Once again this summer you can join thousands of other bicyclists and cruise across Iowa on RAGBRAI, pitching tents, eating heaps of grilled meats, visiting at least one church a day to taste homemade pie, and counting mile after mile of corn on the left, soybeans on the right. Or you can follow Des Moines business owner Bob Netteland, who recently spent 14 days biking canal paths from Paris to Bruges, accompanying 20 other cyclists who enjoyed hot showers, comfortable beds and a cozy lounge aboard an air conditioned barge.

"A Dutch captain, a French chef and a maid – it’s pretty nice living," says Netteland of his latest venture on two wheels. He started cycling 30 years ago when he chaperoned his teenage daughter and her friends on RAGBRAI. He has branched out since then, touring extensively both here and abroad. The Columbia River, Vermont, Florida Keys, Italy, Spain and French Alps make up just a few of his bike trips over the years.

Netteland is partial to supported rides. This means a tour organizer arranges for meals and hotels along the route it has selected. It hauls your gear from stop to stop and provides a sag wagon for people who may want to skip a portion of a day’s ride (or need a repair), and a guide, which he said is crucial on international rides.

"Make certain you don’t get lost, which is a big-time problem," he says, noting that foreign road signs can be confusing.

Netteland arranged his canal-path journey with the Bicycle Adventure Club of San Diego. They set up dozens of U.S. and foreign rides – anyone up for Madagascar? – that cater to small groups. See bicycleadventureclub.org.

Bicycle Adventure is a membership organization, as is Montana-based Adventure Cycling Association, www.adventurecycling.org. It, too, sponsors rides, ranging from a cruise around Lake Michigan to an agility-testing 65-day run along 2,668 miles of the Continental Divide.

Some services will even provide bikes, in case you don’t own one or don’t want to lug yours overseas. The ever efficient Swiss will day-rent both pedal and electric assisted bikes at hundreds of railway stations across their country. Just pick it up and drop it off that night after sampling any of the 6,000 miles of bike trails in the country (Iowa has 2,400 miles of trails).

The point here is that if you need a good excuse to get outside and exercise, why not do it in style?

Electric bicycles – e-bikes – are a great way to exercise, giving you a boost of mechanical power to make that uphill climb and keep up with the rest of the crowd. For older riders they’ve been especially welcomed; Des Moines biker Bob Netteland says his e-bike helps overcome the fatigue of osteoarthritis.

But not everyone embraces them. The National Park Service, for instance. Or the Bureau of Land Management. Neither government agency will permit them to be operated on land they control.

Emma Wimmer, with the Adventure Cycling Association, says her group has had to notify riders signed up for trips it offers in Idaho and along the C&O Canal near Washington, D.C., that e-bikes are barred.

The problem stems from regulatory oversight and the speed of e-bikes. New York, for instance, views them as motorized vehicles that require licensing. And some souped-up versions can reach 50 mph!

Iowa has no problems with e-bikes. Matt Winter, at Bike World in Urbandale, says the versions he sells have maximum speeds of 20 or 28 mph. And there is no throttle on those bikes – their electric motor is only activated by the rider's pedaling.

There have been plenty of reasons lately to worry about the market and the economy, but among America’s wealthy fear is no way to manage money. Individuals with at least $1 million to invest in stocks and other assets have been doing a good job of tuning out all the noise, and as usual, it was the right call.

Even as trade wars persist, recent jobs numbers disappoint and yield curves invert, stocks had a run of six straight positive days before Tuesday’s stall, and the market is near an all-time high. And that is what America’s millionaire investors were expecting all along.

Americans with $1 million or more in investable assets are bullish on stocks and the economy for the duration of 2019, according to the latest CNBC Millionaire Survey, which was conducted in May across 750 affluent individuals. The market sentiment of the wealthy has improved since the last time CNBC’s biannual survey of millionaires was conducted in fall 2018. Read more>>

Gabriel Zucman started his first real job the Monday after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Fresh from the Paris School of Economics, where he’d studied with a professor named Thomas Piketty, Zucman had lined up an internship at Exane, the French brokerage firm. He joined a team writing commentary for clients and was given a task that felt absurd: Explain the shattering of the global economy. "Nobody knew what was going on," he recalls.

At that moment, Zucman was also pondering whether to pursue a doctorate. He was already skeptical of mainstream economics. Now the dismal science looked more than ever like a batch of elaborate theories that had no relevance outside academia. But one day, as the crisis rolled on, he encountered data showing billions of dollars moving into and out of big economies and smaller ones such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong and Singapore. He’d never seen studies of these flows before. "Surely if I spend enough time I can understand what the story behind it is," he remembers thinking. "We economists can be a little bit useful."

A decade later, Zucman, 32, is an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the world's foremost expert on where the wealthy hide their money.  Read more >>

Even relatively wealthy Americans are so worried about their finances that it’s affecting their mental and physical health.

That’s one of the findings in a Bank of America Corp. survey of more than 1,000 people in the U.S. who have enough investable money to qualify as "mass affluent."

Financial concerns affected the mental health of 59% of respondents, while 56% said their physical health has been hurt. Younger people, in the millennial and Generation Z age brackets, reported a bigger impact from money matters than their Gen X and baby boomer counterparts.

Financial awareness is rising among young people because of social media, and that can make them savvier about money matters — and more stressed out, said Aron Levine, head of consumer banking and investments at Bank of America.

"How do I pay off my debt, I really want to buy a home, I still want to take a vacation, I’ve got to deal with potentially aging parents — and then forget about retirement, I don’t even know how to think about that," Levine said in an interview, citing some major financial concerns people face. "That’s a very daunting task."

Despite the prevalence of money worries, 44% of Gen Zers and 48% of millennials say they believe they’ll be millionaires one day. Read more >>

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