Description: Describes how the mantra of 'tax cuts will pay for themselves" along with the political unwillingness to cut spending (extant since the 1980s), has led to this increasing debt problem in the U.S., reaching $17 trillion at time of writing. Other countries are behaving in a similar fashion, and it can be only a matter of time before the globe may reach another crisis, this time based on excessive government debt coupled with fewer interested investors.

Description: This paper introduces basic embedded value EV principles, concepts and formulas that will be especially valuable to the beginning students of EV.

Description: The amount of 1 [i.e., the amount that $ 1 is worth after 1 year] for an account earning a nominal interest r compounded n times annually is Pn[r,t], where t = [t1, . . . ,tn]. Note that Pn[r,t] is a polynomial in r of degree n. Now suppose that the n compounding periods have lengths T1, . . . ,Tn chosen at random. What can we say about Pn[r , T] , where T=[T1, . . . , Tn]? This depends of course on what is meant by choosing random lengths and we will consider two different natural possibilities that give rise to different answers to this question.