President Obama is selling his plan to pull troops out of Afghanistan by describing it as an opportunity to refocus on the domestic health of America. His term, "nation building at home" recalls the great American eras like the industrial and gilded ages. They eventually led to new railroads and highways, the infrastructure that powered us into the boom time of the 1950s.

But with our national debt looming, are we up for a new age of expansion and innovation, even if we end up saving money from a troop withdrawal out of Afghanistan?

Todd Buchholz, former White House economist and author of "Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race" adds up the numbers for us.

For months gold had been on a fantastic run, but last week gold prices plunged 9.6 percent, and then Monday another 2 percent, to $1,600 an ounce. Investors usually consider gold a safe bet, but they may not think of them that way anymore.

Louise Story, Wall Street and finance reporter for The New York Times, discusses why prices are dropping and whether betting on gold is still a sure thing.

From Wall Street to the trailer park—that's the real trajectory traveled by brothers-in-law Dan Weissman and Dave Shlachter, who are both principals and co-founders of Jaffa Parks,  a company that owns trailer parks in Indianapolis and across Texas.

Weissman and Shlachter were recently profiled in Bloomberg Markets Magazine—there they explain that while the trailer park business might seem like an unlikely growth industry, the economics of mobile homes are particularly alluring to folks who’ve made their living in the markets.

There were fewer units of public housing in the United States in 2012 than there were in 1995, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, even as the number of "worse case" households—families particularly in need of assistance—has risen.

For around 12 million Americans, a trailer park home is simply the best bet financially. That's why former Wall Street investment bankers like Weissman and Shlachter are getting into the business. 

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office just a few months after 9/11. As New Yorkers started to rebuild, the Mayor quickly re-zoned the city, leaving much more land for residential real estate.

Much of the new construction included luxury buildings. As the city skyline changed, so did the people buying those high-priced apartments.

According to a new investigation co-authored by Louise Story, investigative reporter for Takeaway partner The New York Times, last year more than $8 billion dollars were spent on New York condos costing $5 million dollars or more—triple the amount of just a decade ago.

However, back in 2013, Mayor Bloomberg claimed this investment was good for the city.

"We've been able to do something that none of these other cities can do, and that is attract some of the very wealthy from around the city and around the world," he told listeners on his call-in WOR radio show. "And they are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes, they're the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and the restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy. And we take the tax revenue from those people and help people throughout the entire rest of the spectrum."

He later noted, "If we could get every billionaire from around the world to move here, it would be a godsend!"

But Story's new investigation presents a much more complicated picture: A number of foreign buyers are using luxury real estate in New York and elsewhere throughout the country to hide corrupt dealings and billions of dollars.

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.

A landmark election for the five-year-old democracy of Myanmar may mean new economic hope for a country that is being closely watched by investors.

Vote counting continues in the most rural parts of the country, but the opposition party has claimed victory for Novel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. 

Can she capitalize on the natural resources and young workforce in order to make significant gains for the country? Tom Nagorski, executive vice president of the Asia Society, answers.

What you'll learn from this segment:

• What the economy of Myanmar was before the 2010 election that ended military rule.
• How Aung San Suu Kyi can manage this economic and political transition.
• How Myanmar could reshape the region, including places like China and Taiwan. 

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview. 

This week, we've partnered with Inside Energy for a look at the ways in which the climate change agreement from the COP21 summit in Paris will impact communities across the country. 

Major investments will be needed to meet the requirements of the agreement. We take a look at the biggest winners in the renewable energy with Dan Boyce, a reporter for Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focused on America’s energy issues.

What you'll learn from this segment:

• How much investment is needed to meet the climate goals established by the COP21 agreement.
• What investors are currently looking at. 
• How industries will have to change to come out ahead.

Last night I watched with 100 of my fellow political junkies as President Obama gave his third State of the Union address. We tweeted along, in earnest, with mostly substantive commentary, though the tweets were laced with wry humor about John Boehner's emotional reaction to Obama's remark about his boyhood and whether Vice President Biden himself was tweeting.

I said on this page yesterday that, for Obama, this speech needed to be a big transformational moment, a speech that would evoke FDR and Kennedy, one that would remind us why we voted for him in the first place.

We face enormous challenges: Putting millions of people back to work, preparing our children to compete in the global economy and, of course, the massive budget deficit that looms over America's future.

I suggested the President deliver a speech that tackled each of these while, at the same time, recalling his message of hope and change - now underway in America. This SOTU address, at the two-year mark in his presidency - and heading into his reelection bid - was his opportunity to show us, with key examples, that he is fulfilling the promises of his campaign, in light of those practical realities.

The President and his advisors clearly made a different choice. Instead of a speech that reached for the hearts and minds of Americans, we had a speech that was largely about compromise with Congress.

President Obama always starts out strong, and he did again last night, with a warm welcome, proper acknowledgment of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the Greene family, and a preacherly call for unity in the wake of the tragedy in Tucson.

Tucson reminded us that no matter who we are or where we come from, each of us is a part of something greater - something more consequential than party or political preference. We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled.

And with that he was on his way to the hearts and minds of America. But then he took the left turn toward compromise - and great detail (always part of the SOTU, and my least favorite part).

The President talked about the need for government investment in highways and railroads, schools, and new clean-energy industries. He talked in great detail about his national goals in this area -- 85% of the country's energy should come from clean energy sources by the year 2035; 80 % percent of Americans should have access to high-speed rail within 25 years; 98 % should have access to high-speed wireless within five years (that drew big applause in the Greene Space, btw).

This is all well and good, but it bogged down the message: Change is happening; hope is here.

The speech started to get back on message when Obama tackled the issue of spending. You could almost see him looking Republicans squarely in the eye (though House Speaker John Boehner was seated behind him, as is the custom, and the rest of the audience were in a new bipartisan seating arrangement, which is not the custom).

Here, President Obama talked a tougher game: Eliminating taxpayer subsidies for oil companies (to help pay for that clean-energy initiative); extending his proposed three-year freeze on some discretionary programs to five years (for $400 billion in savings over 10 years); cutting mandatory spending on Medicare and Social Security; and cutting military spending (more applause in the Greene Space).

We were well beyond the halfway mark before he got to foreign policy -- an interesting choice, given that we are still fighting two wars. It was a choice dictated, his advisors must have felt, by the economic times.

And Sputnik. All day Tuesday, people were talking about Sputnik. The Russian word "sputnik" literally means "co-traveler", "traveling companion" or "satellite." In case you are under thirty-five and missed it, the Sputnik Program was the Soviet space program, in which they launched the first human-made robot to orbit the Earth. The reference yesterday was to John Kennedy's famous speech in which he launched the race to the moon. Presidential historians call it a transcendental moment in Kennedy's presidency and for America.

Last night, President Obama embraced the analogy:

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs. This is our generation's Sputnik moment.

Yet last night's speech lacked the transcendental quality of Kennedy's speech delivered in Houston, back when President Obama was an infant (and before most people in the Greene Space, last night, were born).

Still, this President governs in a new century, during an unprecedented era of partisanship. Given that context, Obama's SOTU offered a welcome contrast to all of the posturing that has passed for productivity in the first few weeks of the new Republican-controlled House.

I've heard rumors that a few of you have some concerns about the new health care law. So let me be the first to say that anything can be improved. If you have ideas about how to improve this law by making care better or more affordable, I am eager to work with you. .What I'm not willing to do is go back to the days when insurance companies could deny someone coverage because of a pre-existing condition... So instead of re-fighting the battles of the last two years, let's fix what needs fixing and move forward.

Move forward, indeed. That is leadership. That is the reason we elected Barack Obama - because when he says, "move forward" most Americans want to move forward with him.

At times Tuesday night, Mr. Obama was truly captivating, with a vision for the country to move forward, restored in confidence, united in a sense of purpose. And of course, at the end of the speech, he was inspired. Americans need to hear a lot more from that President Obama.

Jami Floyd is an attorney, broadcast journalist and legal analyst for cable and network news, and is a frequent contributor to WNYC Radio. She is former advisor in the Clinton administration and served as a surrogate for the Obama campaign on legal and domestic policy issues.

After another volatile day on Wall Street, WNYC checked in with Erika Safran founder of Safran Wealth Advisors, to see how her clients — many retired and living off of their 401Ks and investments — are reacting.

Q: What are you your clients worried about?

A. They're not worried. They're aware, but not worried.

Q: What are you telling them?

A. I identify their portfolio. I identify their positions, and give them comfort in what their exposures are to particular asset classes, and then I bring back to mind what their long term goals are — what were our positions? What were our objectives? I don't create a Pollyanna attitude when the markets are precarious. You can't tell a client, 'Don't worry.' I can tell them to be aware, and let them know that we are watching. There's no reason for people to think everything is wonderful, but at the same sense, this is not a huge, gigantic sell-off that is going to destroy them next week.

Q: What do you tell people nearing retirement?

A. The strategies that they have in place would have been put in place before yesterday, so if my client is three years from retirement, then they don't have 80 percent of their assets invested in the stock markets, be it domestic or foreign, because anyone who has a goal that is a few years away should have a certain amount of cash allocated for that goal. And without question have more security. I know over the long term the stock market is going to be the growth, but if you know that you’re going to need $50,000 from your portfolio next year, wouldn't it be wise to do that now? So, part of that strategy is if you need money and you're going to need consistent income from that portfolio. We always set aside at least two years of those assets and it sits in a money market fund. And that way when the market turns against you, you don't have to worry about dipping into that principle to access those funds.

Q: How do you diversify in this type of economy?

A. Money markets, cash is king. In bad times, money markets can be set aside. Another strategy is being diversified and holding not only domestic bonds, emerging market bonds or bonds that are not tied to the U.S. dollars that trade in foreign currencies. And there are mutual funds that achieve that.

Yesterday morning, what we did was in the morning we bought a position that would provide us hedge against the falling market, so we bought the hedge in the morning, and we sold it out in the afternoon. Are we traders? No. Do we take action to secure parts of client's portfolios on volatile days? Yes. And today we're moving along with no change in client's portfolios. No buying, no selling.

Q: Any other advice for people concerned right now?

A. Generally the public has this misconception that when the markets turn you should stop contributing to your 401K. When the market turns, you should probably increase your contribution to your 401K because you’re adding monthly, or with every paycheck, so you have the fortune of buying it cheaper. You’re actually buying it on sale consistently.

John Campbell, Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, discusses President Obama's trip to Africa and how U.S. policy toward the continent has changed since the Bush Administration--and the kinds of investments the President is advocating for there.

Heidi Moore, finance and economics editor at The Guardian, talks about the new financial regulation restricting how banks can trade securities and invest with their own funds.

John Kay critiques the Western finance culture and function. In Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance, he argues that the finance sector is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Kay also posits that financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading, devoting too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones.

If you’re saving for retirement and you give your money over to financial professionals, a slogan of theirs might be “we put customers first.” Well, until recently that was just a marketing strategy; now it’s law. 

This week The Labor Department issued new regulations that will require financial advisers and brokers handling individual retirement and 401(k) accounts to act solely in the best interest of the investor.

Jason Zweig, personal finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Devil's Financial Dictionary, explains the new rules and when they go into effect.

Paul Solman calls Terry Burnham the “Chicken Little” of finance because of his repeated calls that the Dow will plummet. So how does Burnham invest his own money? Today, he explains. Photo by Amit Dave/Reuters

One year ago on April 1, 2015, in my persona as “Chicken Little,” I revealed my investment positions. As shown in the graph below, one year ago I was primarily invested in U.S. Treasurys and had 30 percent in cash. This investment position reflected my macroeconomic view that “the sky is falling.” And in case you’re wondering — yes, all of my Chicken Little articles include my real investment positions. People often ask for my investment advice; I respond by showing them my actual investments.

In this article we look back on 12 months of Chicken Little’s performance. For investors, we highlight aspects that remain the same and then note what has changed. We end with Chicken Little’s advice and a look at where Chicken Little is invested today (spoiler alert: still cowering in fear).

Chicken Little’s one-year performance

Over the last year, Chicken Little earned 1.3 percent. Is this good or bad? At first look, it seems pretty bad. It is very close to zero. Furthermore, consider that pension funds and endowments assume they will earn more than 7 percent a year. By these measures, 1.3 percent is pretty dismal.

However, if we look at investment possibilities over the last year, the 1.3 percent gain may look better. Let us look at stocks, Treasury bonds and gold.

When we started, on March 31, 2015, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 17,766. One year later, on March 31, 2016, the Dow was 83 points lower at 17,693. With dividends, the total return on the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 1.89 percent.

READ MORE: How long will the Fed have to ‘fiddle’ with interest rates?

Looking more broadly, stocks outside the U.S. had a bad 12 months. Emerging market stocks lost 12.63 percent while international stocks in places such as Europe and Japan lost 8.40 percent. So investors in U.S. stocks made a little bit of money, while those who invested outside the U.S. had moderate-sized losses.

The best place to have been invested in the last year was the “safe-haven” assets of gold and long-term Treasury bonds. Both safe havens had relatively modest returns in absolute terms, but did well relative to stocks.

Table 1: One-year performance of major asset classes, 3/31/2015 – 3/31/2016.

The last year has been a pretty challenging one for investors. The average stock in the world lost money, the best return among the choices above was gold and long-term U.S. Treasury bonds.

If we had a time machine and could go back to March 31, 2015, where would we invest? The highest return would have been to put all of one’s money into gold. However, that would have been very risky. Another reasonable alternative would have been to partially sit out the year by holding a lot of cash. From this perspective, Chicken Little’s decision to buy Treasurys and hold a lot of cash looks pretty good.

There is, however, no chicken victory dance going on, because one year is a very short period of time for investing. A good performance can become disastrous in a few days with turbulent markets. So Chicken Little’s preliminary self-grade is an A* — an A for avoiding money-losing, foreign stocks and picking among the best investment choices. An asterisk to note that we are not even in the first inning. As an investor, humiliation is never far away.

2016 looks like 2015 in many ways

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” as the French saying goes.

We continue a grand Keynesian experiment. The cure to problems caused by loose money and too much debt is, according to current policy, looser money and more debt. Governments around the world continue to print money and spend with reckless abandon.

Loose money means low interest rates and the purchase of assets through newly created money (also known as quantitative easing). The massive monetary experiment is truly hard to fathom. Table 2 summarizes current monetary policy around the world by way of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan.

The Bank of Japan is pursuing the most aggressive quantitative easing program in the world. Newly created yen equate to one-sixth of the size of Japan’s economy each year. In January of 2015, Japan moved to negative interest rates. On both measures, Japanese monetary policy is the loosest it has been in its history.

READ MORE: How do negative interest rates work anyway?

But the loosest monetary policy award may go to the European Central Bank. European interest rates are even more negative than those in Japan. In addition, the European Central Bank recently expanded its money creation to nearly 1 trillion euros per year — the greatest rate of money creation by the European Central Bank in its history.

The U.S. Federal Reserve is also pursuing a super loose monetary policy. Short-term interest rates are fractionally above the lowest rates in U.S. history. After creating $4 trillion dollars of new money in recent years, the Fed has paused its quantitative easing program.

Table 2: Global central banks are providing massive liquidity.

For investors and savers, the Keynesian experiment means low interest rates. If you’re prudent enough to be a saver, you have been placed in a terrible position by low interest rates. Senior citizens, in particular, face two unattractive alternatives:

Senior citizen alternative #1: Invest in Treasurys, and eat cat food.

Senior citizen alternative #2: Gamble. Eat caviar until the bust, then eat at the soup kitchen.

READ MORE: Low Rates are the Real Financial Monster

More generally, the grand Keynesian experiment has led to tepid economic growth while creating daunting instabilities. Just this week, International Monetary Fund director Christine Lagarde warned once again that global growth is stalling.

In summary, global macroeconomic policies are unchanged from a year ago: We continue to experiment with the world economy by attempting to print and spend our way to prosperity.

What is new for investors?

1. The bull market in U.S. stocks might be over

It is said that no one rings a bell at the end of a bull market. However, the one sure sign of the end of a bull market is a failure to make new highs. The U.S. stock market peaked in May 2015 and has not made a new high in more than 10 months. This is the longest period without a new high since this bull market began in March 2009.

In April 2015, Chicken Little showed a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and wrote, “This is a bull market in U.S. stocks.” A year later, the odds that we are already in a stock market decline are much higher than they were.

2. The nightmare of low interest rates has reached absurd levels.

Many government bonds around the world now pay negative interest rates. A negative interest rate means that you are guaranteed to lose money. Looking back just five years, the picture was much different. Interest rates in many places are now the lowest in history. Some pundits label low rates as “financial repression.” If you are a saver, you can choose your own word: unfair, obscene, depressing, horrible, ________?

Table 3: Interest rates on government bonds are low and in many places negative.

Chicken Little’s current investment advice for readers

I believe that most people have too much invested in risky assets. By this, I mean the horror of trying to live on the low interest rates on safe assets has pushed people to take too much financial risk.

How do you know if you are taking too much risk? The simple approach is to recall how you felt with the roughly 10 percent declines in the U.S. stock market in August 2015 and from January to February 2016.

If a 10 percent decline in stocks causes you stress, then you probably have too much risk in your portfolio. In the last century, there have been four periods where stocks lost 50 percent or more of their value. The 1910’s saw massive inflation after World War I. Stocks lost 90 percent of their value in the Depression. Stocks also lost more than half their value in the inflationary 1970s. Finally, stocks lost half their value in the 2007 to 2009 declines.

Table 4: U.S. stock busts in last century.

I suggest that people scale back on their risky investments by a modest amount. For example, an investor could sell 10 percent of her or his stock position. Such a move would have little impact on wealth, but may allow for larger changes in the future. In particular, if the Dow Jones Industrial Average makes a new low below 15,000, Chicken Little will advise more sales.

Chicken Little’s current investments

Chicken Little remains invested for a deflationary depression. As shown below, this means a heavy dose of Treasury bonds and a substantial cash position. What about stocks? Chicken Little does not have a single penny invested in stocks and will, in fact, make a little bit of money if stocks around the world decline. (Chicken Little is “short” stocks, which is a position that makes money if stocks go down.)

As compared with the positioning a year ago, Chicken Little is even more pessimistically invested. Chicken Little became more optimistic about gold prices two months ago. The short position in stocks is larger, and there are more long-term Treasury bonds in the portfolio.

A few last thoughts from Chicken Little

The grand Keynesian experiment will end in ruin.

Furthermore, when markets move, they will move too fast for most people to react. To avoid being frozen in panic when the decline comes, I believe people would do well to reduce financial risk now.

The first year of the Chicken Little portfolio was successful primarily in avoiding losing money in global stocks and for picking a safe asset that rose in value. I expect future stock market moves to be much more extreme than they have been in the past 12 months.

You can compete or follow along with Chicken Little in the Chicken Little 2016 fantasy stock contest.

The post How have Chicken Little’s investments fared in this rough year for stocks? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Before she was a Wall Street executive or the CEO of an investment company for women, Sallie Krawcheck was a little kid, listening to her parents fight about money. 

"You just knew, once a month, they were gonna have a big fight and somebody was gonna storm out of the house," she told me. "It was a really stressful and tense topic for us, because we didn't have any." 

That taught Sallie that she never wanted to be in that position. She says she started working in the third grade, filing papers at her dad's law office. By high school, Sallie was lending her parents money to fix the furnace when it gave out. "I wanted to make my own money. I did not want to have those fights with a spouse, or be put in a position where I would be financially vulnerable," she said. 

Sallie learned that lesson again after she began her career in finance, and she found out her first husband was having an affair. She had graduated from business school, but at the time of their divorce, she wasn't in charge of their finances. "I knew vaguely how much we had, but it was an eye-opener," she says. "When you're reeling from a break to a relationship, that's a really bad time to try and figure out how to manage your money." 

Sallie remarried, and while she and her husband raised their two kids, Sallie's career continued to advance. She became the CEO of Smith Barney, and then, a top executive at Citigroup. She was there when the financial crisis hit in 2008, and Sallie was fired amid corporate infighting about how to handle some of the bank's major losses. "We told the kids that we were okay. You know, that mom got fired, mom got re-orged out and that we were okay as a family," she says. "I think the conversations were that straightforward." 

This year, Sallie started Ellevest, a financial planning firm specifically focused on women. When I asked whether her Wall Street past ever makes it awkward to have money conversations with women who earn much less, it got a little heated. "I have made money in my life. Isn't it interesting I had to come back and tell you that I also lost a lot of money in my life, as if I'm apologizing for it. It's funny. You've made me feel quite defensive," she told me. 

"It is interesting how awkward it is to talk about it," Sallie added, "even though I talk about it in the abstract everyday." 

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview. 

Durreen Shahnaz calls herself a “defiant optimist.” She’s the first Bangladeshi woman to graduate from the Wharton School of Business and to work on Wall Street, and she’s spending her life coming up with new ways to invest in social capital.

Back in 2013, Shahnaz launched the Impact Investment Exchange Asia (IIEA). This social stock exchange is going strong today and has funded a number of projects in places like Bangladesh, Cambodia, and The Philippines.

“We initially spent a lot of time trying to find these entities [to invest in] who were out there doing this great work but could be financially viable,” she says. “Now we are at a stage where they come to us because we have had a lot of success.”

In all, the IIX says it has positively impacted 12 million people throughout Asia since its inception. How does it work? Shahnaz says an entrepreneur with a socially-focused business or organization will approach the IIX and ask for assistance in reaching “the next stage.”

“We spend quite a bit of time getting them what we call ‘investment ready,’” she says. “We also work with them in terms of calculating the social impact that they’re creating. The whole financial and the social calculations go hand-in-hand, and then we basically put it up in front of our investors.”

In addition to helping social entrepreneurs and communities in need, Shahnaz says the IIX is “changing the behavior of investors.” Once an investor sees that an initiative is making an impact, many comeback to contribute more, Shahnaz says. And the projects that the IIX funds aren’t just helping people, they’re yielding financial returns, too.

“It is social and it is about doing good and using finance to do good, which is really nice,” she says. “For once we are seeing what finance should be doing — working very holistically.”

Check out Shahnaz’s full TED Talk on the IIX below.

Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest, an innovative digital investment platform designed to help women reach their financial goals, and author of Own It: The Power of Women at Work, offers women a new set of rules for professional success.