. The reality is, most hedge fund investors are suckers.

In our current time of intermittent financial panics, the banking sector stands out in its unpopularity: major bank stocks are trading well below the book value of those banks. What has everyone so terrified?

Goldman Sachs is a Very Sophisticated Wall Street Firm which is paid a good deal of money for its expertise in reading the financial markets. How is that going this year?