Is that Herb Chambers, Biz Markie, and Youk?

Herb Chambers - Biz Markie - Kevin Youkilis

For most baseball players, the right walk-up song — the song that plays as betters approach the plate — is a crucial element to playing the game. Red Sox third baseman Kevin Youkilis likes to have a little fun with his.

Youkilis uses a little play on words as he goes to the plate to Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend,” a song famous for its “Youuuu, you got what I need…” lyric.

That part of the song, of course, is very familiar to the refrain of “Youuuuk” that rains down every time Youkilis takes the plate.

Local car dealer Herb Chambers, has finally brought Youkilis and Biz Markie together. In a new commercial for Chambers’ car dealerships, whose slogan is “We’ve got what you need,” Youkilis and Chambers get a little help from Biz Markie.

Check it out below.

Being from the Boston area means you learn handful of facts specific to The Hub.

One of them is that Kevin Youkilis (A.K.A. “The Greek God of Walks,” “Youk”) is a great pro baseball player with a few years left in the tank (despite his 2011 woes).

Another fact is that you can’t throw a stone in New England without hitting a Herb Chambers dealership. As a former resident of the great state of Massachusetts, your author is an Escalade-sized Red Sox fan and also worked a summer shuttling rental cars between two of Herb Chambers’ dealerships.

It seems Chambers and Youk are working together now, but their approach is… unique. Sitting at a piano, the duet attempts to warble out a version of Biz Markie’s classic Just A Friend. Predictably, it’s not exactly Grammy worthy. Hell, it’s not even worthy to make the first round of American Idol auditions. Luckily, Mr. Markie isn’t far away and steps in to help the pair get the song just right.

The message? Herb Chambers has got what you need, thanks to his 48 dealerships located around New England.

Kevin Youkilis, Herb Chambers rewrite Biz Markie hit in new TV spot

Red Sox star Kevin Youkilisis teaming with auto baron Herb Chambers for a hip-hopping new TV commercial with Biz Markie.

The spot launching tomorrow shows Youkilis and Chambers sitting at a piano trying to work out a rendition of Biz Markie’s 1989 hit “Just a Friend.”

Youkilis admits that he’s not “much of a singer” and stumbles through a few more takes with Chambers, Biz Markie jumps in, singing “Youk, you got what I need…”

Sox fans already know that Youkilis uses the tune as his theme song before stepping to the plate at Fenway Park.

The All-Star signed a two-year endorsement deal with Herb Chambers, operator of 45 car dealerships, in May 2010.

The Biz Markie spot, produced by Danvers-based Neal Advertising, will appear on www.wevegotwhatyouneed.com and air on local TV broadcasts starting next week.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/sports/baseball/red_sox/view.bg?articleid=1361351

Visit Herb Chambers Official Website:CLICK HERE!

John Keith: Borders DTX is Another Hole in The Ground

The Borders in Downtown Crossing will close soon, victim of its parent company’s bankruptcy.

What should be done with the space?

Borders Books Downtown Crossing - Boston MA

Borders Group, Inc. is in the process of liquidating its holdings, selling off the entire inventory in its 399 bookstores before going out of business forever. Here in Boston, its Back Bay branch is already closed, and last week the Downtown Crossing store advertised a 10 percent closeout sale on books in its fiction collection, with discounts of 20 – 40 percent and more expected soon.

This news could not have come at a worse time for the Downtown Crossing (DTX) neighborhood. With the Filene’s hole in the ground just a block away, with the nearby 45 Province condo project less than a third sold, with the proposed One Bromfield apartment complex preparing to break ground, and with multiple retail vacancies leaving the area feeling at times like a ghost town, the neighborhood needs to at least hold its ground until the real estate market and economy improves. Otherwise, we might lose the opportunity to save our city’s main shopping district for as long as another generation.

The DTX Borders at 10-24 School Street includes 36,000-plus square feet of space with the bookstore on the first two levels (the chain’s largest) and separate business offices on the floors above – it’s a large building in a prominent location. (The building’s owners can’t be happy losing their prime retail tenant, considering they paid $32.6 million for the property back in 2006, taking out a $24.45 million mortgage loan.)

Assessed at $8.4 million by the city of Boston, the property brings in $260,000 per year in taxes. So, it’s in all of our best interests that it doesn’t lie dormant for very long.

One building can’t be counted on to resurrect an entire neighborhood, but unfortunately, the opposite is true – all it takes is the demise of one building to tilt a neighborhood over the edge into urban blight. That’s what’s at risk here.

We need to ensure that, once Borders closes its doors, something else quickly takes its place. The question is: What should the Downtown Crossing Borders become?

I asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter for ideas. Here are their responses, including the clever, the sarcastic, the silly and the sublime.

• Beer Garden
• International Food Court
• Jewelry District
• Roller skating rink
• Bigger, better hole (see Filene’s)
• B&H photo store
• Starbucks|FedEx|Kinko’s with cubicles
• Full-sized version of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
• Bordello
• Redemption center
• Movie theater / IMAX
• College classrooms
• Library (college or public)
• Bookstore
• Restaurant
• Apple store
• Performance space
• Office space
• Open market / flea market
• Movie / TV studios
• Boston History Museum
• Boston Design Museum
• Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Downtown
• IKEA
• CVS
• Kmart
• Bank
• A new city hall
• Trader Joe’s
• Multi-level burrito place
• Amazon Kindle store (too soon?)
• Six-story winding slide
• An ethnic-food sensitive Whole Foods
• A newspaper office
• Pub with good beer and live music
• Reopened Filene’s Basement

All of the above are great ideas (although, with varying degrees of practicality). They show that Boston residents feel engaged and involved, that there are plenty of people who want our downtown neighborhood to improve and our city to succeed.

An out-of-town friend suggested, “They should make DTX more of a promenade-like area with higher-end shops and boutiques, cafés, etc.”

Easier said than done, although many cities have had success with this sort of thing, including Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and Lincoln Road in South Beach, Miami.

Meanwhile, the Boston Herald came up with the concept of a “Digital Alley”.

There’s precedence for this idea of turning a rundown neighborhood into a digital district. Twitter, the online messaging service, is moving into an abandoned furniture showroom building on San Francisco’s Market Street, occupying hundreds of thousands square feet of space.

SF city officials persuaded Twitter to stay local “by proposing a six-year exemption on the city’s 1.5 percent payroll tax for new employees of companies located in the mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods,” according to SF Gate.

I’ve never been fond of tax credit gimmicks, so I can’t recommend making this kind of offer, here in Boston. It leads to all types of trouble. They’ve already discovered this in San Francisco, where other internet companies are urging officials to make payroll-tax changes “that would benefit companies no matter where they are located in the city,” according to the Wall Street Journal. But, it’s an interesting idea.

Hopefully, Boston’s leadership is paying attention to this dire situation and is willing to put as much effort into Downtown Crossing, a neighborhood that already exists, as it is in the “Innovation District” which, last time I checked, was still a bunch of parking lots.

And, hopefully, our elected officials are willing to help businesses that are already located in Boston as well as companies that have to be persuaded to move here with offers of buckets of cash in return.

If Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino is going to continue giving our money away to private developers (which seems probable), he could do worse than using it to encourage economic development and growth in a neighborhood such as Downtown Crossing.

What do you think should be put in the Borders’ space? And what thoughts do you have about what’s going on in Downtown Crossing?

By Robert Powell, MarketWatch

BOSTON (MarketWatch ) — It’s no joke. The sky over the investment world and everything under it, including bonds, stocks, money markets, commodities, you name it, will fall unless lawmakers raise the $14.3 trillion Federal debt ceiling by Aug. 2.

It could be nothing less than catastrophic and worse than the financial meltdown of the late 2000s should Uncle Sam fail to raise the legal limit on government borrowing and default on U.S. debt, according to Greg McBride, a CFA charterholder and senior analyst with BankRate.com. “There will be no safe haven,” said McBride, from his perch in Florida.

In a press conference Monday, President Obama called for compromise as party leaders seek to craft a deal that raises the legal limit on how much the U.S. government can borrow while slashing projected deficits over the next decade. Democratic and Republican leaders held talks Sunday, but discussions broke down over taxes.

Obama said he would keep convening with party leaders every day until a debt-limit deal is reached. He also said he would reject a stopgap measure of 180 days or less. Congress has to raise the federal government’s legal debt limit by Aug. 2 or the nation could be in danger of defaulting on its debt, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said. A U.S. default could put the economy back into recession and create panic in global financial markets.

And the sad part is that most Americans (and lawmakers for that matter) don’t realize just how bad things will get if the U.S. fails to pay any of its obligations, even if it’s the teeniest, tiniest bill.

The crux of the matter, according to BankRate’s McBride, is that people on Main Street don’t understand the connection with, and the unintended consequences of, lawmakers not raising the debt ceiling.

According to McBride, here’s what’s likely to happen should the Obama administration and Congress fail to agree on a plan to raise the debt ceiling and compromise on deficit reductions over the next 10 years. “It’s not an uplifting conversation,” McBride said.

Rapid repricing

First, there will be what McBride calls a “rapid repricing” of all financial assets, not just Treasuries. In other words, the value of your 401(k) plans, IRAs, 529 plans, gold and real estate will all collapse.

And the reason for that is this: What is fundamental to the pricing of financial assets is the notion that U.S. Treasuries are risk-free. All financial assets are priced based on this assumption (or hope). If Treasuries are no longer risk-free, then all financial assets have to be repriced against another a benchmark.

And this time, investors won’t have a safe haven to which they can flock as they did during collapse of 2008. “There will be no place to hide,” said McBride. “Treasuries will no longer be safe in the event of a default.” Ditto real estate, gold, and farm land. In short, there will be no flight to safety because no asset will be safe. “Even cash might not be a safe haven.”

Credit crunch redux

Should Uncle Sam renege on its promises, McBride predicts that interest rates on all forms of debt — mortgages, car loans, government — will spike, resulting in a renewed credit crunch. Borrowing will come to a halt. Business will come to a halt. And even more troubling is the possibility that a halt in the flow of credit will cause commercial paper markets to dry up and that will result in a run on money funds.

Only this time, there won’t be a federal backstop like we had in 2008, said McBride. At the time, the Federal Reserve took action on several levels to support the money markets, and raised the insurance level on deposit accounts to $250,000 per person, per account category, per bank. But what if there was a run on banks? McBride said, “What good is FDIC insurance if the government is not paying its bills?”

If the scenario plays out, even in the case of a brief default, it will permanently tarnish the U.S.’s credit rating and usher in period of permanently higher interest rates. “There will forever be a risk premium attached to U.S. government debt,” said McBride.

Unemployment will rise

According to McBride, Uncle Sam defaulting on its debt could also result in massive job losses as companies slash expenses to conserve cash. And therein lies yet one more reason why lawmakers should do all they can to resolved the debt-ceiling issue. The U.S., which reported last week that unemployment rose to 9.2%, can’t afford any more bad news. “We’re in a bind and we can’t afford to raise the cost of borrowing,” said McBride.

Call, email your representatives

According to McBride, there is no safe place to put your money should Uncle Sam default. And the only good investment move to make right now just might be U.S. postage stamps on envelopes addressed to your representatives in Congress. And inside those envelopes should be requests, no — urgent pleas — asking lawmakers to deal with the debt ceiling now or run the risk of forever changing the landscape of the U.S. as we know it.

Lately, financial education for kids and adults seems to be right up there with Mom and apple pie as a crowd-pleaser.

Nearly everyone acknowledges that financial literacy is a worthy goal, and more than a dozen states require some form of personal-finance education in high schools. There’s just one problem: It doesn’t seem to be working.

That was the sobering conclusion of a panel of experts at a conference on lifecycle saving and investing that I recently attended at Boston University. The problem, the participants agreed, is that broad-based efforts to improve financial literacy don’t hit people when they really need it. The best time to provide financial education, says Annamaria Lusardi, director of the Financial Literacy Center sponsored by the Rand Corp., Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, is “when people actually have to make financial decisions.” (At Dartmouth, for example, new employees are given a simple, one-sheet walk-through of the retirement plan during orientation. The handout is then supplemented by short videos that explain such principles as compounding and diversification and offer profiles of real people telling how they save and invest.)

The same is true of personal-finance curricula aimed at kids, says Lewis Mandell, a professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. After a career specializing in consumer financial behavior, Mandell has concluded that financial education doesn’t have a lasting impact on financial literacy. He ticked off a number of problems: Lessons aren’t “sticky,” to use the Web vernacular. Classes are generally one-offs that aren’t reinforced. And the subject matter isn’t relevant to kids’ immediate experiences — not unlike trigonometry.

Paul Solman, economics correspondent for The PBS NewsHour , noted that a long-term study in New Zealand has shown that adult financial habits can be determined as young as age 3. Children with the least amount of self-control at that age have the most difficulty managing their money as adults.

To improve self-control among kids, the study’s associate director, Terrie Moffitt, of Duke University, recommends — guess what? — giving them an allowance, along with help on how to manage it.

Good advice. All of this was fascinating but not that surprising. In fact, it was encouraging to get academic backup for the real-world advice I’ve been giving for a long time.

For example, it makes sense to me that lessons about life insurance and Social Security wouldn’t be “sticky” for high school students. But sticking them with the responsibility of paying for their own clothing or cell phone does make an impression. That’s why I’ve always been a big advocate of an allowance that’s tied to financial responsibilities (see 7 Tricky kids-and-Money Challenges to Anticipate ).

Based on what I heard at the conference, I’ll stick with some other good advice:

Don’t rush things. Children, like adults, operate on a need-to-know basis, so teach them lessons that are age-appropriate and don’t overwhelm them with information (see 6 Key Questions Before You Teach Kids About Money ).

If you begin an allowance around age 6 or 7, which is a good time to start, keep it simple by giving kids one financial responsibility (perhaps purchasing their favorite collectibles) that you can build on later. Nothing beats a first paycheck for giving teens a crash course in taxes. And high school students may not care much about retirement, but when your college grad gets her first job and has to sign up for the 401 (k) plan, I guarantee you’ll get a phone call asking for help.

Make it fun. In my experience, the best way to get students interested in learning about money is to entertain them. Mandell’s research shows that playing a stock market game is far more efficient at promoting financial literacy than taking a class in personal finance.

In the classroom, I’d also recommend other hands-on games that let kids make real-world decisions about choosing a career, buying a home and paying the bills. And any kind of competition (like a raucous game of financial soccer that I recently witnessed ) gets them pumped and increases the chances that they’ll remember the lesson even after they’ve taken the exam.

Read more: http://community.nasdaq.com/News/2011-06/does-financial-education-work.aspx?storyid=83043#ixzz1QlJCm4du

But Who Is Watching Regulators?

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Atamian Family Bikes with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to Beat Cancer

Atamian Family Tewksbury

The Atamian Family, owners of Atamian Volkswagen & Honda, Inc. of Tewksbury, is a $2,500 sponsor of the 3rd annual “A Reason to Ride bike-a-thon presented by Fuddruckers” to support brain cancer care and research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A Reason to Ride will kick off on Sunday, September 12th at the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers at 8:00 a.m. and will take participants, including members of the Atamian family, through Danvers, Wenham, Ipswich, Essex, Gloucester and Topsfield.

# # #

Retirement ‘Deficit’ Measured in Trillions

By Joe Mont 10/11/10 – 02:17 PM EDT

BOSTON (TheStreet) — The financial gap between what Americans need for retirement and what they have is $4.6 trillion as a national aggregate and an average $48,000 per person, according to congressional testimony by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Jack VanDerhei, EBRI’s research director, was among those testifying at a hearing Thursday, The Wobbly Stool: Retirement (In)security in America, convened by the Senate Committee on Health, Education and Labor. Testimony and video of the hearing on U.S. retirement income adequacy is available online.

EBRI is a research institute based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on retirement and economic security issues. Its analysis estimates how much money will be needed for “basic” expenses (such as food and shelter) and uninsured health care costs in retirement, and what financial resources retirees are likely to have.

The deficit projection assumes no changes to the current Social Security benefit structure. If Social Security benefits were to be eliminated, the aggregate deficit would jump to $8.5 trillion and the average amount would increase to about $89,000.

Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that analyzes trends in employment and compensation, offered an even more pessimistic view by citing Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research’s estimate that American households ages 32 to 64 have a retirement income deficit of $6.6 trillion. “It is a figure that dwarfs the federal deficit and casts a pall over hopes of them retiring in any kind of comfort,” he said.

A recurring theme of Eisenbrey’s testimony was that, “Congress has made matters worse by focusing retirement policy on high-income households and neglecting low-income workers.”

“While nothing to tout, the financial situation of seniors today might be as good as it will ever get for the typical American,” he said. “Between declining pension coverage and Social Security cuts, it is possible that the next generation to retire will be the first to be worse off than its predecessor.”

Eisenbrey blames, in large part, the shift away from traditional pension plans.

“Most 401(k) participants do not have the financial expertise to manage their investments,” he said. “Many fail to diversify sufficiently and often make poor investment decisions. They tend to have an all-or-nothing approach to risk and, despite the lessons of Enron, many still have funds invested in employer stock. Luck plays an oversized role in whether retirement savings in personal accounts will be adequate. Even 401(k) participants who make relatively conservative investment allocation decisions over a long time horizon are subject to unacceptable risks.”

Eisenbrey urged the Senate committee to “recognize that the retirement income deficit we are leaving for the Gen Xers is at least as serious as the ‘burden of debt for our grandchildren’ that gets so much attention in the media and in political debate.”

“How can it be that after 32 years and trillions in tax subsidies, 401(k)s have worsened, rather than improved, retirement security?” he said. “First and foremost, the design of the 401(k) ensures that its tax subsidies go disproportionately to high-income earners who least need the government’s help in saving, while providing little or nothing to low-income earners, many of whom struggle to meet their daily expenses, let alone save for a distant retirement.”

He cited an analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center that estimated 80% of the tax subsidies for retirement savings go to the top 20% of earners.

“This is government welfare stood on its head,” he said. “There is no rationale for providing a larger tax break to a millionaire than to a Wal-Mart(WMT_) cashier for the same dollar contribution to a 401(k) plan — and nothing at all if the cashier owes payroll but not income tax.”

Phyllis Borzi, assistant secretary of labor for the Employee Benefits Security Administration, also testified. She said that the Department of Labor and other government agencies have several regulatory efforts in the offing intended to boost retirement savings. Among them: reducing barriers to annuitization of 401(k) and IRA plan assets; increasing the transparency of pension fees; improving transparency of target date and other default retirement investments; and reducing conflicts of interest between pension advisers and fiduciaries.

– Written by Joe Mont in Boston.

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