Word: terme
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...received death threats regularly, wore body armor and traveled with a guard dog. Just a few weeks ago, the clinic's security cameras and lights were vandalized; Tiller asked the FBI to investigate. He was repeatedly tried--and recently acquitted--on charges of violating state laws governing late-term abortions. Why did he do it? "Women and families are intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and ethically competent to struggle with complex health issues--including abortion," he said, "and come to decisions that are appropriate for themselves...
Stocks, we have been told again and again through the years, are the best long-term investment. Prices go up and they go down, but give stocks enough time and they deliver returns that trounce those of bonds, real estate, commodities or any other asset class...
...stocks--the standard investing advice of the past quarter-century--makes sense for all of us. In the past few years, the mantra of "stocks for the long run" has come under fire from some respected students of financial markets. Their two main critiques have to do with those terms long run and best. The first debate centers on whether you can count on stocks' long-term advantage to work out over your particular investment horizon; the second is about whether an investment as risky as stocks belongs in a retirement portfolio in the first place...
First, though, a little background on stocks for the long run. The notion goes back to 1922, when a bond brokerage in New York City hired Edgar Lawrence Smith to put together a pamphlet explaining why bonds--and certainly not stocks--were the best long-term investment. At the time, this was conventional wisdom on Wall Street. Bonds were for investment, stocks for speculation--and, in those pre-SEC days, for manipulation. But when he investigated the historical record, Smith recounted later, "supporting evidence for this thesis could not be found." Instead, he discovered that over every 20-year span...
...Smith published the results as a book called Common Stocks as Long Term Investments. It was a sensation. Smith--a businessman of no great distinction up to that point--launched a mutual-fund company on the strength of his sudden fame and got an invite from John Maynard Keynes to join the Royal Economic Society. His argument was that stocks would continue to beat bonds because they a) were less vulnerable to having their value eaten away by inflation and b) allowed investors to share in the growth of the U.S. economy in a way that bonds and other assets...