Business

Recovery operation

Wow! Everything about wealth is back in fashion, big time, or so say the financial mags about our economic circus.

Kiplinger’s, usually the more contrary of the money titles, says we should love stock markets again, but also shouts alarms with its cartoon-inspired cover of an anguished woman recoiling in panic with the big headline, “Still Spooked by Stocks?” Gamblers aren’t. Meanwhile, a piece aimed at the lesser rich shows how to take advantage of expiring tax laws. One article assures us that the sky isn’t falling, at least for those 55 or older. But another warns that many could be losing their nest eggs over the financial burden of losing their marbles in the near-epidemic of Alzheimer’s.

Money knows well what spring brings — in this case, a new home-buying bonanza. With interest rates at half-century lows, and sellers eager to bail out after a five-year slump, the upswing in home deals is well on track. Its cover package on housing offers helpful advice for buyers and sellers alike, such as whether to fix up the place or sell, and how to avoid pitfalls like old liens. There’s a flipped-coin piece on whether to buy bonds or stocks, and a how-to on 12 smart ways to save taxes. There’s also a handy wrapup on what hoarded records to keep.

Bloomberg Markets has improved nicely from its old dry self, with an infusion of smarter graphics and more popular cover lines, e.g. “Getting Rich (Secretly) From Soccer.” Thankfully, the page numbers for promoted pieces appear alongside the headline teases to give an easy lookup. It’s maddening when editors don’t provide the page numbers, wrongly assuming readers will pause to admire ads while flipping through pages hunting for an item. Its coverage package, “The World’s Best Paid Investment Banks,” is a keeper, and can help save on the price of renting a Bloomberg machine.

Forbes gets better each year chronicling the world’s ever-expanding crop of billionaires, including the first one in dirt-poor Vietnam. More and more of the world’s tycoons hail from the former Soviet realm. Babies at its demise, they eventually reaped huge fortunes from its breakup and insider deals. This year, 210 new billionaires — 138 of them women — hit the list. Moguls like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have been bumped from the cover and replaced with one of Brooklyn’s favorites — Russian mogul Mikhail Prokhorov. He’s a partner in Jay-Z’s Barclays Center and a likely replacement for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Mayor Bloomberg is at $27 billion.

New Yorker’s style Issue previews the Met’s exhibit on punk-rock clothes, with a curator spouting gobbledygook like “Even the negation of fashion is a statement,” and “their ethos of do-it-yourself has become the future of ‘no future.’” The real eloquence comes from former Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten, who says he considered a trash bag as a “perfect, perfect item of clothing. You’d just cut a hole for your head and your arms and put a belt on, and you looked stunning.” Speaking of glad rags, the financial column addresses JCPenney’s disastrous turnaround bid under CEO Ron Johnson, concluding that “Right now, Johnson looks like a complete fool … his biggest mistake may simply have been taking the job in the first place.”

New York has a cover story on the growing ranks of professional women ditching their careers to be stay-at-home moms. Rather baldly, the article notes a few benefits accruing to men, including the washing of fewer dishes. “Espousing equality” is “partly a mating tactic” for men, says University of Texas evolutionary biologist David Buss. Likewise, the mag reports that “sociologists at the University of Washington found that the less cooking, cleaning, and laundry a married man does, the more frequently he gets laid.” That said, a piece on Prince leaves us wondering whether the rock star shirks his chores. Prince was “the most sensitive, the most androgynous … the closest thing I’d had to having a woman,” says one gal who shared a romp.

Despite tight deadlines, Time cranks out a fine cover story on Pope Francis, who is conservative when it comes to matters of the bedroom, but far more populist than predecessor Benedict XVI, who was known to enjoy the fancy robes. “He’s the Vicar of Christ, but I used to see him riding with us on the subway,” says a young priest in Buenos Aires, where as archbishop the new pope has long clashed with President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner. “She once joked that it was a shame that women couldn’t be Pope because she would run against him,” the mag reports. Elsewhere, a “10 Big Ideas” feature reports on new apartments that are shrinking to as little as 250 square feet amid soaring rents. “They’re a small step in the right direction,” the mag concludes.