These are the good guys. The big challenge facing the Collaborative is not conflict of interest, but rather lack of interest.

Anytime. Though, in effort to clarify, the Wager was ‘against the board’, not v. yourself..

Any potential conflict of interest should be assumed to affect behavior. Period. That something so obvious needs advocating by anyone, anywhere, ever makes my head desperately want to find a wall to beat itself against.

If I’m ever in PA again, I’d love to buy you a hamburger anyway. If Helicopter Ben has his way, they may be 50 quid by the time I get back there (though I’m a near-to-intermediate term deflationist). BR is the Man and, to paraphrase a term of the day, it’s his blog and we’re all just living in it.

Here’s wagering U$D 50, or equivalent value “Box of Clams”, that BR has No Direct Response to your Supposition and supporting Q:’s..

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/supposition

WRT, “We need to protect the financially illiterate from themselves.”

That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. We need to stop changing everyone’s poopie diapers. Until we get back to the idea of growing up and actually facing the consequences of our decisions, we are on Hayek’s road to serfdom. What we need is for the financially illiterate to wake up and engage in a little due diligence. The prospect of failure is a great motivator in that regard.

WRT, “Especially when the rest of us have to pay for their bad choices and/or ignorance.”

Why IS everyone footing the bill? Why are there no investigations? Why is the FR still in charge? Why has Congress ceded control of our economy to the creature from Jekyll Island? I think of myself as a proponent of free and open markets. We’ve had nothing of the sort in this country for the last century and look what it has gotten us. Before the repeal of Glass-Stegall, we had the S&L debacle. We are not suffering the current crisis because of a failure of regulation, we are suffering it as we do all crises – because we have ceded control to a group of elites and their supposed watchdogs who are needed only because the rest of us are “financial illiterates.”

When you get the “octabox” going here on TBP, sometimes good things come out of it (unlike CNBC)…

Let’s put Larry Summers & Suze Orman together as co-hosts of a TV show :-)…Now THAT would be a hoot!

Apology accepted. Thank you.

And I’ve been around long enough that I’ve had disagreements on Suze Orman before, sure. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: On balance Suze Orman does more good than harm. Some of the specifics of her advice is bad, but it isn’t fair to lump her in with some like Jim Cramer. I think of her as the Oprah of personal finance: She makes the topic approachable and unintimidating to a lot of people who would otherwise completely ignore it and hope it goes away. A lot of those people are women, too.

If the entire country were made up of finance nerds like TBP readers, Suze Orman would be out of a job. But the level of ignorance and fear of personal finance in this country is pretty staggering. Not long ago I had a conversation with a friend whose girlfriend was in big credit card debt, and she didn’t even realize that making monthly payments at less than the monthly interest was going to result in the principal growing forever. When he tried to talk to her about it they almost broke up as a result. This story has a happy ending, as she is now taking concrete steps to cut down her living expenses, but many such stories do not.

There are a lot of people in this country who wouldn’t feel empowered (I know that’s a fuzzy, annoying word) to take on their finances without someone like Suze Orman. Not TBP readers, but a lot of other people. You can make fun of her, but if you want her gone you should suggest how those people would reasonably be expected to take control of their financial situation without someone like her making it feel manageable.

But I totally agree with you regarding Larry Summers. The man’s a tool.