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FA Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider that delivers the top news and commentary for financial advisers. 

Bernanke: Everyone Relax, Inflation Isn't Going To Happen (Financial Advisor Magazine)

Everyone's freaking out now that QE is over. They're expecting major inflation, which happens after massive amounts of money is poured in. However, Bernanke is assuring everyone that serious inflation isn't going to happen. "There was 'no risk of inflation,' it was 'never a risk,' and it is 'not a risk now,'" Bernanke said on Wednesday, reports Evan Simonoff.

Additionally, Bernanke noted that both the US and the UK were doing relatively better than Europe at the moment. He attributes this to the fact that both the US and the UK embraced QE. On the other hand, Europe did not implement a similar course of action — and could not have since Europe does not have "Eurobonds" — and thus is relatively struggling.

But if inflation does happen, Bernanke doesn't seem too worried. "The Fed can deal with inflation if it happens," he said.

Long-Term Care Hybrids Are Lower Cost Alternatives (Financial Planning)

Long-term care policies are becoming increasingly expensive, so advisers may want to suggest long-term care hybrids. One option for clients is to purchase a fixed annuity with long-term care benefits for a lump sum. Even clients who have been turned down for stand-alone policies can go for this option.

Unfortunately, this policy requires a large upfront pay, and "the cost of the LTC rider eats into the annuity's interest income."

The second option is a universal life-insurance policy with a long-term-care benefit rider. In this case, clients can avoid paying for long-term-care policies that they will never need; however, the policy tends to be on the expensive side, and covers only three to four years.

Financial Advisers Are Seriously Mis-using Liquid Alternative  (Wealth Management)

Liquid alternatives are supposed to reduce the overall risk to a portfolio, without drastically affecting the portfolio's performance. However, many financial advisers are not using liquid alternatives correctly. Instead of using them to diversify portfolios, advisers are "guilty of performance chasing," writes David Armstrong.

And the number of advisers misusing liquid alternatives has significantly grown over the last decade. "Advisers don't know how to determine whether a fund is doing what it says it will do," said Nadia Papagiannis, the director of alternative investment strategy at Goldman Sachs.

Additionally, she suggests that advisers "may want to look at investing in hedge funds themselves" to get at strategies they cannot otherwise pursue, or to "access them through a multi-strategy fund."

Tap Into The Power Of Consistency To Woo Prospective Clients (Advisor Perspectives)  

There are several key strategies advisers should follow to get prospective clients "off the fence." First, advisers need to show super-wealthy (and super-busy) clients that there is a concrete benefit to meeting with them, writes Dan Richards. One way to do that is to contact the prospects and walk them through questions regarding financial readiness.

Additionally, there's an interesting phenomenon when people who have made a small commitment often feel the need to be consistent, and then continue making a commitment. So advisers should "introduce an intermediate step on the route to asking for [a prospective's] business," which may in turn hook the prospective for the long term.

The SEC Fines 13 Brokerage Firms For Selling Junk-Rated Puerto Rico Bonds (The Wall Street Journal)

The SEC "fined 13 brokerage firms for improperly selling junk-rated Puerto Rico bonds in increments below $100,000, the agency's first action under a rule designed to protect mom-and-pop municipal-bond investors from high-risk debt," reports Aaron Kuriloff.

The firms didn't admit or deny whether or not they were guilty, but they paid fines ranges from $45,000 to $130,000. 

The SEC has been working on better protecting the smaller investors in the municipal bond market, who make up the majority of investors in that category. The SEC's direct and public involvement in this case may be indicative of a longer trend in the future.  

NOW WATCH: T. Boone Pickens: Here Are The 3 Conditions You Should Set Before Taking Any Advice

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A criminal case against Bitcoin Savings and Trust's Trendon Shavers has been filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Gavin Andresen has spoken about bitcoin at Web Summit in Dublin, a gathering of technology startups, investors and celebrities.

The coordinated international action, dubbed Operation Onymous, against the Deep Net marketplaces infamous for being run on the rails of Bitcoin and other digital currencies is still being unveiled. So far, three men have been arrested in the last few days in conjunction with the cases. Currently, Cloud 9, Hydra, and Silk Road 2.0 display the […]

The post Operation “Onymous” Also Shut Down Dark Net Markets Cloud 9 Hydra and Maybe More appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

The 5-megawatt bitcoin mining farm in Thailand was destroyed in a massive fire earlier this week.

The man allegedly gained control of as much as 7 percent of the bitcoin market by promising investors up to 7 percent weekly interest

SumUp has integrated bitcoin with its mobile point-of-sale solution and will charge no fees through 2015.

With more and more users turning to Bitcoin and Chief Scientist Gavin Andresen having proposed a hard fork of the blockchain, the issue of network scalability has once again risen to the surface. The problem is called “blockchain bloat”: when more transactions are made, the blockchain has more data to record, and if it grows too large, it becomes difficult to easily download or store. As a result, blocks are currently limited in size, which limits the maximum number of transactions per second we can make to 7–far less than the volume handled by Visa or MasterCard. This has become a major point of criticism against Bitcoin, especially with the arrival of “Bitcoin 2.0″ applications unrelated to cryptocurrency that want to […]

Today’s Reddit frontpage has several threads about a recent surge of popularity of Change Tip. One is titled “Changetip is causing bitcoin to go viral right now,” and another was started by the ChangeTip team to say that they are working hard to keep up with the growing volume of tipping via their platform. ChangeTip […]

The post Is ChangeTip the Viral Bitcoin Killer App? appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Genworth shares are crashing.

In morning trade on Thursday, the stock was down nearly 36% to about $9 per share. On Wednesday, the stock closed around $14. 

At current prices, the company has a market cap of around $4.4 billion. 

The crash in Genworth shares comes after the company last night reported earnings that widely missed expectations as the company took a massive $844 million loss after completing a review of its long-term care businesses. On a per share basis, this comes out to a loss of $1.70; Wall Street was looking for earnings of $0.19.

Long-term care insurance is a private version of a Medicare or Medicaid program that provides insurance to older Americans. 

The main problem Genworth found with its assumptions after its review: people are living way longer than they previously assumed.

In its earnings release, Genworth said:

"The company made changes to its assumptions and methodologies primarily impacting claim terminations, most significantly in later duration claims, and benefit utilization reflecting that claimants are staying on claim longer and utilizing more of their available benefits in aggregate than had previously been assumed in the company's reserve calculations."

In English, "claimants...staying on claim longer" means that people on a long-term care plan are making that plan longer-term than the company previously modeled. Genworth also filed a presentation outlining how they went about changing its models. 

As an insurance company, you collect premiums and then stockpile these assets — keeping some in cash and investing others — so that when folks you insure need this money, you can pay it out. 

And so the charge that Genworth took on Thursday is related to a need to increase its stockpile for long-term care customers. And the company said it is continuing its review, which, based on Thursday's market reaction, investors are thrilled about.

Here's a long paragraph from Genworth about that:

In the fourth quarter of 2014 the company is conducting its annual review of active life margins and as part of this review it will review the associated assumptions and methodologies. Based on the work done in connection with the recently completed claim reserve review that resulted in changes to claim terminations and benefit utilization assumptions and associated methodologies, the company expects these changes will materially reduce its active life margins... Separately, the company tests its acquired LTC blocks for recoverability as part of its loss recognition testing margin review. Given the age of those blocks, the results of this review are less likely to benefit from management actions, and therefore are more likely to be negatively impacted by the updated claim reserve assumptions and methodologies. The company may also make changes to its other active life margin assumptions and methodologies, but currently cannot predict with more specificity the nature, extent or margin impact of any of the assumption and methodology changes it may make in completing its annual margin review, and whether or not the resulting impact will be material.  

Genworth hits a version of two of the phrases investors like to hear least: "materially reduce" and "cannot predict."

Investors hate being told that earnings are going to be reduced, and might hate it more when a company isn't sure how something is going to turn out. 

And on Thursday, investors are hating Genworth's stock, too. 

Here's the ugly chart.

SEE ALSO: Wall Street's Brightest Minds Reveal The Most Important Charts In The World

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  I sat down at Premier Studios on 10/21/14 with my good friend David of NY’s premier industry news website www.SonicScoop.com. David is one of the few people I know in the music industry taking an interest in Bitcoin. He will be covering it for his own site, and we hope to share content with Bitcoin Magazine’s audience as well in the future! We talk about the future of the music industry, how crypto can help, and even give a few tips on how to be successful when starting a music career! For more on David, see the links below. http://www.sonicscoop.com/ http://www.thesonghunters.com/ http://www.musicsupervisioncentral.com/ Special Thanks to www.PremierStudiosNY.com for hosting us and for leading the way with Bitcoin in Music!  

The UK Government, through Her Majesty’s Treasury (HM Treasury) has asked for public feedback to assist in their formation of digital currency regulations. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/digital-currencies-call-for-information HM Treasury has been aware of the developing Bitcoin space for quite some time, yet previously (2013) they had agreed to take a “wait and see” approach, allowing businesses in the bitcoin space to develop within the UK without any hindrance. Earlier this year, George Osborne (Chancellor of the Exchequer), asked HM Treasury to investigate the potentials of digital currency, and what the government’s role in this emerging sector should be. Since then HM Treasury has investigated and researched bitcoin and the development of businesses in this sector. From talking with people working in the sector, and from Osborne’s […]

Ghana-based remittances service Beam has launched a bitcoin donations service for charities fighting against Ebola in Sierra Leone.

At 8 a.m. EST today, various Dogecoin and Litecoin members plan to announce a brand new initiative to both raise Christmas money for orphans in the Philippines and unite the crypto communities over a special cause. The charity, deemed “Liteshibes4Christmas,” will launch on both the Litecoin subreddit and the Dogecoin subreddit, along with litecointalk.org. The […]

The post Litecoin and Dogecoin to Join Forces for Charity appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

At 8 a.m. EST today, various Dogecoin and Litecoin members plan to announce a brand new initiative to both raise Christmas money for orphans in the Philippines and unite the crypto communities over a special cause. The charity, deemed “Liteshibes4Christmas,” will launch on both the Litecoin subreddit and the Dogecoin subreddit, along with litecointalk.org. The […]

The post Litecoin and Dogecoin to Join Forces for Charity appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

The Dark Wallet Alpha 7 has been released. The new release brings big structural changes: Interface translations support; New Keyring structure, BIP44 compliant; BitcoinJS upgraded to stable version 1.2. The new release also brings some other minor features. The release is labeled “alpha,” so beware that it’s still considered experimental software that may have bugs […]

The post Dark Wallet Alpha 7 Released appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

As Steven Hirsch stood gazing at the water, rising gas bubbles created ripples in the oily sludge floating on the surface. It produced a brilliant display of color, which Hirsch photographed.

The post These Beautiful Images Are of…Canal Sludge in Brooklyn appeared first on WIRED.

Japanese bitcoin services company Coincheck yesterday launched a bitcoin exchange aimed at everyday consumers.

The Bitcoin price is rising in sustained algorithmic bullish trade. Manual sellers appear to be entering the market at the $340 Bitstamp price level, and technical analysis evaluates the potentials on the price chart. Today’s feature looks at the “unbanked poor” that is now becoming a talking point amongst Bitcoin entrepreneurs. Bitcoin and the Fortune […]

The post Bitcoin Price and the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Upstart Business Journal reveals that crypto-anarchist Cody Wilson will run for a board seat on the Bitcoin Foundation for no other reason than to disband the organization from within.  His next opportunity will be in January 2015 when some seats will be up for election. Wilson said: “I will run on a platform of the […]

The post Cody Wilson Plans to Destroy the Bitcoin Foundation appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Swarm represents a unique opportunity for anyone to take part with their bits to bitcoin and support new and interesting projects. We will include the stories related to Swarm’s Demo day here: Demo Live Stream Autonomous Drones SwarmOps JudoBaby DDP Coinspace

New Bitcoin Foundation director Patrick Murck engaged the bitcoin community today in an open Q&A.