In economics, it's well known that a perfect market is one in which everybody has access to information instantly, accurately, and uniformly. The closest market in the United States to this is our stock market, where the information flows freely; investors know exactly how securities are priced within moments of the most recent trades. Perfect markets are difficult to beat, and the people who identify and take little pinches of profits call it arbitrage.

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A few days ago, I shared my view on how entrepreneurs are being squeezed out in this economy - even more so than our bigger company counter-parts who have also been struggling. A lot of people agreed — and a few disagreed – but this topic created a lot of discussion. Now I want to put forth a strategy for entrepreneurs to embrace. One which could help all of us overcome this mess.

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One of the first lessons I learned, as a young accountant working in the tax department of a multinational CPA firm, was that "pigs get fat, and hogs go to slaughter." In the tax business, this means that taxpayers should push the law as far as they can, but if they are overly abusive, they will get nabbed and probably end up spending time in the Cross-Bar Hotel.

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There's no single question, that I've been asked more in the last six months,
than "is now a good time to by real estate"?

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I normally don't write columns that leave my readers hanging but I wanted to
take the weekend to think about my conclusions - and to think about how
accurate my thoughts are. I also wanted to take some time to absorb the
commentary that every political and business observer has put out.

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The ink isn't even dry, and we're already starting to find out one surprise
after the next about  the recent health care legislation approved by
Congress and signed by President Obama.

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These days, I'm asked more frequently to address real estate related topics than any of the other areas where I help people to raise capital and structure their businesses. The area where I specialize in real estate is known as real estate syndication. Syndication means putting many investors together into a pool and then a general manager, managing director or general partner invests that money into an asset on behalf of all of the partners who put money into the deal. The investing partners are generally silent partners and the manager has virtually complete control (within reason) of all the activities of the partnership.

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In November 2009, I said that the bottom is a historical concept (http://tinyurl.com/yk3zfmb) and that "the only time you ever know where the bottom of the market was is by reading the paper a week, a month, or a year after that bottom has occurred." Instead of focusing on the bottom, let's look for trends that point to the market moving north. I'll start by offering a good one.

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The world has gotten sufficiently complicated, where many of the rules that have been written in the past need to be broken or disregarded so that we can move forward and break through the log jam.

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The most pressing question that I receive nearly daily is something like: "Joel, how do you see the economy? What's on the horizon, in your opinion?"

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