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Got this off the Freakonomics blog, this video is really good. There’s some good halal investment tips in there too 
The part about the crack dealing is from chapter 3 of the book. This book is a great read, one that I really enjoyed, you can get the book here:
Without further ado.. here is the video on Basic Economics by Tommy Bottoms: (FYI video is kind of R rated)
Related post: Halal Real Estate Flipping
Nice read about Hakeem Olajuwon making money post-basketball. The article is here, and I have put some quotes from the article.
Hakeem Olajuwon, the soft-spoken Nigerian émigré who led his team to two NBA championships, also has done extremely well flipping real estate in his adopted hometown. Following an unorthodox yet disciplined strategy, he has managed to make as much in real estate in the past 10 years as he did in his 17 seasons playing professional basketball.
…
Another way Olajuwon minimizes risk is with cash-only transactions.
It’s against Islamic law to charge or pay interest, so he never seeks outside financing.
I found this article from this blog about Caribou Coffee/Arcapita Bank. I wrote about the Caribou Coffee thing a while back.
When Caribou Coffee went public last year, sharp-eyed investors noticed some unusual promises in its prospectus. Caribou, the nation’s second-largest coffeehouse chain, said it would never sell pork or porn. It wouldn’t charge or receive interest, either.
my blog seems to be getting a lot of hits from search engines for “halal stocks” so i wanted to make a few things clear, and add some info i have learned recently.
i mentioned some stock info in previous posts (here, here, and here). the list i made of ‘halal’ stocks is in no way meant to be an actual list of halal stocks. its just something thats of a personal interest to me so i have been doing some research and posting it here, since, well, its my personal blog.
anyway, i had a muslim financier friend check into the SEC filings on the companies i thought had the potential to be halal stocks. here is what he found:
from those that i listed, the following companies PAY interest:
the following companies pay minority interest (not sure what that is):
None of the companies listed were receiving interest alhamdulillah, and the following companies from what my friend could verify were not involved in riba:
I also wanted to mention this article that contains more info on caribou coffee and its muslim ownership.
Lastly, please note that i am in no way saying these companies are halal or haram to invest in. its just a small effort on my and some brothers parts to get some more information on investing in the west and trying to do it in a halal manner, nothing more, nothing less. for actual rulings, etc. please refer to an imam or scholar, or if you have no access to one, then look at the fiqh and fatwa websites posted in my links on the right side inshallah.
Interesting article from Newsweek on Islam in Office: If Fundamentalist Parties Take Over How Will They Do Business?
One thing to note about taxes that, unfortunately, i never really knew until i started reading Millionaire Next Door (a muhammad alshareef recommendation), the us govt is losing money because they tax INCOME and not WEALTH. there’s a huge difference. guess what that is? tax vs. zakat.
if you look at millionaires (i.e. over one mill in net worth) what they pay in taxes is actually a small percentage of what they’re worth. that’s why guys like ross perot (yeah this book was written a few years ago the examples are a bit dated) only actually paid less than 10% of their worth in taxes. meanwhile, the rest of us are forking over huge percentages of our incomes. just taking 2.5% from the WEALTHY of their wealth would actually be a more lucrative venture than taxing everyone across the board.
you will also notice if you look up salaries of CEO’s of huge companies etc (look them up here), they really only make 100-150k/year, quite a partly sum given their position, however, they actually have millions in things like stock options etc (think enron people). so what they pay in income tax is really about the same as a huge number of others, and the govt is losing the money on their wealth and net worth.
needless to say, subhanallah, islam really is the perfect system. by taking what seems such a small sum (2.5% of a mill is still 25g’s) and not taxing everyone, it gives enough money to suffice everyone while at the same time not penalizing the rest.
i have emailed Amana but gotten no response. after doing some research i came across the following article on faith-based investing (kathleen pender, march 12, 2006) that is very interesting:
I have left the highlights of the article in this post, for the full text, click the link.
In the small but growing world of religious mutual funds, few managers face more restrictions than Nick Kaiser, yet none has done better the past few years. Kaiser manages the Amana Trust Growth fund, which invests according to Islamic law.Like most religious funds, it excludes companies involved in tobacco, alcohol, gambling or pornography. The Amana fund also eschews pork, but unlike funds designed for Catholics, it has no beef with contraceptives.
Islamic law forbids the payment or collection of interest, which keeps the entire financial services industry out of the fund. It should exclude any company that has debt, but that would eliminate all but 35 of the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index.
"One of the Islamic scholars (who advise the fund on religious issues) said, 'We're also concerned about companies with too much cash. They are earning interest on that cash.' But excluding them would bring the portfolio down to zero," says Kaiser.
As a compromise, the fund generally will invest in a company if its debt is not more than one-third of market value.
The fund itself is not supposed to earn interest, so Kaiser keeps the cash he needs to meet withdrawals in a non-interest-bearing account. If the fund did earn interest, it could "purify" it by giving it to an Islamic charity. But that would create regulatory problems, so Kaiser forgoes interest.
Kaiser figures that only 45 percent of the 5,000 stocks he follows are halal, or permissible under Islamic law.
Kaiser says the strict Islamic restrictions sometimes help and sometimes hurt performance.
Morningstar analyst David Kathman says, "a lot of the factors that result from Islamic law are actually good long-term investment strategies anyway."
Kaiser, who has degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago, is not Muslim, nor is he particularly religious. "I stumble into the Episcopal church once in a while," he says.
His company, Saturna Capital of Bellingham, Wash., manages money for many clients, including the nonreligious Sextant family of no-load funds.
For religious guidance, he relies on Muslim scholars and on Monem Salam, Saturna's director of Islamic investing.
A number of Islamic banks sidestep the ban by taking in money and deploying it in ways deemed halal. There is no fixed interest rate. The return to depositors depends on how much profit their capital generates.
(Several Islamic countries have sold sovereign bonds, called sukuks, that are structured along the same lines. Dow Jones is introducing a sukuk index.)
i began investing "halal" stocks. i emailed amana and azzad but haven't heard back. i started compiling a list of healthcare/IT companies, and then started going through their income statements one by one. it seems to me (keeping in mind my novice expertise in finance) that the following companies don't look to be earning money from interest. i am also familiar personally with a number of these companies from working in the industry (all the companies listed are healthcare/IT related somehow). here's the stock tickers, i used google finance.
ABC, APY, BAX, BIO, CAH, DGX, DLK, HAXS, HCA, HLTH, KMB, LANV, MCK, MEDW, PFE, THC, VITL.
check this out. i also checked out amana and azzadfund but according to google finance their top 10 holding companies include apple - which means itunes, so that put a big cloud on that for me.
