Investment Policy Magazine  

You may have seen the special “Wealth” section in the New York Times (Oct. 19), which offered advice on “Your Money.” I read it, although to be honest I didn’t read the articles very carefully. Okay, I didn’t read them at all. But I did read the voluminous ads; they took up, by my estimate, six and a half pages of the 12-page section. The articles themselves were accompanied by perhaps three pages of illustrations, including lots of photos and a little box that listed websites where you can “Find an Adviser.” So forgive me if I can’t report on the two and a half pages of Times writing.
Some of the ads seemed overly eager to lend you money: “If you can find a better deal, TAKE IT!” I didn’t pay much attention to them, since I thought everyone understands by now that the best deal is not to borrow at all. If there’s a single cause of our current national economic malaise (an evocative word, worth rescuing from 1970s politics) it is this: too much debt. We suffer from mountains of governmental, personal, and corporate debt. More on this in coming posts.
Most of the ads in the Times section were from firms wanting to manage your money, and since even I have some money to manage, I read those. Three of them were full pages. The most personal was from Fidelity Investments; looking directly at me was the smiling face of a confident and clearly competent female Investment Professional, who was “helping a client” – he was shown in profile, with a slightly less confident smile – to “find the right path” for his retirement savings. I couldn’t discern what the path might be.
Another full page was from BNY Mellon Wealth Management. It had a large photo/illustration of playing cards exploding from a Hamptons-style house, and the sly question, “Is your portfolio built like a house of cards?” The text claims that the company reviewed “thousands of investor portfolios” and found (surprise!) that fully 99% of them had “unexpected risks and missed opportunities.”
The third full page was from State Street and the World Gold Council, who are promoting a fund called SPDR Gold Shares. Most of the ad space was filled with a grainy photo of gold bars and a clever heading: “No one ever says, ‘Go for the silver.’ ” A few words of text below explain that athletes who spend years in training “want the gold” – Who can argue with that? – and investors who “feel the same way” ought to buy the fund. The instructions for doing so are: “Scan the QR code with your smartphone to visit spdrs.com/GLD.” I’m guessing the idea is that investors who have trained long enough to understand those instructions will want the gold fund too.
Other ads were smaller, but no less punchy. One from Wells Fargo – that’s beyondtoday.wellsfargo – pictured a mature woman with a fashionably country look, standing perhaps on a Scottish moor and gazing off to the right into her “future” – which, as the ad sensibly points out, “is yet to be written.” The text advises her to “create the future you want,” presumably by jumping aboard the company’s signature stagecoach drawn by three pairs of strong horses.
Despite the mostly upbeat tone of the ads, there is a troubling thread that runs through them, albeit in type sized about one-third or less of the good stuff. It is the warning that, as one ad succinctly puts it, “Investing involves risk. You may gain or lose money.” There’s a further warning that you may lose even if you spread your investments around: “Diversification does not assure a profit and may not protect against investment loss.”
So after being drawn in by the ads, and then warned of possible disaster, I looked for the takeaway message. And there it was every time: “Put our thinking to work for you.” – “Who’s helping you?” – “Together we’ll go far.” – “Our central focus is entirely on you.” – “We share the same goals – yours.” I’m not sure if the same copywriter did every ad, or different copywriters just happened to take the same tack. In any case, each company’s ad was aimed right at me – except the one that said its services “are best suited for those with $3 million or more to invest.”
Now about those articles by Times people. I have no doubt that they offered useful information. The problem is that readers could hardly ignore the surrounding ads. As Marshall McLuhan argued, what most people unconsciously “consume” is the whole package. The not so subtle message of the Times section is, Here is some information about personal “wealth” and about companies that will work to increase yours. Create the future you want.
If only we could. The ads, taken by themselves, can’t help but reveal what Wall Street is truly saying: we work hard to get your money and almost as hard to make it grow–but don’t fault us if some or all of your money disappears. The reality is that wealth tends to remain in Wall Street; as the old quip goes, There are no customers’ yachts.