Asiacell shares sold on Iraq bourse in major float






BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi mobile phone service provider Asiacell began on Sunday to sell shares on the Iraq Stock Exchange in what the head of the bourse said is the biggest initial public offering in the Middle East since 2008.


Asiacell offered a quarter of its shares, or 67.5 billion, as part of licensing requirements. The company is hoping to raise $ 1.3 billion, with the initial share price set at 22 Iraqi dinars, or just under 2 cents, apiece.






Taha al-Rubaye, the head of the exchange, said the floatation would almost double the market capitalization of the ISX to about $ 9 billion. It currently stands at $ 4.7 billion.


Al-Rubaye said it’s the first major stock float on the ISX, which was set up in 2004, a year after a U.S.-led invasion toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Al-Rubaey said he believes it’s also the largest IPO in the Middle East in nearly five years.


About 90 minutes after the start of trading Sunday, Asiacell had sold more than 35 billion shares, said a-Rubaye.


A successful floatation on Baghdad’s low-volume stock exchange could reassure international investors, many of whom remain wary of the risky Iraqi market, overshadowed by continued sectarian violence and political deadlock.


On Sunday, an attacker drove a car packed with explosives into the regional police headquarters in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least 15 people and wounding 70.


Asiacell is one of three major Iraqi telecom companies, along with Zain Iraq, part of Kuwait’s Zain, and Korek, an affiliate of France Telecom. The Gulf state of Qatar’s government-backed Qatar Telecom has a majority stake in Asiacell.


The three companies are required to list shares on the stock exchange as a condition of their 15-year operating licenses, which cost $ 1.25 billion when they were acquired in 2007. All three missed a deadline in August 2011 to offer shares to the public.


International News and Information on Yahoo! Finance





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"Great Rotation"- A Wall Street fairy tale?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street's current jubilant narrative is that a rush into stocks by small investors has sparked a "great rotation" out of bonds and into equities that will power the bull market to new heights.


That sounds good, but there's a snag: The evidence for this is a few weeks of bullish fund flows that are hardly unusual for January.


Late-stage bull markets are typically marked by an influx of small investors coming late to the party - such as when your waiter starts giving you stock tips. For that to happen you need a good story. The "great rotation," with its monumental tone, is the perfect narrative to make you feel like you're missing out.


Even if something approaching a "great rotation" has begun, it is not necessarily bullish for markets. Those who think they are coming early to the party may actually be arriving late.


Investors pumped $20.7 billion into stocks in the first four weeks of the year, the strongest four-week run since April 2000, according to Lipper. But that pales in comparison with the $410 billion yanked from those funds since the start of 2008.


"I'm not sure you want to take a couple of weeks and extrapolate it into whatever trend you want," said Tobias Levkovich, chief U.S. equity strategist at Citigroup. "We have had instances where equity flows have picked up in the last two, three, four years when markets have picked up. They've generally not been signals of a continuation of that trend."


The S&P 500 rose 5 percent in January, its best month since October 2011 and its best January since 1997, driving speculation that retail investors were flooding back into the stock market.


Heading into another busy week of earnings, the equity market is knocking on the door of all-time highs due to positive sentiment in stocks, and that can't be ignored entirely. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> ended the week about 4 percent from an all-time high touched in October 2007.


Next week will bring results from insurers Allstate and The Hartford , as well as from Walt Disney , Coca-Cola Enterprises and Visa .


But a comparison of flows in January, a seasonal strong month for the stock market, shows that this January, while strong, is not that unusual. In January 2011 investors moved $23.9 billion into stock funds and $28.6 billion in 2006, but neither foreshadowed massive inflows the rest of that year. Furthermore, in 2006 the market gained more than 13 percent while in 2011 it was flat.


Strong inflows in January can happen for a number of reasons. There were a lot of special dividends issued in December that need reinvesting, and some of the funds raised in December tax-selling also find their way back into the market.


During the height of the tech bubble in 2000, when retail investors were really embracing stocks, a staggering $42.7 billion flowed into equities in January of that year, double the amount that flowed in this January. That didn't end well, as stocks peaked in March of that year before dropping over the next two-plus years.


MOM AND POP STILL WARY


Arguing against a 'great rotation' is not necessarily a bearish argument against stocks. The stock market has done well since the crisis. Despite the huge outflows, the S&P 500 has risen more than 120 percent since March 2009 on a slowly improving economy and corporate earnings.


This earnings season, a majority of S&P 500 companies are beating earnings forecast. That's also the case for revenue, which is a departure from the previous two reporting periods where less than 50 percent of companies beat revenue expectations, according to Thomson Reuters data.


Meanwhile, those on the front lines say mom and pop investors are still wary of equities after the financial crisis.


"A lot of people I talk to are very reluctant to make an emotional commitment to the stock market and regardless of income activity in January, I think that's still the case," said David Joy, chief market strategist at Columbia Management Advisors in Boston, where he helps oversee $571 billion.


Joy, speaking from a conference in Phoenix, says most of the people asking him about the "great rotation" are fund management industry insiders who are interested in the extra business a flood of stock investors would bring.


He also pointed out that flows into bond funds were positive in the month of January, hardly an indication of a rotation.


Citi's Levkovich also argues that bond investors are unlikely to give up a 30-year rally in bonds so quickly. He said stocks only began to see consistent outflows 26 months after the tech bubble burst in March 2000. By that reading it could be another year before a serious rotation begins.


On top of that, substantial flows continue to make their way into bonds, even if it isn't low-yielding government debt. January 2013 was the second best January on record for the issuance of U.S. high-grade debt, with $111.725 billion issued during the month, according to International Finance Review.


Bill Gross, who runs the $285 billion Pimco Total Return Fund, the world's largest bond fund, commented on Twitter on Thursday that "January flows at Pimco show few signs of bond/stock rotation," adding that cash and money markets may be the source of inflows into stocks.


Indeed, the evidence suggests some of the money that went into stock funds in January came from money markets after a period in December when investors, worried about the budget uncertainty in Washington, started parking money in late 2012.


Data from iMoneyNet shows investors placed $123 billion in money market funds in the last two months of the year. In two weeks in January investors withdrew $31.45 billion of that, the most since March 2012. But later in the month money actually started flowing back.


(Additional reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)



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NFL's Goodell aims to share blame on player safety


NEW ORLEANS (AP) — NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wants to share the blame.


"Safety," he said at his annual Super Bowl news conference, "is all of our responsibilities."


Not surprisingly, given that thousands of former players are suing the league about its handling of concussions, the topics of player health and improved safety dominated Goodell's 45-minute session Friday. And he often sounded like someone seeking to point out that players or others are at fault for some of the sport's problems — and need to help fix them.


"I'll stand up. I'll be accountable. It's part of my responsibility. I'll do everything," Goodell said. "But the players have to do it. The coaches have to do it. Our officials have to do it. Our medical professionals have to do it."


Injuries from hits to the head or to the knees, Goodell noted, can result from improper tackling techniques used by players and taught by coaches. The NFL Players Association needs to allow testing for human growth hormone to go forward so it can finally start next season, which Goodell hopes will happen. He said prices for Super Bowl tickets have soared in part because fans re-sell them above face value.


And asked what he most rues about the New Orleans Saints bounty investigation — a particularly sensitive issue around these parts, of course — Goodell replied: "My biggest regret is that we aren't all recognizing that this is a collective responsibility to get (bounties) out of the game, to make the game safer. Clearly the team, the NFL, the coaching staffs, executives and players, we all share that responsibility. That's what I regret, that I wasn't able to make that point clearly enough with the union."


He addressed other subjects, such as a "new generation of the Rooney Rule" after none of 15 recently open coach or general manager jobs went to a minority candidate, meaning "we didn't have the outcomes we wanted"; using next year's Super Bowl in New Jersey as a test for future cold-weather, outdoor championship games; and saying he welcomed President Barack Obama's recent comments expressing concern about football's violence because "we want to make sure that people understand what we're doing to make our game safer."


Also:


— New Orleans will not get back the second-round draft pick Goodell stripped in his bounty ruling;


— Goodell would not give a time frame for when the NFL could hold a game in Mexico;


— next season's games in London — 49ers-Jaguars and Steelers-Vikings — are sellouts.


Goodell mentioned some upcoming changes, including the plan to add independent neurologists to sidelines to help with concussion care during games — something players have asked for and the league opposed until now.


"The No. 1 issue is: Take the head out of the game," Goodell said. "I think we've seen in the last several decades that players are using their head more than they had when you go back several decades."


He said one tool the league can use to cut down on helmet-to-helmet hits is suspending players who keep doing it.


"We're going to have to continue to see discipline escalate, particularly on repeat offenders," Goodell said. "We're going to have to take them off the field. Suspension gets through to them."


The league will add "expanded physicals at the end of each season ... to review players from a physical, mental and life skills standpoint so that we can support them in a more comprehensive fashion," Goodell said.


With question after question about less-than-light matters, one reporter drew a chuckle from Goodell by asking how he's been treated this week in a city filled with supporters of the Saints who are angry about the way the club was punished for the bounty system the NFL said existed from 2009-11.


"My picture, as you point out, is in every restaurant. I had a float in the Mardi Gras parade. We got a voodoo doll," Goodell said.


But he added that he can "appreciate the passion" of the fans and, actually, "couldn't feel more welcome here."


___


Follow Howard Fendrich on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HowardFendrich


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Hillary: Secretary of empowerment




Girls hug U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a 2010 tour of a shelter run for sex trafficking victims in Cambodia.




STORY HIGHLIGHTS


  • Donna Brazile: Clinton stepping down as Secretary of State. Maybe she'll run for president

  • She says as secretary she expanded foreign policy to include effect on regular people

  • She says she was first secretary of state to focus on empowering women and girls

  • Brazile: Clinton has fought for education and inclusion in politics for women and girls




Editor's note: Donna Brazile, a CNN contributor and a Democratic strategist, is vice chairwoman for voter registration and participation at the Democratic National Committee. She is a nationally syndicated columnist, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of "Cooking with Grease." She was manager for the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign in 2000.


(CNN) -- As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton steps down from her job Friday, many are assuming she will run for president. And she may. In fact, five of the first eight presidents first served their predecessors as secretary of state.


It hasn't happened in more than a century, though that may change should Clinton decide to run. After all, she has been a game changer her entire life.


But before we look ahead, I think we should appreciate what she's done as secretary of state; it's a high profile, high pressure job. You have to deal with the routine as if it is critical and with crisis as if it's routine. You have to manage egos, protocols, customs and Congress. You have to be rhetorical and blunt, diplomatic and direct.



CNN Contributor Donna Brazile

CNN Contributor Donna Brazile



As secretary of state you are dealing with heads of state and with we the people. And the president of the United States has to trust you -- implicitly.


On the road with Hillary Clinton


Of all Clinton's accomplishments -- and I will mention just a few -- this may be the most underappreciated. During the election, pundits were puzzled and amazed not only at how much energy former President Bill Clinton poured into Obama's campaign, but even more at how genuine and close the friendship was.


Obama was given a lot of well-deserved credit for reaching out to the Clintons by appointing then-Sen. Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state in the first place. But trust is a two-way street and has to be earned. We should not underestimate or forget how much Clinton did and how hard she worked. She deserved that trust, as she deserved to be in the war room when Osama bin Laden was killed.


By the way, is there any other leader in the last 50 years whom we routinely refer to by a first name, and do so more out of respect than familiarity? The last person I can think of was Ike -- the elder family member who we revere with affection. Hillary is Hillary.


It's not surprising that we feel we know her. She has been part of our public life for more than 20 years. She's been a model of dignity, diplomacy, empathy and toughness. She also has done something no other secretary of state has done -- including the two women who preceded her in the Cabinet post.


Rothkopf: President Hillary Clinton? If she wants it



Hillary has transformed our understanding -- no, our definition -- of foreign affairs. Diplomacy is no longer just the skill of managing relations with other countries. The big issues -- war and peace, terror, economic stability, etc. -- remain, and she has handled them with firmness and authority, with poise and confidence, and with good will, when appropriate.


But it is not the praise of diplomats or dictators that will be her legacy. She dealt with plenipotentiaries, but her focus was on people. Foreign affairs isn't just about treaties, she taught us, it's about the suffering and aspirations of those affected by the treaties, made or unmade.








Most of all, diplomacy should refocus attention on the powerless.


Of course, Hillary wasn't the first secretary of state to advocate for human rights or use the post to raise awareness of abuses or negotiate humanitarian relief or pressure oppressors. But she was the first to focus on empowerment, particularly of women and girls.


She created the first Office of Global Women's Issues. That office fought to highlight the plight of women around the world. Rape of women has been a weapon of war for centuries. Though civilized countries condemn it, the fight against it has in a sense only really begun.


Ghitis: Hillary Clinton's global legacy on gay rights


The office has worked to hold governments accountable for the systematic oppression of girls and women and fought for their education in emerging countries. As Hillary said when the office was established: "When the Security Council passed Resolution 1325, we tried to make a very clear statement, that women are still largely shut out of the negotiations that seek to end conflicts, even though women and children are the primary victims of 21st century conflict."


Hillary also included the United States in the Trafficking in Person report. Human Trafficking, a form of modern, mainly sexual, slavery, victimizes mostly women and girls. The annual report reviews the state of global efforts to eliminate the practice. "We believe it is important to keep the spotlight on ourselves," she said. "Human trafficking is not someone else's problem. Involuntary servitude is not something we can ignore or hope doesn't exist in our own communities."


She also created the office of Global Partnerships. And there is much more.


She has held her own in palaces and held the hands of hungry children in mud-hut villages, pursuing an agenda that empowers women, children, the poor and helpless.


We shouldn't have been surprised. Her book "It Takes a Village" focused on the impact that those outside the family have, for better or worse, on a child's well-being.


As secretary of state, she did all she could to make sure our impact as a nation would be for the better.


Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion


Join us on Facebook/CNNOpinion


The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Donna Brazile.






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Former New York mayor Ed Koch moved to hospital intensive care






NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch was moved to a hospital intensive care unit on Thursday, his spokesman said, in a sign that his health could be deteriorating.


Koch spokesman George Arzt said the 88-year-old politician, who earned a reputation for being as outspoken as he is colorful, was being moved so his cardiologist could better monitor his condition. Koch has been treated at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on and off since January 19.






Koch was re-admitted to the hospital on Monday after complaining of shortness of breath. He was unable to attend Tuesday’s premier of “Koch,” a documentary about his turbulent three terms as mayor, at the Museum of Modern Art.


In New York‘s City Hall from 1978 to 1989, Koch – with his trademark phrase “How’m I Doing?” – was seen as the personification of New York City.


“I don’t think there was anybody who had more fun being mayor as Ed Koch,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who is in the race to be the city’s next mayor, said while walking the premier’s red carpet.


Koch was credited with helping to restore confidence in the city at a time when it stood at the brink of financial ruin. Under his leadership, New York City regained its fiscal footing and underwent a construction boom.


His time in office was also marked by corruption among his political allies, racial tensions, a rise in cases of AIDS and HIV, and an increase in homelessness and the crime rate.


(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst)


Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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RBS must meet Libor fines – Osborne







Any fines by US authorities on Royal Bank of Scotland over the Libor scandal should be met by bankers not taxpayers, Chancellor George Osborne has insisted.






A ruling on the involvement of RBS in the fixing of the key industry interest rate is due imminently.


It is expected to be higher than the fine of nearly £300m imposed on Barclays last year.


RBS, which is majority owned by the government, is now in final talks with US and UK authorities over Libor.


An announcement could be made within days. In effect, the fine imposed by the British financial authorities will be the UK taxpayer paying the UK taxpayer, but there has been concern over how the US fine was to be paid.


Bonus awards


Senior sources at the Treasury said the chancellor had made it clear that the financial penalty imposed by American regulators must be covered by deductions from the bonuses of bankers at RBS.


These would be either clawed back from previous years or deducted from future bonus awards.


Two leading banks, Barclays and UBS, have reached settlements with regulators over their involvement with Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate), with fines of £290m and £940m respectively.


Libor tracks the average rate at which the major international banks based in London lend money to each other.


BBC business editor Robert Peston has said the talks include “other necessary remediation, including a possible senior resignation”.


But the bank’s board does not believe chief executive Stephen Hester needs to resign.


BBC News – Business





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What a Tangled Web We Leave






When Alexandra Kaye’s husband died last year of a heart attack at age 57, she thought she was well prepared financially—until she started wading through the day-to-day details.


Ms. Kaye and her husband Jeff, British and American journalists living in Washington, had done more end-of-life planning than many couples. Among other things, they had wills in place and had talked extensively about what they would do if the other died.






Stephen Voss for The Wall Street Journal Alexandra Kaye with her sons, Nathan, left, and Jackson. When her husband died, she found herself battling banking snafus and trying to get access to online accounts.


Yet despite the preparations, Ms. Kaye, 51 years old, found herself battling a number of unexpected problems, from banking snafus to being locked out of his email account, that left her frustrated at a time when all she sought was peace.


“What surprised me most was that I thought I’d done all the right things,” she says.


While the Internet era has ushered in a boom in online financial planning, it also has caused a tangle of banking, bill-paying and other online relationships that require tending even after people die.


But there are ways to help ease the transition—from collecting passwords and updating beneficiary forms to setting up new retirement accounts. Lawyers and financial planners are even adding digital estate planning to their menu of services.


Ms. Kaye, the Washington bureau chief for the Times of London, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp., says she wishes she had collected a list of passwords to online accounts and had known the rules for unwinding joint financial accounts before her husband died.


Her biggest stumbling block: the checking account. Her bank, HSBC, told her it couldn’t remove her husband’s name from the joint account. Instead, she would have to close it and open a new one, even though the British unit of the same bank had removed his name from a joint account held in the U.K.


An HSBC spokesman declined to comment on Ms. Kaye’s situation. In a written statement he said that, in general, “changes of this nature” require closing an existing account and opening a new one, to ensure that tax reporting is accurate and other legal considerations are addressed.


But closing the U.S. account would mean finding user names and passwords for bills that Mr. Kaye had set up to be paid automatically from the account, she says. And opening a new account would mean she would have to redirect her paycheck, which could take a few pay periods—all while juggling her husband’s estate and raising two teenage sons.


Ms. Kaye found the process so exasperating that she complained to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which simply read the bank’s policy to her again, she says. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment. For now, Ms. Kaye says, she is waiting to close the joint bank account until she has more stamina.


Financial accounts aren’t her only problem. Ms. Kaye says she and her sons have logged hours trying to tap into Mr. Kaye’s email account, to let friends overseas know about his death, and to get into their Netflix account. They finally figured out that his password to Spotify, a digital music service, was a word spelled phonetically and backward.


To avoid potential snags like these, here are some moves to make both before a spouse’s death and afterward:


Even if spouses have updated beneficiary information on obvious assets like retirement accounts, other assets still might be in one partner’s name.


JeanAnn Fenrich, a 60-year-old widow in Fairmont, Minn., was confronted with this problem last year, after her husband was killed in a car accident. The couple had planned to move to his mother’s home in a few years and do all the retitling paperwork at that point. “The accident just interrupted the best plans that we had,” she says.


Ryan McKeown, her financial adviser in nearby Mankato, Minn., says he sees this problem frequently. The remedy for real estate is simple, he says: just file what is called a “quit claim deed” to set up “joint tenancy with right of survivorship,” meaning the property transfer could avoid probate. Usually, this can be done quickly at the county office that handles real-estate records.


Ms. Fenrich also had to deal with savings bonds in her husband’s name that he had inherited from his mother. Putting the bonds in her name—and adding the couple’s children as beneficiaries—required opening the estates of her husband and her mother-in-law to get the documents needed to send to the U.S. Treasury Department. It would have been far easier to do this ahead of time.


Also, make sure your spouse’s name is on any paper stock certificates you own, says Jeffrey Cutter, a Falmouth, Mass., certified public accountant and financial adviser who says he helped a friend’s 85-year-old father convert $ 150,000 in 15 stocks to his name from his wife’s after she died. It took three months, he says, to get a copy of the death certificate, find the stock’s custodian, dig up his marriage certificate and get everything notarized.


To avoid any surprises, it is important to make sure you understand what happens with a joint account when you want to move it into one person’s name—whether any holds are placed on deposits or withdrawals, and whether online banking could be affected.


That is a lesson that Chuck Jarvis, a 63-year-old retired telecommunications specialist in Camby, Ind., learned after his wife died of cancer last year.


“I went to the bank and told them I needed to take her name off the account. I go home and my electronic banking was gone,” he says. “I just expected everything to roll over and her name to come off and my name to stay on. I didn’t expect my electronic banking to vaporize.”


Had he known that would happen, he said he would have transferred their bill-paying information to a separate account. “But once it vanished, I had to start from ground zero.”


Since Mr. Jarvis’s wife had handled the bills, he wasn’t even sure he would be able to restore them all, and might miss some payments. Finally, an IT worker at the bank resurrected the account numbers for him.


The standard advice is to roll a spouse’s individual retirement account into your own after he or she dies—but for younger widows and widowers, that could cause a big, unnecessary tax bill.


A “spousal rollover” generally makes sense if you are at least 59½ years old, the age at which you are allowed to start tapping an IRA without paying a 10% penalty on early withdrawals (though you would still owe any income tax due).


But many widows are younger than that, and if they need to tap IRA assets rolled over into their own account to supplement their income or cover other expenses, they must pay the 10% penalty.


Instead, widows and widowers under age 59½ often are better off transferring the money into an “inherited IRA,” which remains in the deceased spouse’s name, and then transferring it to their own IRA when they hit 59½ and can make penalty-free withdrawals, says Jeffrey Levine, a certified public accountant and IRA technical consultant at Ed Slott & Co. in Rockville Centre, N.Y.


With an inherited IRA, most beneficiaries have to take a “required minimum distribution” every year—but if the deceased spouse was younger than 70½, the surviving spouse is exempt until the year the deceased spouse would have hit that age.


Under the new federal tax law, Congress made permanent the “portability” provision that lets spouses double the $ 5 million estate-tax exemption to $ 10 million (currently $ 10.5 million, adjusted for inflation).


But there is a catch. Even if the first spouse’s estate is worth less than $ 5 million, that estate still has to file a federal estate-tax return and elect portability to use the leftover exemption in the future.


The money you protect from future estate tax could make it worth spending at least a few thousand dollars now, if appraisals are involved, and going through extra hassle.


For example, if the wife dies first with a $ 1 million estate, meaning it is exempt from federal estate tax, but the husband runs a business that could someday be worth millions of dollars, his wife’s estate should file an estate-tax return electing portability so that the surviving spouse potentially could add the remaining $ 4 million exemption to his $ 5 million one.


An estate also can get hit with state-level estate taxes in at least a dozen states with thresholds lower than $ 5 million as well. But trusts can be structured to help defer those taxes, says James Cundiff, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery in Chicago.


Tying up a partner’s life online is among the toughest chores a grieving spouse must face. Internet providers are reluctant, for privacy reasons, to let loved ones into email and social-media accounts, often leaving families to choose between violating the rules to break into an account or losing decades of email contacts, family photos and other information.


The problem is so common that the Uniform Law Commission, the group that recommends uniform state laws, is working on a recommended statute that states could adopt to deal with post-death access to digital assets.


When making lists of password-protected digital assets, it is wise to focus first on the ones with monetary value, experts say. Many people now have extensive libraries on iPods and digital readers, and even airline accounts contain frequent-flier miles that could be worth thousands of dollars, says Sally Hurme, an elder-law attorney at AARP in Washington.


Your best bet: Keeping an accessible list of your online user names, passwords and other prompts required to tap accounts you would want your family to see.


But it is difficult to keep such a list up-to-date. That is why the U.S. General Services Administration recommends people set up a “social-media will,” review the privacy policies and terms and conditions of each website and stipulate in their traditional will that the “online executor” get a copy of the death certificate.


There are less formal options as well. Annalee Leonard, president of Mainstay Financial Group in Pensacola, Fla., suggests spouses keep separate books with all Internet accounts they access, along with logins and passwords.


A number of paid services, including SecureSafe and Legacy Locker, provide “digital” estate planning—though it is important to make sure the service has good security.


Some financial planners are starting to collect their clients’ online-account information, along with inventories of other assets, in various ways, so it is worth asking any planners or investment advisers you work with if they will help. Mark Cortazzo, principal of Macro Consulting Group in Parsippany, N.J., for example, developed an online “vault” where he encourages clients to upload financial documents.


And if you find yourself trying to untangle such accounts after your spouse dies, give yourself some time, says Karen Altfest, a New York financial planner who specializes in working with widows. One of her clients, whose husband died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, still has one account in his name, because it has taken so much energy to deal with all the formalities.


“You have to be prepared for setbacks as they occur,” Ms. Altfest says. “You have to say, ‘I think I have everything in place, but I’m prepared to go home one more time. It’s just an extra step.’”


Email: [email protected]


Write to Kelly Greene at [email protected]


More From The Wall Street Journal


Yahoo! Finance – Personal Finance





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"Great Rotation"- A Wall Street fairy tale?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street's current jubilant narrative is that a rush into stocks by small investors has sparked a "great rotation" out of bonds and into equities that will power the bull market to new heights.


That sounds good, but there's a snag: The evidence for this is a few weeks of bullish fund flows that are hardly unusual for January.


Late-stage bull markets are typically marked by an influx of small investors coming late to the party - such as when your waiter starts giving you stock tips. For that to happen you need a good story. The "great rotation," with its monumental tone, is the perfect narrative to make you feel like you're missing out.


Even if something approaching a "great rotation" has begun, it is not necessarily bullish for markets. Those who think they are coming early to the party may actually be arriving late.


Investors pumped $20.7 billion into stocks in the first four weeks of the year, the strongest four-week run since April 2000, according to Lipper. But that pales in comparison with the $410 billion yanked from those funds since the start of 2008.


"I'm not sure you want to take a couple of weeks and extrapolate it into whatever trend you want," said Tobias Levkovich, chief U.S. equity strategist at Citigroup. "We have had instances where equity flows have picked up in the last two, three, four years when markets have picked up. They've generally not been signals of a continuation of that trend."


The S&P 500 rose 5 percent in January, its best month since October 2011 and its best January since 1997, driving speculation that retail investors were flooding back into the stock market.


Heading into another busy week of earnings, the equity market is knocking on the door of all-time highs due to positive sentiment in stocks, and that can't be ignored entirely. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> ended the week about 4 percent from an all-time high touched in October 2007.


Next week will bring results from insurers Allstate and The Hartford , as well as from Walt Disney , Coca-Cola Enterprises and Visa .


But a comparison of flows in January, a seasonal strong month for the stock market, shows that this January, while strong, is not that unusual. In January 2011 investors moved $23.9 billion into stock funds and $28.6 billion in 2006, but neither foreshadowed massive inflows the rest of that year. Furthermore, in 2006 the market gained more than 13 percent while in 2011 it was flat.


Strong inflows in January can happen for a number of reasons. There were a lot of special dividends issued in December that need reinvesting, and some of the funds raised in December tax-selling also find their way back into the market.


During the height of the tech bubble in 2000, when retail investors were really embracing stocks, a staggering $42.7 billion flowed into equities in January of that year, double the amount that flowed in this January. That didn't end well, as stocks peaked in March of that year before dropping over the next two-plus years.


MOM AND POP STILL WARY


Arguing against a 'great rotation' is not necessarily a bearish argument against stocks. The stock market has done well since the crisis. Despite the huge outflows, the S&P 500 has risen more than 120 percent since March 2009 on a slowly improving economy and corporate earnings.


This earnings season, a majority of S&P 500 companies are beating earnings forecast. That's also the case for revenue, which is a departure from the previous two reporting periods where less than 50 percent of companies beat revenue expectations, according to Thomson Reuters data.


Meanwhile, those on the front lines say mom and pop investors are still wary of equities after the financial crisis.


"A lot of people I talk to are very reluctant to make an emotional commitment to the stock market and regardless of income activity in January, I think that's still the case," said David Joy, chief market strategist at Columbia Management Advisors in Boston, where he helps oversee $571 billion.


Joy, speaking from a conference in Phoenix, says most of the people asking him about the "great rotation" are fund management industry insiders who are interested in the extra business a flood of stock investors would bring.


He also pointed out that flows into bond funds were positive in the month of January, hardly an indication of a rotation.


Citi's Levkovich also argues that bond investors are unlikely to give up a 30-year rally in bonds so quickly. He said stocks only began to see consistent outflows 26 months after the tech bubble burst in March 2000. By that reading it could be another year before a serious rotation begins.


On top of that, substantial flows continue to make their way into bonds, even if it isn't low-yielding government debt. January 2013 was the second best January on record for the issuance of U.S. high-grade debt, with $111.725 billion issued during the month, according to International Finance Review.


Bill Gross, who runs the $285 billion Pimco Total Return Fund, the world's largest bond fund, commented on Twitter on Thursday that "January flows at Pimco show few signs of bond/stock rotation," adding that cash and money markets may be the source of inflows into stocks.


Indeed, the evidence suggests some of the money that went into stock funds in January came from money markets after a period in December when investors, worried about the budget uncertainty in Washington, started parking money in late 2012.


Data from iMoneyNet shows investors placed $123 billion in money market funds in the last two months of the year. In two weeks in January investors withdrew $31.45 billion of that, the most since March 2012. But later in the month money actually started flowing back.


(Additional reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)



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Carville, Matalin enjoy role as Big Easy boosters


NEW ORLEANS (AP) — When Mary Matalin heard a baby cry during a Super Bowl news conference this week, she paused midsentence, peered in the direction of the fussing child and asked: "Is that my husband?"


Matalin, the noted Republican political pundit, isn't shy about making jokes at the expense of Democratic strategist James Carville, who went from being her professional counterpart to her partner in life when they were married — in New Orleans — two decades ago.


This week, though, and for much of the past few years, the famous political odd couple have been working in lockstep for a bipartisan cause — the resurgence of their adopted hometown.


Their passion for the Big Easy and its recovery from Hurricane Katrina was why Carville and Matalin were appointed co-chairs of New Orleans' Super Bowl host committee, positions that made them the face of the city's effort to prove it's ready to be back in the regular rotation for the NFL's biggest game.


"Their commitment to New Orleans and their rise to prominence here locally as citizens made them a natural choice," said Jay Cicero, president of the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation, which handles the city's Super Bowl bids. "It's about promoting New Orleans, and their being in love with this city, they're the perfect co-chairs."


Carville, a Louisiana native, and Matalin moved from Washington, D.C., to historic "Uptown" New Orleans in the summer of 2008, a little less than three years after Katrina had laid waste to vast swaths of the city. There was not only heavy wind damage but flooding that surged through crumbling levees and at one point submerged about 80 percent of the city.


The couple had long loved New Orleans, and felt even more of a pull to set down roots here, with their two school-age daughters, at a time when the community was in need.


"The storm just weighed heavy," Carville said. "We were thinking about it. We'd been in Washington for a long time. The more that we thought about it, the more sense that it made. We just came down here (to look for a house) in late 2007 and said we're just going to do this and never looked back."


Matalin said she and Carville also wanted to raise their daughters in a place where people were willing to struggle to preserve a vibrant and unique culture.


"It's authentically creative, organically eccentric, bounded by beauty of all kinds," she said. "People pull for each other, people pull together. ... Seven years ago we were 15 feet under water. ... This is unparalleled what the people here did and that's what you want your kids to grow up with: Hope and a sense of place, resolve and perseverance."


Carville has been an avid sports fan all his life, and Matalin jokes that he now schedules his life around Saints and LSU football.


An LSU graduate, Carville has been a regular sight in Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, often wearing a purple and gold rugby-style shirt.


In New Orleans, he and Matalin have lent their names not just to the Super Bowl host committee, but to efforts to prevent the NBA's Hornets from leaving when the ownership situation was in flux.


"I was scared to death they would leave the city," said Carville of the Hornets, who were purchased by the NBA in December of 2010 when club founder George Shinn wanted to sell and struggled to find a local buyer. "We were starting to do better (as a community). It would have been a terrible story to lose an NBA franchise at that time."


Saints owner Tom Benson has since bought the NBA club and signed a long-term lease at New Orleans Arena, ending speculation about a possible move.


Carville and Matalin also have taken part in a range of environmental, educational, economic and cultural projects in the area. Matalin is on the board of the Water Institute of the Gulf, which aims to preserve fragile coastal wetlands that have been eroding, leaving south Louisiana ecosystems and communities increasingly vulnerable to destruction. They have supported the Institute of Politics at Loyola University and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.


Carville teaches a current events class at Tulane University and he looks forward to getting involved in the 200th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans in 2015 and New Orleans' tercentennial celebrations in 2018, when the city also hopes to host its next Super Bowl, if the NFL sees fit.


Leading a Super Bowl host committee, the couple said, has similarities to running a major national political campaign, but takes even more work.


"This has been going on for three years and it's huge," Matalin said. "It's bigger, it's harder, it's more complex — even though it's cheaper."


The host committee spent about $13 million in private and public funds to put on this Super Bowl, and the payoff could be enormous in terms of providing a momentum boost to the metro area's growth, Carville said.


"For us — New Orleans — I think this is going to be much more than a football game Sunday," Carville said of the championship matchup between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers. "We'll know how we feel about it on Monday. It's a big event, it helps a lot of people, but I think we have a chance if it goes the way we hope it does, it'll go beyond economic impact. It'll go beyond who won the game. I think there's something significant that's coming to a point here in the city."


So there's a bit of anxiety involved, to go along with the long hours. But Carville and Matalin say they've loved having a role in what they see as New Orleans' renaissance.


"I always say I'm so humbled by everyone's gratitude," Matalin said. "We get up every day and say, 'Thank you, God. Thank you, God.' It's a blessing for us to be able to be here, to live here."


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Reality check needed on immigration?






STORY HIGHLIGHTS


  • Howard Kurtz: The mainstream media are rooting for immigration policy changes

  • Kurtz: Is enthusiasm causing the media to overestimate the prospects for reform?

  • He says the Republican House has been a graveyard for numerous Obama reforms

  • Kurtz: Illegal immigration still arouses visceral opposition among some Americans




Editor's note: Howard Kurtz is the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources" and is Newsweek's Washington bureau chief. He is also a contributor to the website Daily Download.


(CNN) -- The mainstream media -- you know who you are -- are rooting for immigration reform.


They like the idea of doing something to accommodate the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants, who, despite conservative rhetoric to the contrary, were never going to be banished.


They swoon over the kind of bipartisanship that brings together John McCain and Marco Rubio on the one hand and Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer on the other.



Howard Kurtz

Howard Kurtz



They believe the Republican Party needs to moderate its harsh rhetoric about immigrants -- if only to salvage its political future -- and are welcoming the GOP's new realism.


But is that enthusiasm causing media organizations to overestimate the prospects for reform?


Watch: Steve Kroft Plays Defense Over Hillary/Obama Lovefest on '60 Minutes'



Any bill still must pass the Republican House, which has been a graveyard for numerous Obama reforms. The Senate has always been a place where top lawmakers reach across the aisle more easily than in the polarized House, as was evident during the fiscal cliff debacle. And there are conservative groups determined to derail any path toward citizenship, which they view as amnesty.


It's not that journalists are acting as cheerleaders for the emerging plan. But when the media have qualms about an issue, they couch it as being "controversial" and "risky" (say, George W. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security).


Opinion: Immigrant - Can we trust Obama?






By contrast, look at the way the president's immigration speech in Las Vegas was covered:


The New York Times: "Seizing on a groundswell of support for rewriting the nation's immigration laws ..."


The Washington Post: "Obama added to momentum on Capitol Hill in favor of an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws ..."


We saw the same supportive approach when the Pentagon lifted a ban on women serving in front-line combat positions, which, despite some conservative opposition, was greeted with favorable features that largely depicted the move as long overdue.


Watch: Should N.Y. Times Have Censored Company Name Over the S-Word?


As with many perpetual Beltway disputes, the contours of a common-sense compromise on immigration have been clear for some time. The right wants tougher border enforcement and employer verification procedures. The left wants undocumented immigrants taken out of the "shadows," as Obama put it, and given a chance to become openly productive members of society.


The key are the tradeoffs. How long would a path to citizenship take? Are fines and back taxes required? How do we ensure that those who broke the law don't get an unfair advantage over legal applicants?


I don't argue with the standard political analysis that the moment may be ripe for immigration reform.


Watch: Media Seize on Emotional Moment of Gabby Giffords' Testimony


Mitt Romney, who talked about wanting immigrants to "self-deport," got clobbered among Hispanic voters. The GOP has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. Sean Hannity, the Fox News commentator, says he has "evolved" on the issue, and he's not alone.


The conservative media may be a bellwether here. After Obama's Tuesday speech, Hannity's leadoff guest was Karl Rove, the former Bush lieutenant who favors the Senate compromise. And when Rubio, the Florida senator and son of Cuban immigrants, called in to Rush Limbaugh's show, the host -- while criticizing Obama -- told him, "What you are doing is admirable and noteworthy. You are recognizing reality."


Watch: BlackBerry 10: Is It a Hit or All Thumbs?


But illegal immigration remains a divisive subject that still arouses visceral opposition among some Americans. Capitol Hill is a place where partisan maneuvering can push the government to the brink of default. And as George W. Bush learned in his second term, hammering out a compromise on such a volatile issue is maddeningly elusive.


Perhaps the election changed the landscape and both parties will find a way to compromise. In the meantime, it might be wise to take the upbeat media coverage with a healthy dose of skepticism.


Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion.


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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Howard Kurtz.






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