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As senators, Obama and John McCain each earned $165,200 in 2007.
Hensley distributes the products of Anheuser-Busch (BUD, news, msgs), and Cindy McCain's retirement account includes between $50,001 and $100,000 of its stock. Other than that, however, most securities held by her and the McCain children are individual bonds, many of them tax-free, and load mutual funds from American, Lord Abbett and JPMorgan Chase, which suggests the portfolio was assembled by professional financial advisers, rather than by the McCains.
That would be normal; wealthy investors rarely choose their own investments.
Plain-Jane investing
Certainly the McCain household would benefit from the candidate's position on taxes, which includes extending President Bush's tax cuts, which otherwise expire in coming years. Sen. McCain had opposed them when they were passed during Bush's first term.The top federal income tax rate would increase to 39.6%, from 35%, if the cuts expired, which Obama advocates.
McCain's economic expertise was an issue in the GOP primaries. The Boston Globe late last year ran this statement from McCain, which one of his opponents picked up: "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book."
Overall, McCain's filing indicates a wealthy family with relatively plain-vanilla financial tastes, unlike the hedge fund world in which former presidential rivals Mitt Romney and John Edwards had once worked. Hedge funds are, indeed, wholly absent from the McCain family's holdings, as they are from those of the Obamas.
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The McCains' assets do, however, include several trusts and limited liability companies owning real estate as well as marketable securities.
The decision to sell the controversial mutual funds will certainly not affect the McCains' lifestyle, but it was a move driven purely by political posturing -- just like Obama's divestiture of Vanguard Wellesley Income (VWINX).
You and I are lucky we don't have to answer to Washington's celebrity press corps, which knows less about money than the candidates do, which isn't saying a reassuring lot. These are outstanding mutual funds that benefit financially from not trying to be holier than thou.
All three are five-star funds under Morningstar's rating system and have outperformed 95% of their rivals for the past 10 years. Investing for political rather than economic ends is self-defeating, substituting as it does the heavy hand of government for the invisible hand of the market.
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How the job picture will shape the electionA discussion of how the jobs report will weigh in on the election, with Rea Hederman of The Heritage Foundation and Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute.
If anything, what the disclosure forms show is this: They have a trivial impact on voters, but they're highly offensive to anyone with a sense of privacy, including Cindy McCain.
The real curiosity is that no politician has fought harder for campaign disclosure than John McCain. And yet no politician's spouse has fought harder to resist disclosing her own finances than Cindy McCain.
At the time of publication, Tim Middleton did not own or control shares of any company or fund mentioned in this column
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