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Five Ways to Build Your Wealth: A Guide

Strategy Driven

A diversified portfolio includes various investments, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and cash. A portfolio heavily weighted towards bonds and cash may have lower potential returns, but it is also less volatile and carries less risk. Invest in bonds of various types, credit ratings , and maturities.

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Ratings Agencies Are the Darnedest Things

Harvard Business Review

In olden times, the bond raters at S&P and Moody's were financial advice providers, sort of like Morningstar is today. regulators followed suit — credit ratings are now mentioned almost 2,000 times in the Federal Register. Lots of overseas regulators and private investors have come to rely on the ratings as well.

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Why We Build Fiscal Cliffs

Harvard Business Review

Other countries sometimes have actual fiscal crises, when investors around the world (not to mention most locals) lose confidence in their government bonds and/or their currency. The interest rate on 10-year Treasuries is a mere 1.58%, the lowest in more than 50 years. credit rating but no observable increase in interest rates.

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Does Standard & Poor's Deserve a Downgrade?

Harvard Business Review

nation's credit rating has the same tone. Most of the country believes our rating for effective policymaking is somewhere between a D and an F. But that is not the point of a credit ratings agency. Ten year Canadian bonds jumped from 7.6% We are embroiled in politics, not economics.