Tell It To Al

It’s easy to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, as the Federal Reserve appears poised to do again on Thursday.

But if the economy ever comes roaring  back, how does it get all this money back out?

It’s a question that hasn’t been sufficiently answered, says Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist for The Economic Outlook Group in Princeton, N.J.

“There have been growing concerns that the Federal Reserve has already overextended itself by pumping so much liquidity into the economy,” he wrote in some talking points emailed to media. (Click here to read them.) That “it will be unable to adroitly mop up the excess funds once growth and employment pick up.”

“Here’s what is so worrisome,” he continued. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke “said ‘the costs of nontraditional policies, when considered carefully, ‘appear manageable.’

“’Appear manageable???’” This reinforces the view that no one at the Fed really knows how successful they will be in limiting credit growth once they begin to drain some $2 trillion in stimulus from the economy.”

Looks like the Fed will jump off that bridge to no where when it gets there. All the chatter from Wall Street this week amounts to an expectation that the Fed will launch another massive bond buying program, which it is calling “QE3″ for what would be a third round of quantitative easing.

“Our concern is that QE 3 may end up tarnishing the Fed’s reputation,” Mr. Baumohl writes. “Whatever ‘exit strategy’ they have on paper, we wonder how well they will implement it in the real world. Given the unprecedented amount of emergency liquidity provided, simply admitting that the cost of all this easing “appear manageable” is not all that comforting.”

When it comes to protecting your income from taxes, there is no better way than to become a highly compensated private equity fund manager.

Not only do they take most of their income as capital gains in a perfectly legal way, but they’ve also got a trick to take their remaining income at a lower tax rate as well. It’s a bit of a grey area, of course. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating if this trick is legal.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

At WhatsYourPrice.com, you can pay a woman to go on a date with you. At SeekingArrangement.com, you can become some sweet young thing’s “sugar daddy. At MissTravel.com, you can find a beautiful girl to travel with you, as long as you’re picking up the tabs.

Is this prostitution? No, it’s how rich nerds get dates, says the creator of all these websites, Brandon Wade.

Meantime, Mr. Wade is suing PayPal because it refuses to business with his sites.

Click here to read my column on Marketwatch.

You need a home for your growing family, but growing your family could result in a denied mortgage application.

Yes, it’s illegal to discriminate against women on maternity leave. But that doesn’t keep discrimination from happening.

‘The Department of Housing and Urban Development today said it reached a $20,000 settlement with Land Home Financial Services after it allegedly denied a California couple’s mortgage application because the wife was on maternity leave.

“We will continue to pursue maternity leave discrimination until it is eliminated,” said John Trasviña, HUD’s Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.

Click here to read more from HUD.

Let’s see, Americans are getting fatter, but airlines are making their seats thinner.

If you’re a ”customer of size” or you are sitting next to a “customer of size,” you know that this is just nuts. Click here to read more about the seat size changes, and then go on a diet or get one of those “Honey, I shrunk the kids,” machines.

Almost everything about commercial aviation is nuts these days, from the pilots and crew to the passengers. And no airline can truly guarantee a “nut-free” flight from people allergic to them.

Click here to read my column on Marketwatch. And click here to read a column I wrote in 2006 about getting stuck on a flight from Hawaii next to a guy whose mass was just rolling into my seat.

Forget about “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The big question is, “Are you poor?”

More than 25% Americans say they are poor, and another 6% are not willing to admit, or are still trying to decide, whether they are poor, according to a survey by online cash-advance lender CashNetAmerica.

Click here to read more about the study.

That’s quite a bit more than the 15.1% of Americans who live at or below the federal poverty threshhold of $22,113  a year for a family of four, according the Census bureau.

Of course, anyone trying to raise a family on say, $22,114, while not meeting the technical definition of “impoverished” is going to feel that way.

What the survey shows is that a rising number of Americans do not consider themselves to be middle class. It backs up the observation that the economy is in fact creating a larger underclass with nearly one-third of Americans left poor or not quite sure if they are poor.

The nation is moving backwards. The ”War on Poverty” has become the “War on the Middle Class.”

Finally, a top Republican admits his party has something to do with the nation’s $16 trillion debt load.

With House Speaker John Boehner standing nearby, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney conceded that Republican have been a something of a let-down for true fiscal conservatives.

 ”We’re going to finally have to do something that Republicans have spoken about for a long time, and for a while we didn’t do it. When we had the lead, we let people down,” Romney told a roaring crowd in Ohio today. “We need to make sure we don’t let them down this time. I will cut the deficit and get us on track to a balanced budget.”

Click here to read more on the speech.

This will take some of the wind out of the Democrats when they argue at their convention later this week, that Mr. Romney is just another George W. Bush. It’s also a refreshing change from “Let’s start another trillion-dollar war,” and then “Hey, where’d all this debt come from.”

It would have sounded even more honest if he’d said it at the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla. last week.

The claim that there’s a war on success in this country is a phony rhetorical argument that gained quite a bit of steam from the Republican National Convention.

“The centerpiece of the president’s entire re-election campaign is attacking success,” Mitt Romney claimed in his acceptance speech.

Americans do not punish, or attack success. What they punish are people who cheat.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

It doesn’t take a wide vocabulary to win in Words With Frends.

The game is won with well placed two-letter words – or at least two-letter combinations that the game’s creators think are words.

Like, ZA. Or HM.

I offer some choice words for Zynga.

Despite the popularity of its games, including Words With Friends, it’s stock has taken an amazing plunge.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch. And write me back with your favorite two- and three-letter words from this game.