They need to live someplace, and their current home has a one-to-one correlation with all other local real estate.

While our real estate allocations may have dropped from 10 percent down to 7, the difference was often made up by increasing offshore real estate holdings. Of course, that only makes sense for the most wealthy clients, because for smaller ones it's not worthwhile to split assets into 2 percent and 3 percent allocations.

The advertising man is a liaison between the products of business and the mind of the nation. He must know both before he can serve either.

As we all know, Nike is a terrible exploiter of labor in other countries while advertising themselves here as being the bearer of "authenticity," with products that will put you back in touch with "real life." They even had a series of commercials several years ago about "the revolution," which was basketball when played from the heart and not for love of money.

Target advertising and things like that hit you, and they're annoying, but that's really only half the concern. The real concern is what kind of information is being collected about you, if your bank is doing something with it, and whether you know about it or not.

For the last two or three years, we've seen a real spike in home equity lending. Frankly, all the lenders have marketed this.