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Biz bits
By wire services
Published July 17, 2005
MILLIONS OF UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS live and work in the United States illegally, despite federal laws intended to stop them. And U.S. companies are eagerly catering to the fast-growing segment, which is coming to be seen as "an untapped engine of growth," BusinessWeek says. "In the past several years, big U.S. consumer companies - banks, insurers, mortgage lenders, credit card outfits, phone carriers and others - have decided that a market of 11-million or so potential customers is simply too big to ignore." The magazine says the economic impact could be significant.
RETIREMENT PLANNING isn't as easy as it used to be, Fortune says in a special edition devoted to the topic. Challenges include a stagnant stock market, low rates on savings instruments, the prospect of worsening inflation, a Medicare disaster and looming cutbacks in Social Security and private pensions. "You have to pilot your own ship, find your own safe harbor," Fortune editor-at-large Justin Fox writes. Getting there will require "saving, planning, thinking, taking risks and possibly working past retirement age."
A NEW SOURCE of wind is puffing up the real estate bubble, according to Forbes: public pension funds, which "are rushing into real estate the way they rushed into technology in the late 1990s." The top 50 public pension funds want to raise their real estate holdings by $34-billion, or 37 percent, from current levels, which would put real estate at 7.2 percent of their assets.
THE BEST-PERFORMING STOCK FUNDS in the second quarter focused on real estate or Latin America, Barron's says in its quarterly mutual fund survey. The financial weekly says investors can look forward to "more ho-hum and choppy activity, for both bonds and stocks, in the second half of the year."
PARADISE APPARENTLY ISN'T in the United States, at least for retirees. Fortune says it has found "five idyllic places - from Patagonia to Phuket - where you can still live like a king on what you've saved." You can dream on in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina; Dubrovnik, Croatia; Boquete, Panama; Merida, Mexico; and Phuket, Thailand.
Compiled from Times wires and Web sites.
[Last modified July 15, 2005, 20:20:02]
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