Skeptical Finance Quotes

• Introduction
• Memorable quotes
• Other interesting quotes
• Recommended Links

Introduction

The term Casino Capitalism  as a specific phase of neoliberal transformation of capitalism. A slow motion corporate coup d'état, which is now accomplished in the USA and other Western countries.

In other words this is a variant of neoliberal model of corporatism used in wealthy Western countries. The term itself was coined by Susan Strange who used it as a title of her book Casino Capitalism published in 1986. She was one of the first who realized that

1.  "The roots of the world's economic disorder are monetary and financial";
2.  "The disorder has not come about by accident, but has in fact been nurtured and encouraged by a series of government decisions." (p. 60). In other words its was a counter-revolution  of  the part of ruling elite that lost its influence in 30th (dismantling New Deal from above in the USA (Reaganomics) or Thatcherism in the GB).

According to Susan Strange transformation of industrial capitalism into neoliberal capitalism ("casino capitalism")  involved  five trends. All of them increased the systemic instability of the system and the level of political corruption:

1. Innovations in the way in which financial markets work due to introduction of computers;
2. The sheer size of markets;
3. Commercial banks turned into investment banks;
4. The emergence of Asian nations as large players;
5. The shift to self-regulation by banks (pp.9-10).

Now it is pretty much established fact that the conversion from "industrial capitalism" to neoliberal "casino capitalism" is the natural logic of development of capitalism. In early and incomplete matter this trend was noticed earlier by many thinkers. So, in a way,  replacement of industrial capitalism with financial capitalism was immanent and corruption was contributing, but not decisive factor. Also this conversion did not happen due to lack of oversight or as a folly. Also unlike "industrial capitalism" which was more-or-less stable system, able to outcompete the neo-theocratic system of the USSR, the financial capitalism is unstable in the same sense as radioactive elements are unstable.  The crisis of neoliberal capitalism started 2008 undermined ideological legitimacy oif its central claim that "free markets" lead to faster and more uniform economic development of all countries. While the peak of its power might be over, it will exist in zombie state due to economic and military power of the USA and G7.  And as we know from Hollywood films, zombies can be especially bloodthirsty. It probably will remain the dominant force for at least the next two decades with the policy of "forceful" opening of energy rich countries for western multinationals intact.  But as Napoleon quipped "You can do anything with bayonets, you just can't sit on them".

Conversion to neoliberal capitalism was a reaction on stagnation of industrial production and as such it was nurtured and encouraged by a series of government decisions for the last 50 years.  Stagnation of industrial production made expansion of financial sector of paramount importance for the ruling elite and by extension for Congress which represents this elite. House vote 377:4 for Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 is pretty telling in this respect.

Memorable Quotes

• Economics without Politics is like sex without a partner...
• Luckily for the top 1% – and the top 10% supporting the top 1% – the bottom 90% never figures things out.  -- ZeroHedge
• It should have been self evident that a ‘plutonomy’ isn’t stable. Centralized demand is as toxic as centralized planning for an economy. Comment from Stop Coddling the Super-Rich - NYTimes.com
• Only 9% of U.S. voters said they had confidence in Wall Street, 15% in news media, 16% in federal government. That's way too many imbeciles for the country.
• America “that have been destroyed for quarterly profit reports” Chris Hedges on Bill Moyers show.
• If Charles Ponzi were still alive, I would not be surprised if he had his own show on financial television, with an avid following. Taibbi and Spitzer on Sandy Weill, Romney, LIBOR and Geithner
• Boards of director are hirlings of management, selected for cosmetic reasons related to gender, race, previous condition of importance. Their job is to apply the rubber stamp and collect their emoluments, sit through a monthly lunch without noticeable gastric embarrassment. You think these clowns worry about media outrage?
• "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." -- Kenneth Boulding, economist
• "It must be fun to be a Republican senator sometimes, because you get the fun of breaking sh*t and the joy of complaining that the sh*t you just broke doesn't work." Jon Stewart
• “Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.” Dave Gorczynski
• Buffet: all over the world, everybody that manages money is waiting to catch the signal that the fed will reverse course. and, you know, there's a -- i think they're on a hair trigger.  So i think the fed will try to get little signals here and all of that. but in the end, there are an awful lot of people that want to get out of a lot of assets if they think the fed is going to tighten the lot. Listen, at least to my knowledge, we've never had the degree of dis-georgement that might be called for down the line. And who knows how will play out. But it will be noticeable, put it that way.

• Synthetic positions lead to organic losses!

• Who cares about $708 trillion of derivative exposure between friends? (WSJ)

• "So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget." -- Kurt Vonnegut

• "The Market" is the new Potemkin Village -- zerohedge.com, Oct 12, 2013

• "Why is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate." - Matt Taibbi

• “financial innovation” ... “finding legal ways to do things that used to be illegal under the old rules.” -- naked capitalism, 2010

• Selling is an ultimate bond maturity transformation

• Is not this is good time to enroll at the Chuck Prince Dance Academy?

• FED are a politically (in)dependent group with a dual mandate of supporting the banks and maximizing bank profits.

• There are rumors, that within a week Obama administration will announce that the Rule of Law had been downgraded to a guideline.
• The authorities were handed a Madoff-quality scandal with MF Global to finally prove they are the best regulators money can buy.
• Nomura's Bob Janjuah: "markets are so rigged by policy makers that I have no meaningful insights to offer.”
• "The greatest triumph of the banking industry wasn’t ATMs or even depositing a check via the camera of your mobile phone. It was convincing Treasury and Justice Department officials that prosecuting bankers for their crimes would destabilize the global economy.”  -- Barry Ritholtz
• The economics exam question: "Find analogy between actions of the  Fed and a control fraud.
• “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
• Jeremy Grantham: "I like the analogy of the Fed beating a donkey (the 1% growing economy) for not being a horse (his 3% growing economy). I assume he keeps beating it until it either turns into a horse or drops dead from too much beating!"
• The finance elite claim to be capitalists seeking a “free market”, but what they really want is a free-fire zone -Volatility
• The idea of mainstream media trying to get to the truth sounds like Mayan toothpaste

Other interesting quotes

• Beware short bankers: short bankers will always be more cynical, corrupt and narcissistic than those with normal height.
• Lloyd Blankfein used to fly to Las Vegas on weekends to gamble and that's not the worst demonstration of his inability to resist temptation.
• Drive for ethical, socially responsive banking is similar to asking a great white shark to be nice to fish or a fox to go vegetarian...
• Our Fed chairman is highly intelligent, thoughtful, polite, soft-spoken, seemingly earnest gambler. -- Doug Noland
• Banks PR: "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."
• The big jobs in financial media go to kids who know which boats not to touch
• The first rule of ideology is that people can rationalize anything so that they can make a living.
• "If you don't know who the sucker is, then you're it." -- poker player's aphorism (reiterated by Warren Buffet)
• When Putin called Ben Shalom Bernanke a hooligan he was wrong. Ben Shalom is just a shoplifter. As he is printing money out of thin air to buy financial paper, his actions is tantamount to shoplifting. The shoplifter walks away with stolen goods. The shop owner, realizing part of his merchandise has disappeared, has no choice except to hike the price of the remaining goods. Call it inflation.
• Thank you Ben Shalom Bernanke for being the singular pompous PhD idiot who can take the yeoman's credit for navigating this global ship of financial farce into the sargasso sea of pinstriped fraud. The WilliamBanzai7 Blog ALAN GREENSPAN'S ASSET BUBBLE BAND
• "Sado-Monetarists". Used in the title of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article (Nov 08, 2012): Who will stop the Sado-Monetarists as jobless youth hits 58pc in Greece?
• Financial crisis ... was an incestuous orgy between inside players at Washington and inside players at Wall Street. -- Bill Moyer.
• The expression “academic prostitution” is really abusive. It conveys a disrespect for sexual prostitution, – a hazardous occupation for poor women comparing them with dishonorable intellectual prostitution of rich men.
• Financial journalists are typically high school dropouts who were whores before slightly changing specialization.
• If foxes are put in charge of rebuilding a chicken coop, it is a given that the chicken’s new quarters will be less than secure. The same is true about rebuilding US economy...
• "The Edge of Financial Cliff... there is no honest way to explain it to anybody, because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
• The main reason for the USA current economic problems is that both republican and democrats are two domestic terrorist groups.
• James Bond has a license to kill. Wall Street has a license to steal.
• I love the smell of a bank burning in the morning.
• An interesting side effect of 2008 financial crisis is that now prostitutes has higher moral standing then academic economists...
• The IMF raised it's world growth projections from 3 to 3.5%. The only group that is worse than the IMF projecting growth rates is the Fed
• Speculators are often confused with investors when they come from the land of the privileged hedge and vulture funds.
• The only difference between Wall Street and organized crime is that Wall Street is much better organized.
• Is "pro growth" coded language for " print mo money"? Europe- Sarkozy calls on ECB to support growth
• Central banking makes organized religion look positively honest by comparison.  Petey Wheatstraw [Apr 14, 2012] Fed Access for All -- The Big Picture
• "There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on --shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." --Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002  -- George W. Bush
• "Let them eat receipts"
• People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election. --Ambrose Bierce
• The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business. -- Clarence S. Darrow
• The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. --Ambrose Bierce
• "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 -- George W. Bush
• "You work three jobs? ... Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." -- to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005 -- George W. Bush
• "This is an impressive crowd -- the haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite -- I call you my base." -- at the 2000 Al Smith dinner -- George W. Bush
• "Yes We Can" was truly Wall Street banks slogan: Ron Paul- "It Is Estimated That US Banks Have Over A Trillion Dollars Tied Up At-Risk With German And French Banks" 
• The Zombies (in the sciences at least) are ex-scientists who have had their brains lost or, more often, sold.
• The decline in the saving rate during a quarter when asset prices plunged is called the desperado economy.
• The only purpose of neoclassical economics is to justify and legalize theft.
• Banking totalitarianism has become American post facto dominant Church.
• The MSM will never speculate about the possible criminality of leading financiers and politicos… that’s what blogs are for... LOL. --  The Big Picture
• U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know --[Oct 30, 2011 .Did You Hear the One About the Bankers-, by Thomas Friedman, Commentary, NY Times]
• The essential thing about our democracy is that every four years we have the opportunity to get swindled, one more time. 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... Um, er... Can't get fooled again!' -- Fred C. Dobbs. October 27, 2011 at 02-19 PM
• Balanced budgets are always in the future, never the present.
• Language arbitrage used by banks: You’re Not a Sucker, You’re a Customer
• Who cares about a $30 DVD player if the only job you can get is at Wal-Mart? -- Oct 26, 2011, dysfunctional-system-bankrupts-generation
• Chairman Bernanke has evidently never read Professor Bernanke...  --DrDick,  October 29, 2011 at 03-49 PM
• Why seize gold? Print up money and buy it. Seizing it is so declasse and socialist. Buy it, and be a REpublican!
• I wish I had a Bernanke mask for this Halloween... Sold out... Bummer
• We will have low inflation  in everything you can't afford because you have no job.
• The 0.01% will hire the 0.99% as hedge fund managers and together the 1% will hire the rest of us as housekeepers, chauffeurs and gardeners. Sounds like a plan...14
• insider-trading is only the old-style form of how-to-get-rich-by-taking-other-peoples'-money.
• Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. Did You Hear the One About the Bankers - NYTimes.com
• The essential thing about our democracy is that every four years we have the opportunity to get swindled, one more time. 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... Um, er... Can't get fooled again!' -- Fred C. Dobbs. October 27, 2011 at 02-19 PM
• Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, used to tell a joke about how Moses must have made a wrong turn in the desert: “He dragged us 40 years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.’ ”  Drumbeat- October 26, 2011
• Free enterprise is not a hunting license -- Ronald Reagan
• "What do they even mean by] efficiency, anyways?" Shaking your right hand while slipping their left hand into your pocket. ;)
• «The American Dream is alive and well -- in Denmark!»
• The "equity-efficiency tradeoff" has precisely as much analytical purchase as a fart in the bathtub.  -- October 22, 2011 at 04-38 PM
• When the capitalists own the gov't, socialism and capitalism are so hard to distinguish! ;)  October 22, 2011
• I like that Wall Street psychopaths are turning on each other but I hate the false precision of Goldman Sachs guesswork.
• "Banks are in a business of hiding risk" and only valuable information you can get from [bank earnings] is how much they pay themselves.  -- Nassim Taleb
• Seems that invisible hand is most often the one with lots of money; the fist full of money.
• Hope is neither a pension plan nor an investment strategy (on 11% expected returns from stocks)  -- Pimco's Prediction For Pension Plans- "Pain"
• New motto: “We’re not working because the system isn’t working!”
• Given that we cannot have democracy what do you want ?   --  October 03, 2011 at 11-15 AM
• How is "let the markets decide" different from "let the money decide" ?   --  October 03, 2011
• "Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money."--J. Edgar Hoover  Note: That's also true about stocks and 401K speculators (aka investors) :-(
• "Thou shalt not mistake the Meaning of Life with thine business sales target” -- April 22, 2011
• Anyone else here pining for a multiparty, parliamentarian system this morning? Frankly, I think separating from the UK was a big mistake. I blame George Washington.
• Wall Street is one of the few places where practice does not make perfect.
• "Like there is no atheists in foxholes there is no libertarians on Wall Street" [at the time of the crisis]  -- Daily Ticker - Yahoo! Finance Sep 23, 2011
• The Federal Reserve's balance sheet is accounting smoke and mirrors - which completely invalidates almost the entire body of conventional economics built upon the misconceived understanding of money which results. It is the eighth wonder of the world. -- The eighth wonder of the world
• Bank stress tests: Never attribute to malice (I’d also add conspiracy) that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- naked capitalism, September 21, 2011 at 9-35 am
• Bank of New York has been run by pigs. I recall them talking on a conference call several years ago, around 2005-06, about the cost savings generated by moving 400 IT/administrative jobs from NY/NJ to lower cost areas overseas. If they saved $40K per year on each one of those job relocations, total savings per year would be $12 million pre-tax. I looked in the proxy for that year and the total compensation of the top 5 executives was $60 million. -- DP September 19, 2011 at 8-40 am
• ”Nobody blames the tiger for stalking its prey, but you do blame the zookeeper for leaving the tiger’s cage open.” -- KevinTren September 18th, 2011 at 2-26 pm
• The banks do a very good job picking people whose faulty interpretation of the world works *right now*.  endorendil  September 18th, 2011 at 12-40 pm
• Delta one traders are, and I fear that I will give offense but so be it, the dimmest wattage bulbs in the generally low-wattage equity derivative universe. --indiainc September 17th, 2011 at 10-09 pm
• Greenspan screwed us to such an extent that the entire global financial system has morphed into one big “Rogue trade” September 17th, 2011 at 8-27 pm
• If you follow ‘investment science’ then you are someone who reads books that quantify the unquantifiable, but make it look scientific. I once read the CFA book 5 on equity investments and bonds just for grins. -- dead hobo September 17th, 2011 at 10-01 am
• There are no rogue traders — just as there are no predatory borrowers — there are only rogue banks. The Big Picture September 17th, 2011
• They’re not “rogue” for the simple reason that making insanely irresponsible decisions with other peoples’ money is exactly the job description of a lot of people on Wall Street.  -- Matt Taibbi: The $2 Billion UBS Incident: ‘Rogue Trader’ My Ass (Rolling Stone)
• As a nation we still continue to enjoy a literally unprecedented prosperity; and it is probable that only reckless speculation and disregard of legitimate business methods on the part of the business world can materially mar this prosperity.  -- Teddy Roosevelt in December 1906.
• American consumer: “Not Happy Being the Nicest Horse in the Glue Factory”
• I am reminded of that splendid quote from the British ’80s sitcom, Yes, Prime Minister: “Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.” -- John Mauldin's Weekly E-Letter, Sep 10, 2011
• Obama -- living proof the fincial oligarchy can always recruit another quisling, the supply is endless; their personalities are irrelevant.

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20200310 : That is the way POTUS go down in History ( Mar 10, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200310 : We probably do not need election of Sanders to crash stock market. Coronavirus will do the job just fine ( Mar 10, 2020 , www.nakedcapitalism.com )
• 20200310 : "Saving" Wall Street really amounts to "saving" the tapeworm while discarding the host. ( Mar 10, 2020 , www.nakedcapitalism.com )
• 20200309 : What's the difference between a cannibal and a neoliberal ( Mar 09, 2020 , nymag.com )
• 20140711 : Jane Austen Explains Monetary Policy ( Zero Hedge )
• 20140710 : One unanticipated effect of neoclassical economic education ( ...the avg Americans gives away 42% of found money. But first year economics students only give away 20%. The economics curriculum in the USA needs to change. -- Mixed Thinking about Markets )
• 20140129 : Random findings ( Jan 29, 2014 )
• 20130220 : "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the publics money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville ( Feb 20, 2013 )
• 20130216 : Random quotes ( Feb 16, 2013 )
• 20130130 : Random quotes ( Jan 30, 2013 )
• 20121230 : ] Random quotes ( Dec 30, 2012 )
• 20111130 : ] Random quotes ( Nov 30, 2011 )
• 20111130 : ] Random quotes for November, 2011 ( Nov 30, 2011 )
• 20111031 : ] Random quote for October ( Oct 31, 2011 )
• 20110930 : Random quote for September ( Sep 30, 2011 )
• 20110831 : Random quote for August ( Aug 31, 2011 )
• 20110731 : Random quotes ( Jul 31, 2011 )
• 20110630 : Random quotes ( Jun 30, 2011 )
• 20110530 : Random quotes ( May 30, 2011 )
• 20110430 : Random quotes ( Apr 30, 2011 )
• 20110331 : Random quotes for March 2011 ( Mar 31, 2011 )
• 20110115 : Random quotes ( Jan 15, 2011 )
• 20110101 : In 2009 I Learned That… ( The Reformed Broker )
• 20101222 : Random quotes December 2010 ( Dec 22, 2010 )
• 20091222 : Oh, CRE- Holiday parody of the song O Christmas Tree ( Oh, CRE- Holiday parody of the song O Christmas Tree, Dec 22, 2009 )
• 20091222 : Fictional Reserve Lending And The Myth Of Excess Reserves ( Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis )
• 20091221 : Economics is mathematics bent to the service of political propaganda. ( Dec 21, 2009 )
• 20091030 : Glossary of Trading Terms and Phrases by Barry Ritholtz ( October 30th, 2009 )
• 20090714 : Wall Street Fraud ( Wall Street Fraud, Jul 14, 2009 )
• 20090514 : After this bizarre time period is over (gonna be a while), the terms "green shoots" and "better than expected" will be running jokes to repeated ad nauseum. ( May 14, 2009 )
• 20090501 : ( May 1, 2009 )
• 20090428 : Flight to quality: ( Apr 28, 2009 )
• 20081222 : Larry Kudlow financial advice ( Dec 22, 2008 )
• 20081215 : ( December 6, 2008 , by WcP Blog - World Culture Pictorial )
• 20081003 : wolf pack ( Oct 3, 2008 )
• 20080928 : O.P.M ( Sep 28, 2008 )
• 20080927 : Passing the trash ( Sep 27, 2008 )
• 20080926 : Ponzi Finance Dynamics. ( Sep 26, 2008 )
• 20080926 : Paulsons Economic Patriot Act is about marking to market ( Paulson's Economic Patriot Act is about marking to market, Sep 26, 2008 )
• 20080926 : "Economic Patriot Act" -- Paulson Plan ( )
• 20080925 : The Big Picture We should toss him a couple of bucks... ( The Big Picture We should toss him a couple of bucks..., Sep 25, 2008 )
• 20080820 : Bear market ( Aug 20, 2008 )
• 20080820 : BenSteinery ( Aug 20, 2008 )
• 20080811 : Age of Froth ( Aug 11, 2008 )
• 20080811 : Ace of Spades ( Aug 11, 2008 )
• 20080808 : Fuel: ( Aug 8, 2008 )
• 20080731 : Free Trade: ( Jul 31, 2008 )
• 20080729 : Ideological idiots: ( Jul 29, 2008 )
• 20080729 : Orwellian madness ( Jul 29, 2008 )
• 20080729 : Financials: ( Jul 29, 2008 )
• 20080729 : Kookyville: ( Jul 29, 2008 )
• 20080728 : Phony and Fraudy: ( Jul 28, 2008 )
• 20080727 : Fed discount window: ( Jul 27, 2008 )
• 20080727 : Anchored: ( Jul 27, 2008 )

Old News ;-)

[Mar 10, 2020] That is the way POTUS go down in History

Mar 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

DFC , Mar 9 2020 22:17 utc | 64

"I have the hunch that this is a normal flu" (D.J.Trump, March 2020)

"I have the hunch the recovery is around the corner" (Herbert Hoover, November 1929)

That is the way POTUS go down in History

[Mar 10, 2020] We probably do not need election of Sanders to crash stock market. Coronavirus will do the job just fine

What will happen if Biden dies from Coronavirus after the convention?

Mar 10, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Aumua , March 9, 2020 at 4:36 am

I guess another mixed positive is that it shows you don't need Bernie Sanders to crash the stock markets. The thing is quite unstable on its own thank you very much.

Divadab , March 9, 2020 at 7:16 am

Yes- quite illuminating to see the contempt Dem party worthies hold for us and the office of President

[Mar 10, 2020] "Saving" Wall Street really amounts to "saving" the tapeworm while discarding the host.

Mar 10, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Parker Dooley , March 9, 2020 at 1:53 pm

"Saving" Wall Street really amounts to "saving" the tapeworm while discarding the host.

But we love love love our tapeworm -- especially our "healthcare plans" and "capitalism".

[Mar 09, 2020] What's the difference between a cannibal and a neoliberal

Mar 09, 2020 | nymag.com

"A cannibal doesn't eat his friends."

[Jul 11, 2014] Jane Austen Explains Monetary Policy

"I wonder how Harry Potter would put it..."

Zero Hedge

Who knew? Jane Austen was a dyed-in-the-wool, easy-money-loving, stimulus-demanding 'expert' on monetary policy. As Citi's Steven Englander finds in his eloquent new year's note, it seems the antiquated authoress has much sense-and-sensibility to reproach those of us who believe in real money and a return to a real economy. From justifying QE, "Money is the best recipe for happiness," to the importance of the wealth effect, "If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow;" Austen offers some 'balance' to offer on Fed transparency, tapering, and congressional spending.

Via Citi's Steve Englander,

'Elinor now found the difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told to consider it, and certainty itself." – particularly apt in light of the market reaction to tapering.

• "Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself." -- more on tapering
• "A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch." -- on the tapering calendar
• "I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly." -- advice on communications policy
• "I think we are a great deal better employed, sitting comfortably here among ourselves, and doing nothing." -- insight into labor force participation
• "I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it." -- the hysteresis effect
• "A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of." – on the need for more stimulus
• "I am sorry to tell you that I am getting very extravagant and spending all my money: and what is worse for you, I have been spending yours too. " -- message to Congress
• "If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow." – the importance of the wealth effect for human capital
• "Money is the best recipe for happiness." – QE justified
• "If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next." -- on economic forecasting
• "There is a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing, & common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit." -- FOMC press conferences
• "It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering." –taking the easy policy route
• "We do not look in great cities for our best morality." – distribution effects of QE
• "I don't approve of surprises. The pleasure is never enhanced and the inconvenience is considerable." -- the argument for Fed transparency
• "It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first." -- nothing more need be said
• "..people always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them" -- on the need for entitlements reform
• "And we mean to treat you all,' added Lydia, 'but you must lend us the money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there." – on balance sheet expansion

[Jul 10, 2014] One unanticipated effect of neoclassical economic education

...the avg Americans gives away 42% of found money. But first year economics students only give away 20%. The economics curriculum in the USA needs to change. -- Mixed Thinking about Markets

[Jan 29, 2014] Random findings

• "So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget." -- Kurt Vonnegut
• Let us think 'Republican Morons' for Downplaying Shutdown. March of Dumbs continues -- Jon Stuart
• Looks like the government is addicted to spying, Repugs (and especially Tea troopers) are addicted to apocalypses, Wall Street is addicted to derivatives. What's next?
• This may sound very cynical - but then, if you aren't cynical at this point, you aren't paying attention. EconomistView
• "The Market" is the new Potemkin Village -- zerohedge.com, Oct 12, 2013
• "I think the slogan for the US might become 'we reject your reality and substitute our own.' " -- Jesse
• There is an old poker saying that if you don't know who the sucker is at the table, it is probably you. This is fully applicable to government shutdown.
• "Why is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate." - Matt Taibbi
• "Why did God invent economists? To make weathermen feel good about themselves." -- David Rosenberg, former chief economist at Merrill Lynch
• Banana Republic: It's not just a store anymore. Economist's View
• "financial innovation" ... "finding legal ways to do things that used to be illegal under the old rules." -- naked capitalism, 2010
• Should we now include additional greeting "Hello NSA" just to be polite to people who will be reading our correspondence ?
• We need to support our insurance parasites -- they need the third house in the Hampton's. Calculated Risk Comment
• Low Fed rates didn't fuel the housing bubble. ~ Alan Greenspan, former Chair of FOMC
• This is the United States of America. That's what I remember. Guess what.... It's a free f***ing country. ~ Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPM
• FED are a politically (in)dependent group with a dual mandate of supporting the banks and maximizing bank profits.
• Barclays was fined a whopping $200 million for fixing Libor,¹⁴⁰ the British Banking Society, using language right out of Casablanca, said that they were "shocked."¹⁴¹
• There are rumors, that within a week Obama administration will announce that the Rule of Law had been downgraded to a guideline.
• The authorities were handed a Madoff-quality scandal with MF Global to finally prove they are the best regulators money can buy.
• Nomura's Bob Janjuah: "markets are so rigged by policy makers that I have no meaningful insights to offer."
• No serious person would question the integrity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These numbers are put together by career employees. ~ Alan Krueger, White House Council of Economic Advisers
• A title: 2012 Year In Review - Free Markets, Rule of Law, And Other Urban Legends Zero Hedge
• Is not this is good time to enroll at the Chuck Prince Dance Academy?
• Selling is an ultimate bond maturity transformation
• Buffet: all over the world, everybody that manages money is waiting to catch the signal that the fed will reverse course. and, you know, there's a -- i think they're on a hair trigger.

  So i think the fed will try to get little signals here and all of that. but in the end, there are an awful lot of people that want to get out of a lot of assets if they think the fed is going to tighten the lot.

  Listen, at least to my knowledge, we've never had the degree of dis-georgement that might be called for down the line. And who knows how will play out. But it will be noticeable, put it that way.

[Feb 20, 2013] "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville

[Feb 16, 2013] Random quotes

• The American consumer has so many hands in his pocket there is no room for their own to fit. -- Externalized Costs comment to Summary for Week ending February 16th
• I bet "Let's break for coffee" Greenspan cant boot a PC, what does he know about HFT??? Useless Randian Mummy... -- Yoringe comment to Summary for Week ending February 16th
• "The greatest triumph of the banking industry wasn't ATMs or even depositing a check via the camera of your mobile phone. It was convincing Treasury and Justice Department officials that prosecuting bankers for their crimes would destabilize the global economy." -- Barry Ritholtz
• "The man who knows the truth and has the opportunity to tell it, but who nonetheless refuses to, is among the most shameful of all creatures." -- Theodore Roosevelt
• HSBC Leaving Ordinary Street Robbers Highly Envious (title of the article).
• "Assistant Attorney General Admits On TV That In The US Justice Does Not Apply To The Banks" transcript
• At the end of the day, when the Fed decides to exit, they will not be able to put the liquidity 'toothpaste' back in the tube. - Zero Hedge
• "IF I AM WRONG AND WE TRULY HAVE FOUND ECONOMIC AND MARKET NIRVANA SIMPLY THROUGH THE CENTRAL BANK PRINTING PRESS AND ENORMOUS INDEBTEDNESS, THEN I WILL HAVE NO HESITATION IN ENJOYING THE FUTURE, THINKING ABOUT THE FUNNY MONEY MIRACLE, NEVER NEEDING TO WORRY ABOUT ECONOMIES OR GROWTH EVER AGAIN Bob Janjuah
• Hypocrisy Defined: DOJ's Infamous Lanny Breuer Accuses RBS Of "Stunning Abuse Of Trust" - Zero Hedge
• Tim Geithner's Book Is Coming: An En-Titlement Crowdsourcing Effort -- Zero Hedge
• The economics exam question: "Find analogy between actions of the Fed and a control fraud.
• "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error." – John Kenneth Galbraith
• "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." – Aldous Huxley
• Get Rich Quick Schemes For The Rest Of Us: Rent Out Your Neighbor's Foreclosed House
• The economics exam question: What are the similarities between the European Union and the Soviet Union ?
• The law of the crony capitalism: Geithner's proximity to Rubin's Citi during the dark days means never "take away the punchbowl"
• Jeremy Grantham: "I like the analogy of the Fed beating a donkey (the 1% growing economy) for not being a horse (his 3% growing economy). I assume he keeps beating it until it either turns into a horse or drops dead from too much beating!"
• Paul Krugman: "We Should Kick The Can Down The Road. It's The Responsible Thing To Do"
• There is no clean shirt among major banks (Pausons sells all his bank stocks at loss)
• Having survived the Mayan apocalypse, and a Papal resignation, our home planet is due for a record setting space encounter on Friday (Feb. 15, 2013 ) of this week... We often turn to cycles - business, solar, Kondratieff, etc. - to better understand current events. But what if this era is not just a cycle but the terminal phase of Global Capitalism 1.0?
• Selling snake oil and issuing unbacked paper currency are not so different.
• The finance elite claim to be capitalists seeking a "free market", but what they really want is a free-fire zone -Volatility
• Beware short bankers: short bankers will always be more cynical, corrupt and narcissistic than those with normal height.
• Lloyd Blankfein used to fly to Las Vegas on weekends to gamble and that's not the worst demonstration of his inability to resist temptation.
• Drive for ethical, socially responsive banking is similar to asking a great white shark to be nice to fish or a fox to go vegetarian...

[Jan 30, 2013] Random quotes

• As for Social Security Repugs might be wolfs, but Obama is definitely a wolf in sheep's clothing
• Our Fed chairman is highly intelligent, thoughtful, polite, soft-spoken, seemingly earnest gambler. -- Doug Noland
• The idea of mainstream media trying to get to the truth sounds like Mayan toothpaste
• Banks PR: "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."
• The big jobs in financial media go to kids who know which boats not to touch
• The first rule of ideology is that people can rationalize anything so that they can make a living.
• "If you don't know who the sucker is, then you're it." -- poker player's aphorism (reiterated by Warren Buffet)
• "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." -- Kenneth Boulding, economist
• "It must be fun to be a Republican senator sometimes, because you get the fun of breaking sh*t and the joy of complaining that the sh*t you just broke doesn't work." Jon Stewart
• "Sado-Monetarists". Used in the title of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article (Nov 08, 2012): Who will stop the Sado-Monetarists as jobless youth hits 58pc in Greece?
• Financial crisis ... was an incestuous orgy between inside players at Washington and inside players at Wall Street. -- Bill Moyer.
• The expression "academic prostitution" is really abusive. It conveys a disrespect for sexual prostitution, – a hazardous occupation for poor women comparing them with dishonorable intellectual prostitution of rich men.
• Financial journalists are typically high school dropouts who were whores before slightly changing specialization.
• If foxes are put in charge of rebuilding a chicken coop, it is a given that the chicken's new quarters will be less than secure. The same is true about rebuilding US economy...
• "The Edge of Financial Cliff... there is no honest way to explain it to anybody, because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
• "Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country." Dave Gorczynski
• The main reason for the USA current economic problems is that both republican and democrats are two domestic terrorist groups.
• Obama is like a guy hanging out around the schoolyard saying..."Hey, little kid, I have some candy for you." The really sad part is, it so totally fits. "Come here, America. If you just go with me I promise I'll show..."
• Colbert: National conventions [provide a] rare opportunity to hear different parties say same things
• Like mice agreeing that the cat should wear a bell, the unemployed agree that corporations needs to restore a high growth rate. The Bush Institute bells the cat [Jul 31,2012]
• Economics without Politics is like sex without a partner...
• America "that have been destroyed for quarterly profit reports" Chris Hedges on Bill Moyers show.
• If Charles Ponzi were still alive, I would not be surprised if he had his own show on financial television, with an avid following. Taibbi and Spitzer on Sandy Weill, Romney, LIBOR and Geithner
• When Putin called Ben Shalom Bernanke a hooligan he was wrong. Ben Shalom is just a shoplifter. As he is printing money out of thin air to buy financial paper, his actions is tantamount to shoplifting. The shoplifter walks away with stolen goods. The shop owner, realizing part of his merchandise has disappeared, has no choice except to hike the price of the remaining goods. Call it inflation.
• Thank you Ben Shalom Bernanke for being the singular pompous PhD idiot who can take the yeoman's credit for navigating this global ship of financial farce into the sargasso sea of pinstriped fraud. The WilliamBanzai7 Blog ALAN GREENSPAN'S ASSET BUBBLE BAND
• Boards of director are hirlings of management, selected for cosmetic reasons related to gender, race, previous condition of importance. Their job is to apply the rubber stamp and collect their emoluments, sit through a monthly lunch without noticeable gastric embarrassment. You think these clowns worry about media outrage?
• The Tories may not be any more interested in serving the interests of their people, but they do have some measure of pride in their office and self-respect, of decorum, in comparison to Wall Street's bawds in the Congressional corporate campaign contributions bordello. Jesse's Café Américain
• The difference between the republicans and a clown car carnival is that the former are much more wealthy and much less funny.
• 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Wealthy' John Stewart on the GOP Field

[Dec 30, 2012] ] Random quotes

• GOP = Greed Over People
• Just remember, in the new fiat world:
  • Bad economic data is good for stocks!
  • Good economic data is good for stocks!
    
• Barry should write a book on "The Art of the Cave-In" when this thing with Social Security is all over.
• "Jon Corzine is just another foo (Friend of Obama). "
• Only 9% of U.S. voters said they had confidence in Wall Street, 15% in news media, 16% in federal government. That's way too many imbeciles for the country.
• James Bond has a license to kill. Wall Street has a license to steal.
• Synthetic positions leading to organic losses!
• I love the smell of a bank burning in the morning.

[Nov 30, 2011] ] Random quotes

• If Occupy Wall Street supporters are looking for new places to protest, they might think about picketing the economics departments of the most prestigious American universities. -- Forbes
• An interesting side effect of 2008 financial crisis is that now prostitutes has higher moral standing then academic economists...
• Indexes are doing fine. Data not so much. -- Rob Dawg 05/01/2012 - 7-10 am
• Obama is the Hero in the Global Potemkin Village with a cast of characters from Goldman Sacks.
• I used to make the analogy that W was the train driver, and we could all see that the bridge was down in front of us. Neither the Rs or the Ds are willing to stop the train, but damn it, W is gleefully stuffing more coal into the locomotive. As William K. Black reminds us, the incentives of the 1% are "perverse."
• Remember, only Nixon could go to China, and it is highly likely that only a Democrat can gut Social Security and Medicare -- Yves Smith April 29, 2012 at 3-38 am
• Rocky Anderson would be my choice, but I'll probably vote for the betrayer in chief, again reluctantly, because I remember how Ralph Nader gave us W.
• Please, let's have Chris Christie run – his girth almost perfectly symbolizes Republican greed. April 29, 2012 at 2-24 pm
• What a bunch [Of presidential candidates]…! This is reminds me of the George Carlin skit called the American Dream when he said… their coming for your Social Security money and their gonna get it.
• In a way bankers are Marx's dream, it's the workers getting [more then] the fruits of their labours. Economist's View April 29, 2012.
• If there is anyone has that any doubt that America is doomed, they are too stupid to be saved. -- A reader reaction to Matt Taibbi description of Obama team of bank lobbyists who put together JOBS Act that legalize fraud in the stock market( Yes, Virginia, This Is Obamas JOBS Act Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone)
• The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them. Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)
• They want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals. They're against street crime, providing that street isn't Wall Street. -- George Carlin(Wikiquote)
• As OptionsXpress has found, in the USA naked short selling and price manipulation is only permitted for TBTF institutions and campaign contributing hedge funds.
• The IMF raised it's world growth projections from 3 to 3.5%. The only group that is worse than the IMF projecting growth rates is the Fed
• Speculators are often confused with investors when they come from the land of the privileged hedge and vulture funds.
• If Obama is Hoover, who is Mitt?
• The only difference between Wall Street and organized crime is that Wall Street is much better organized.
• It should have been self evident that a 'plutonomy' isn't stable. Centralized demand is as toxic as centralized planning for an economy. Comment from Stop Coddling the Super-Rich - NYTimes.com
• plutonomy
  • When the rich steal from the rich, it's Good Business;
  • When the rich steal from the rich for the poor, it's Nobless Oblige;
  • When the middle steal from the middle, it's Corruption;
  • When the rich and the middle steal from the poor, it's Fiscal Responsibility;
  • When the poor steal from the rich and the middle, it's Crime;
  • When the poor steal from the poor, it's Tough Luck.
    
• I wish people didn't fall all over themselves every time Mankiw stops masturbating to his textbook royalty checks long enough to issue some disingenuous missive. Comment by Norb, April 16, 2012, Economist's View
• "Among the attributes I most envy in a public man (or woman) is the ability to lie. If that ability is coupled with no sense of humor, you have the sort of man who can be a successful football coach, a CEO or, when you come right down to it, a presidential candidate. Such a man is Mitt Romney." Mitt Romney's enviable ability to ignore the truth - The Washington Post
• Think Green. Recycle Washington, DC. This November.
• The Germans (and the Bundesbank especially) don't want a solution. They prefer to fail conventionally.
• These banks are not too big to fail. But they're certainly too stupid to exist.
• Where did the surge in capital come from? The Confidence Fairy?
• Is "pro growth" coded language for " print mo money"? Europe- Sarkozy calls on ECB to support growth
• Central banking makes organized religion look positively honest by comparison. Petey Wheatstraw [Apr 14, 2012] Fed Access for All -- The Big Picture
• It seems that the Obama gang never tires in its efforts to protect, enrich and serve the financial institutions. To the average citizen that should be repulsive. A Republican candidate may boil down the effort into: "Obama tries to rob you blind again" with hilarious results. January 23, 2012
• Apparently senior bankers globally, as a class, are predisposed to minimize their business losses whilst maximizing their bonuses. Be they in Wall St, City of London, Dublin, and now little Belgium they all know how to concoct a good fairy tale. The Germans will be the next to be found out , along with their fairy godmother Cindamerkel. The cradle of Grimm's tales should provide some interesting reading in the New Year. -- December 23, 2011, Naked Capitalism
  "There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on --shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." --Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002 -- George W. Bush
• "Let them eat receipts"
• "I can tell you, just from 40,000 feet, that some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn't illegal." President Obama Read more: benzinga.com
• Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself! -- Herman Cain
• People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election. --Ambrose Bierce
• The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business. -- Clarence S. Darrow
• The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. --Ambrose Bierce
• "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 -- George W. Bush
• "You work three jobs? ... Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." -- to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005 -- George W. Bush
• "This is an impressive crowd -- the haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite -- I call you my base." -- at the 2000 Al Smith dinner -- George W. Bush
• Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail Matt Taibbi

[Nov 30, 2011] ] Random quotes for November, 2011

• Luckily for the top 1% – and the top 10% supporting the top 1% – the bottom 90% never figures things out. -- ZeroHedge
• Only people who buy what Fox News peddles will love the fact that Congress does not want to lower tax for 99% at the expense of 3.2% hike for top 1%.
• This [stock market rally] feels like the big happy ending in Star Wars, where all the stupid little fuzzy bears started playing with each other...
• "The Nikkei is up about 2%, the Hang Seng is up 5.4%." .......and cows like jazz. They are one of the most inquisitive 'open book' mammals on earth. Take a refreshing break....LOL
• The more they print, the less we have.
• Central banks have to save bankers from the people, for the good of the people. Nov 30, 2011 - 6-50 pm
• If I took my retirement to Vegas on a bender at the craps table, blackjack, and pai gow I'd be called an irresponsible fool. If I took my retirement to Wall Street and invested it in index funds in a "diversified portfolio" for the "long term" I would be called wise and responsible. My odds, and entertainment value, are better in Vegas. -- ZeroHedge Nov 30, 2011
• The United States is a country built upon the four C's: Crude, Cars, Credit, and Consumption.
  http://www.zerohedge.com/
• "US consumers more confident than ever they can kill others for a $1.29 towel" -- Zero Hedge.
  Why is it illegal for people to rob banks but legal for the banks to rob the people?
  How much you need to pay to somebody so that he/she openly believe that regulation by the SEC was excessive during 2001-08 and that this contributed to the financial crisis? "The Easy Question in Financial Regulation"
• It is too often forgotten that only half of the passengers of the Mayflower lived through the first winter in Plymouth harbor. Ironically, it is probably closest to its historical roots, a day of gratitude for surviving brutal conditions, for those who are enduring physical or financial hardships but manage to get some respite and personal cheer today. Happy Turkey Day!
• Who cares about $708 trillion of derivative exposure between friends? (WSJ)
• Hu's Your Daddy!
• It is too bad that our 255 million cars can't run on hot air. Guest Post Energy Independence - The Big Lie ZeroHedge
• "Yes We Can" was truly Wall Street banks slogan: Ron Paul- "It Is Estimated That US Banks Have Over A Trillion Dollars Tied Up At-Risk With German And French Banks"
• Ahh, ...those gullible Americans who wrap themselves in the flag and refuse to believe that their country could ever knowingly do anything that is wrong. Counterpunch
• "I baptise you in the name of the Rand, the Fama and the Holy Friedman."
• The Zombies (in the sciences at least) are ex-scientists who have had their brains lost or, more often, sold.
• Fleecing shareholders 101: In 2009, all Toyota executives together received less than Ford's CEO.
• Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sucks: a forecast from either of them on anything is not worth the electrons it takes to put it on the net. Nancy Reagan's astrologer surely would be more accurate and less prone to the likely reality that both profit from their forecasts. There's no collusion here, folks. Or fraud. just keep moving.
• The decline in the saving rate during a quarter when asset prices plunged is called the desperado economy.
• It's Friday. Governments are teetering. Banks are failing. I can't help but be in a good mood. Nov 4, 011 - 6-48 pm
• Between 2006 & 2010, wall street bonuses alone have yielded $128 billion for the bad-guy-crooks -- which, doesn't include salary or other bennies, or other industries outside of the financial empire. Now let's talk about increasing bank capital, using mainly crooked accounting standards.... --
• Nov 4, 2011 - 6-52 pm
• Capitalism can't just be about money -- November 4, 2011, FT.com (such title from FT is equal to title from Vatican -- Catholicism can't just be about religion).
• The only purpose of economics is to justify and legalize theft.
• Banking totalitarianism has become American post facto dominant Church.
• Our coin-operated legislators -- naked capitalism
• The MSM doesn't want to speculate about the possible criminality of leading financiers and politicos… that's what blogs are for... LOL. -- The Big Picture

[Oct 31, 2011] ] Random quote for October

• I'm sure they [MF Global ] were using their clients' money to do God's work. -- naked capitalism
• Chairman Bernanke has evidently never read Professor Bernanke... --DrDick, October 29, 2011 at 03-49 PM
• Why seize gold? Print up money and buy it. Seizing it is so declasse and socialist. Buy it, and be a REpublican!
• I wish I had a Bernanke mask for this Halloween... Sold out... Bummer
• We will have low inflation in everything you can't afford because you have no job.
• "One of the dark secrets of the market is we don't really do much research on Wall Street. I started off on the trading desk. I worked at my job. There were a lot of people who really hadn't done the work, and what they were saying was very compelling and saleable, but it wasn't right." -- Laszlo Birinyi
• The 0.01% will hire the 0.99% as hedge fund managers and together the 1% will hire the rest of us as housekeepers, chauffeurs and gardeners. Sounds like a plan...14
• In those roiling sixties "eat the rich" was a catch phrase. No self respecting cannibal would touch these people.
• insider-trading is only the old-style form of how-to-get-rich-by-taking-other-peoples'-money.
• One of the reasons why we 99%ers aren't more angry at the 1% is that most of us don't live in close proximity with them. Imagine moving in next to a 0.1% family (i.e. a family in the top tenth of a percentile bracket, above 99.9% of all other Americans). Private jets landing at private airports where there are no lines at all. A $50,000 shopping trip in Milan to cheer up a daughter whose pet died. A vacation at Disneyland Hong Kong for a son whose best friend dumped him. A complete interior remodeling of the family vacation home on Ibiza, because that's how the Mrs deals with spring cleaning fever.
• Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. Did You Hear the One About the Bankers - NYTimes.com
• U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they're taking money from. The public needs to know --[Oct 30, 2011 .Did You Hear the One About the Bankers-, by Thomas Friedman, Commentary, NY Times]
  
• The essential thing about our democracy is that every four years we have the opportunity to get swindled, one more time. 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... Um, er... Can't get fooled again!' -- Fred C. Dobbs. October 27, 2011 at 02-19 PM
• Whenever someone cites a Cato study, you know they are either a fool or a liar (or both). -- DrDick, October 27, 2011 at 05-55 PM
• Balanced budgets are always in the future, never the present.
• Language arbitrage used by banks: You're Not a Sucker, You're a Customer
• Who cares about a $30 DVD player if the only job you can get is at Wal-Mart? -- Oct 26, 2011, dysfunctional-system-bankrupts-generation
• Chairman Bernanke has evidently never read Professor Bernanke... --DrDick, October 29, 2011 at 03-49 PM
• Why seize gold? Print up money and buy it. Seizing it is so declasse and socialist. Buy it, and be a REpublican!
• I wish I had a Bernanke mask for this Halloween... Sold out... Bummer
• We will have low inflation in everything you can't afford because you have no job.
• "One of the dark secrets of the market is we don't really do much research on Wall Street. I started off on the trading desk. I worked at my job. There were a lot of people who really hadn't done the work, and what they were saying was very compelling and saleable, but it wasn't right." -- Laszlo Birinyi
• The 0.01% will hire the 0.99% as hedge fund managers and together the 1% will hire the rest of us as housekeepers, chauffeurs and gardeners. Sounds like a plan...14
• In those roiling sixties "eat the rich" was a catch phrase. No self respecting cannibal would touch these people.
• insider-trading is only the old-style form of how-to-get-rich-by-taking-other-peoples'-money.
• One of the reasons why we 99%ers aren't more angry at the 1% is that most of us don't live in close proximity with them. Imagine moving in next to a 0.1% family (i.e. a family in the top tenth of a percentile bracket, above 99.9% of all other Americans). Private jets landing at private airports where there are no lines at all. A $50,000 shopping trip in Milan to cheer up a daughter whose pet died. A vacation at Disneyland Hong Kong for a son whose best friend dumped him. A complete interior remodeling of the family vacation home on Ibiza, because that's how the Mrs deals with spring cleaning fever.
• Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. Did You Hear the One About the Bankers - NYTimes.com
• U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they're taking money from. The public needs to know --[Oct 30, 2011 .Did You Hear the One About the Bankers-, by Thomas Friedman, Commentary, NY Times]
  
• The essential thing about our democracy is that every four years we have the opportunity to get swindled, one more time. 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... Um, er... Can't get fooled again!' -- Fred C. Dobbs. October 27, 2011 at 02-19 PM
• Whenever someone cites a Cato study, you know they are either a fool or a liar (or both). -- DrDick, October 27, 2011 at 05-55 PM
• Balanced budgets are always in the future, never the present.
• Language arbitrage used by banks: You're Not a Sucker, You're a Customer
• Who cares about a $30 DVD player if the only job you can get is at Wal-Mart? -- Oct 26, 2011, dysfunctional-system-bankrupts-generation
• "So one may almost say that the theory of universal suffrage assumes that the Average Citizen is an active, instructed, intelligent ruler of his country. The facts contradict this assumption." -James Bryce (1909, 35)
• Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, used to tell a joke about how Moses must have made a wrong turn in the desert: "He dragged us 40 years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.' " Drumbeat- October 26, 2011
• "By 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year-greater than the total national incomes of France, Italy or Canada." --Robert Frank, Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom
• From our Lord and Saviour, via his earthly representative and the New York Times: The Vatican called on Monday for an overhaul of the world's financial systems, and once again proposed the establishment of a supranational authority to oversee the global economy -- And on the eighth day He created a supranational institution with universal competence
• Banks who lent the Greek government billions, and now want everyone, any one, to take their bad debts from them. A 100 cents on the dollar, of course. -- Oct 24, 2011, Consequences of a Trillion Broken Promises
• I didn't know that scientolog­y was a rupert murdoch enterprise -­ ... sh­ocking ... -­ .. -- -- Oct 24, 2011 kevinbaja in comments to Church Of Scientology Investigated 'South Park' Creators Matt Stone, Trey Parker: Report
• Free enterprise is not a hunting license -- Ronald Reagan
• Kozlowski says he shares the outrage over corporate greed expressed by the Occupy Wall Street protesters, many of whom wonder why the recent financial crisis didn't send as many executives to prison as the scandals of a decade ago. "I understand their frustration," Mr. Kozlowski said in an interview in a visitors' room here at the Mid-State Correctional Facility. http://dealbreaker.com/2011/10/guy-who-used-company-funds-to-throw-wife-birthday-party-featuring-vodka-pissing-ice-sculptures-morally-offended-by-corporate-greed/
• I'm a big fan of raising the marginal rates to above 50 percent, following Michele Bachman's suggestion - who told Fox news that she favored the same kind of tax percentages as we had under Reagan. Me too! Back to the Reagan era is a good transitional program.
• "What do they even mean by] efficiency, anyways?" Shaking your right hand while slipping their left hand into your pocket. ;)
• There is some "false consciousness" indeed, but I think that there is self-loathing too. Maybe the advertising got them to buy into the mini-objectivist point of view as hopeful John Galts, but once they bought into it and 20-30-40 years later discovered that they were not John Galt but serfs, they simply cannot switch ideology and condemn themselves.
• a 55 year old with 20k in the bank and no pension plan is telling me how we should cut back on SS and follow the Paul plan for Medicare I just don't know what to say...
• "The American Dream is alive and well -- in Denmark!"
• The "equity-efficiency tradeoff" has precisely as much analytical purchase as a fart in the bathtub. -- October 22, 2011 at 04-38 PM
• When the capitalists own the gov't, socialism and capitalism are so hard to distinguish! ;) October 22, 2011
• "Nominally Democratic president"
• $19,000 shoelaces made from gold (they even come with someone to tie them for you) | Mail Online
• [GS losses] couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of parasites. Build roads, not hedges. The Goldman $2 Billion share buyback tells us Goldman has no clue how to invest $2 Billion for an honest profit.
• "Credit Default Swaps" --> "I feel your pain" --> "Strategic Default"
• I like that Wall Street psychopaths are turning on each other but I hate the false precision of Goldman Sachs guesswork.
• "Banks are in a business of hiding risk" and only valuable information you can get from [bank earnings] is how much they pay themselves. -- Nassim Taleb
• It costs me less to fly to London than to Houston or San Antonio from D.C. I like London better…. -- October 18, 2011 at 5-51 pm
• No, it'll be okay. We'll all run *tiny classified ads* in thousands of newspapers across the country, and we can make as much as *fifty thousand dollars a week*. Then we can pay our mortgages. -- The Data That the Economy is Not So Hot is Getting Harder to Ignore " naked capitalism
• I got a chain letter yesterday – the poor schmuck paid first class postage to send it to me.
• Economy for TBTF is "Drive Your Own Tank / Fire a Bazooka" amusement park.
• Apparently Progressives turn into Nihilists once they lose faith in the government. Oct 15, 2011 See-Saw Economy or a Series of Shocks-
• Saw a bumper sticker today, first one like this, that read "we the sheeple... had better wake up!" Oct 15, 2011 See-Saw Economy or a Series of Shocks
• "Price Stickiness" in not so sticky. What is really sticky is the wealthy holding on to their assets.
• Consumers….Bankers…..what's the difference….lets just give it all to the bankers….it's easier.
• 'Bernanke's Monetary Impotence'. http://www.youtube.com/user/EconomicStability#p/u/15/Zliv3USGysM
• "Half truths" may be the logic fallacy of ambiguity. "non sequitors" may be relevance fallacies. "innuendo" might be presumption. The goal of the propagandist is to get the mark to accept false conclusions as truth.
• Wall Street is just a toxic spell, not unlike BP Gulf oil spill...
• Seems that invisible hand is most often the one with lots of money; the fist full of money.
• Hope is neither a pension plan nor an investment strategy (on 11% expected returns from stocks) -- Pimco's Prediction For Pension Plans- "Pain"
• New motto: "We're not working because the system isn't working!"
• Why the taxpayers own Red Roof inns and if we could stay there for free ?
• OWSers are supposed to be stock beatnik characters a la Timothy Carey in a surfing movie. The good news is that things will not end well for the people who misread the protestors this badly.
• Bank of America has become a virtual financial nuclear waste dump where toxic materials from all over the criminal banking network can be deposited
• The resolve Europe seems to have mustered to prevent bank creditors from having any losses is very helpful.
• This would be class warfare if Obama had any class. comment to Class War Games (NYT, Oct 3, 2011)
• That's the part I find totally baffling about the corporatocrats/kleptocrats. When they have finally succeeded in buying all levels of all branches of government and looting the middle class out of existence, what then? What do they want in place of what we've had for 235 years? Do they even have an end game or is it all just about laser-focused power and wealth acquisition for acquisition's sake?
• Given that we cannot have democracy what do you want ? -- October 03, 2011 at 11-15 AM
• How is "let the markets decide" different from "let the money decide" ? -- October 03, 2011
• "Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money."--J. Edgar Hoover Note: That's also true about stocks and 401K speculators (aka investors) :-(
• "Thou shalt not mistake the Meaning of Life with thine business sales target" -- April 22, 2011
• Anyone else here pining for a multiparty, parliamentarian system this morning? Frankly, I think separating from the UK was a big mistake. I blame George Washington.
• It's a mental recession. Phil Gramm for Sec'y of Treasury under a Palin/Bachmann/Overdive over Perry's dead body Administration. -- Update on Gasoline Prices Oct 2, 2011
• Wall Street is one of the few places where practice does not make perfect.
• Compare:
  • Wages on Wall Street tumbled more last year than at any time in modern history -- including the Great Depression, according to a study released yesterday by the city's Independent Budget Office. The IBO reported that securities-industry wages averaged $311,279 in 2009, down 21.5 percent from $396,370 the previous year, and down 24.6 percent from $412,915 in 2007. -- Wall St. pay plunge
  • BLOOMBERG: "The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year day and are struggling to make ends meet.
  • It's so cute that they are "are struggling to make ends meet". -- Comrade Rally Monkey, Oct 1, 2011

[Sep 30, 2011] Random quote for September

• Chichenhawks from Fed: "For your safety, we suggest you exercise caution, and avoid engaging with any demonstrators." -- Boston Fed, Sep 30, 2011
• ...Central Bank must be independent from the government – which means in practice, acting on behalf of the commercial banking monopoly. -- Michael Hudson Debt Deflation in America " naked capitalism. Sep 28, 2011
• If WWII got us out of the Great Depression because of massive Keynesian spending then why would massive military spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now the additional cost of our war with Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen, not bring prosperity? Am I missing something? Perhaps things are really good but we are just pretending to be in a huge economic contraction? - Econbrowser, September 26, 2011
• The financial sector recognized that we missed a glorious opportunity to have ire and revolution against them in 2009. So, as good corporate citizens, they have organized a second chance for the the country (the world actually). -- September 25, 2011 at 9-46 am
• ...the most awesome, fearsome, and effective weapon in the arsenal of the modern Republican Party is their total, utter and complete lack of shame. -- Sep 24, 2011,William Rivers Pitt, Class Warfare My Ass
• Change we can believe in: Boil room mentality now dominates the company with Obama friend Jamie at the helm. JP Morgan (the BP of Banking ;-) agreed to pay $211 million last week to settle allegations that it cheated local governments in 31 states by rigging the bidding process for dozens of muni bond deals. -- Daily Ticker - US - Yahoo! Finance
• "Like there is no atheists in foxholes there is no libertarians on Wall Street" [at the time of the crisis] -- Daily Ticker - Yahoo! Finance Sep 23, 2011
• The Federal Reserve's balance sheet is accounting smoke and mirrors - which completely invalidates almost the entire body of conventional economics built upon the misconceived understanding of money which results. It is the eighth wonder of the world. -- The eighth wonder of the world
• Bank stress tests: Never attribute to malice (I'd also add conspiracy) that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- naked capitalism, September 21, 2011 at 9-35 am
• Bank of New York has been run by pigs. I recall them talking on a conference call several years ago, around 2005-06, about the cost savings generated by moving 400 IT/administrative jobs from NY/NJ to lower cost areas overseas. If they saved $40K per year on each one of those job relocations, total savings per year would be $12 million pre-tax. I looked in the proxy for that year and the total compensation of the top 5 executives was $60 million. -- DP September 19, 2011 at 8-40 am
• "Nobody blames the tiger for stalking its prey, but you do blame the zookeeper for leaving the tiger's cage open." -- KevinTren September 18th, 2011 at 2-26 pm
• The banks do a very good job picking people whose faulty interpretation of the world works *right now*. endorendil September 18th, 2011 at 12-40 pm
• Delta one traders are, and I fear that I will give offense but so be it, the dimmest wattage bulbs in the generally low-wattage equity derivative universe. --indiainc September 17th, 2011 at 10-09 pm
• Greenspan screwed us to such an extent that the entire global financial system has morphed into one big "Rogue trade" September 17th, 2011 at 8-27 pm
• If you follow 'investment science' then you are someone who reads books that quantify the unquantifiable, but make it look scientific. I once read the CFA book 5 on equity investments and bonds just for grins. -- dead hobo September 17th, 2011 at 10-01 am
• There are no rogue traders - just as there are no predatory borrowers - there are only rogue banks. The Big Picture September 17th, 2011
• They're not "rogue" for the simple reason that making insanely irresponsible decisions with other peoples' money is exactly the job description of a lot of people on Wall Street. -- Matt Taibbi: The $2 Billion UBS Incident: 'Rogue Trader' My Ass (Rolling Stone)
• As a nation we still continue to enjoy a literally unprecedented prosperity; and it is probable that only reckless speculation and disregard of legitimate business methods on the part of the business world can materially mar this prosperity. -- Teddy Roosevelt in December 1906.
• American consumer: "Not Happy Being the Nicest Horse in the Glue Factory"
• Jobless men keep going. We can't take care of out own Chamber of Commerce. Gerald Celente- "Things Are Going to Get Much Worse…Society Is Breaking Down"
• It is apparent that Obama's $400 billion in Pentagon "cuts" are not cuts at all - not unless you consider an obese person, who continues eating at the same level but reduces his dreams of ever grander future repasts, to be on a diet. -- Lowering America's war ceiling
• Bush and Obama, Shoulder to Shoulder -- NYTimes.com
• The Twin Towers, standing symbolically over Wall Street, were a 1,300-foot rendition of those two, short verticals that transform a mere "S" into a dollar, transmuting it to a symbol for work and wealth and well-being across the Earth. -- Sean Corrigan On The Tenth Anniversary ZeroHedge
• I am reminded of that splendid quote from the British '80s sitcom, Yes, Prime Minister: "Never believe anything until it's been officially denied." -- John Mauldin's Weekly E-Letter, Sep 10, 2011
• Obama -- living proof the the oligarchy can always recruit another quisling, the supply is endless; their personalities are irrelevant.

[Aug 31, 2011] Random quote for August

• "Now, we've got a problem here in America that we have to address. Too many American families, too many minorities do not own a home. [...] Freddie Mac will launch 25 initiatives to eliminate homeownership barriers." -- George W. Bush, June 17, 2002
• Let VISA solve your balance of trade problems... -- August 16, 2011 at 07-54 AM
• We live in a nightmare born from the romantic dreams of economists. -- August 16, 2011 at 08-51 AM
• KING: Now, [Obama] also makes Hugo Chavez look like a piker when it comes to nationalizing American business. Three large investment banks, AIG, taken over by the federal government. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, the student loan program, all of that nationalized. -- Rep. Steve King Articulates John Birch Society's Apocalyptic Vision
• With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine.
• Gangsters + banksters = war
• I'll sharpen my pitchfork and watch for the sign of the Swan. - The Bankers as the Enemy of Humanity
• [Obama on unemployed] Let them eat web pages with my speeches.
• I would have thought that all of these unemployed people with government support cutoff would simply re-awaken their entrepreneurial animal spirits and they would create the next Google and Amazon bringing us back to prosperity that is our birthright. -- rd, August 14, 2011 at 8-20 am
  Uncle Scam:... The return of the Fed may signal the beginning of the end. -- ZH, Too-much-good-thing-not-good-thing
• The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself. -John Kenneth Galbraith
• [Obama speech summary] America, you'll always be triple-A to me. -- August 8, 2011 at 5-09 pm
• To say that S&P analysts aren't the sharpest tools in the drawer is a massive understatement. With S&P, it got to the point where we were constantly saying, "that's a good point, but is S&P smart enough to understand that argument?" I kid you not, that was a hard-limit on our game-plan. With Moody's and Fitch, we at least were able to assume that the analysts on our deals would have a minimum level of financial competence. -- "S&P was Flat-Out Wrong - No Caveats"
  Gee Dorothy, I guess we're not in Kansas anymore and that wicked witch S&P is trying to tell us something: Japan used to copy us, now we are copying Japan.
• In ancient Rome they blamed it on NERO (according to myth), who fiddled while Rome burned. Well, we have a whole bunch of little Neros who are out campaigning and vacationing while we sink deeper into the mire.
• Those of us without bank accounts in the Cayman Islands have felt this for some time and the real surprise would be if anyone is surprised. -- Gramercy, NYTimes.com Aug 5, 2011
• This is what a Tea Party Market Rally looks like, folks... Time to Say It Double Dip Recession May Be Happening - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com
• "U.S. federal agents allegedly allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel to traffic several tons of cocaine into the United States in exchange for information about rival cartels, according to court documents filed in a U.S. federal court." El Paso Times sited in August 5, 2011 at 3-01 pm
• Global warming is a liberal myth engendered by secular socialist to destroy America's only Christian economy, Texas, by bringing Exxon to its knees. -- Vern FT.com
• In a variety of ways, the episode portends continued short-term economic misery and long-term national decline. It is as if the US chose at the last minute not to commit financial suicide – but only out of preference for a slower, more excruciating form of self-destruction. ... A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president. -- Jacob Weisberg August 5, 2011
• "Trust is like air and sex. You don't realize how much you need it until you don't have it." -- August 5, 2011 at 8-15 am
• If the euro zone does fall apart, a fitting epitaph might read, "The ECB feared 3% inflation". -- August 05, 2011 at 12-36 AM
• Here's a great idea: let's have a kindergarten-level debate about the "debt limit" and then all go home while Rome burns. Effing bastards. -- August 4th, 2011 at 9-44 pm
  
• Why we should worry about stock market drop if eighty percent of stocks belong to the richest 10 percent of Americans. Let them worry.
• Thank goodness the Congress did the debt ceiling bill before going on vacation, or something really bad might have happened. -- August 4, 2011 at 6-15 pm
• [It looks like] "Everything is a bubble."
• "Tell him that bulls have no balls." The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway -- August 4, 2011 at 6-20 pm
• Ah yes, now it makes sense "The Hissing of Summer Swans" by Joni Mitchell. -- August 4, 2011 at 5-25 pm
• With the news out of Europe, there isn't even anywhere to escape to, and I don't speak Mandarin
• Bernanke and NYSE gang must be indulging in the two for one martini lunch thinking it's just another Thursday. Menu special: October in August Halloween special of Black Thursday. -- August 4, 2011 at 3-53 pm
• Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Were Our Enemies Right FrumForum, Aug 4, 2011
• I was a teenager during the Eisenhower years. It just shocks me to see what has become of the Republican Party. They do not presently have a single candidate for President that Ike would trust them to shine his shoes. -- Washington Chain Saw Massacre - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com, Aug 3, 2011
• Putin called Bernanke a hooligan. -- ZeroHedge
• This is warfare by drone - the target is America– the sickest first, and then affecting every man, woman and child in the country. -- Naked capitalism, Aug 1, 2011
• "I have diehard lefties who are so mad at Obama that they will vote for the Republican candidate just to screw him. " -- Naked capitalism, Aug 1, 2011
• The green spray paint on the economy is showing its true brown color. -- naked capitalism, Aug 1, 2011
• Obama's inner circle would be best served by being placed in a circular firing squad, given live ammo, and being told to "do what is right."
• "This sucker could go down" -- President Bush, 2008
• the financial crisis is nature's way of telling us that banking occupies too much space in our economy -- especially the "creative" kind of banking which thrives on innovations in fraud and swindles. -- James Howard Kunstler
• This situation calls for calm, determined and decisive inaction by the president. -- Calculated Risk
• If you think Congress will fail to raise the debt ceiling, I'd suggest Tar and Feather futures! -- Calculated Risk

[Jul 31, 2011] Random quotes

• If you think Congress will fail to raise the debt ceiling, I'd suggest Tar and Feather futures! -- Calculated Risk
• "without any economic background": a necessary feature in order to be politically conservative.
• Financial deregulation was merely an attempt to optimize the rate of destruction of the real productive economy to the benefit of investment bankers and hedge funds. -- Economist's View
• By the time this is over, the US government will be an LLC, incorporated in Delaware and dollars will represent voting stock. -- rosie-v-krugman
• I whined loudly and for years about Uncle Stupid and a host of miserable, horrible, incompetent, and hate inspired laws and regulations that allowed and still allow thieves to steal at will. Nothing happened except my writing skills improved immensely. -- rosie-v-krugman
• Obama is Gorbachev, presiding over a system that cannot be sustained. A bit eerie as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan also accompanied that country's woes. -- rosie-v-krugman
  
• True, Treasuries won't be triple A, so in the rater's eyes, they won't be as safe as, say, mortgage-backed CDOs were prior to 2007 -- Dave Rosenberg QOTD- On Potential US Downgrade
• Historically the Left/Right competition for dumb and dumber had been fairly evenly matched. Now the Tea Party Republicans have won that competition hands down. -- Ron in Economist's View
• Many say, "Where is the real Obama?" But it seems that the real Obama turns out to be a Republican Wall Street imposter in Democratic clothing. That is what the Democratic Leadership Committee basically is: Wall Street Democrats. -- Michael Hudson
• Quite a campaign slogan is in the making "I cut your Social Security and Medicare for you with the help of my Republican buddies. Please vote for me anyway. Hey, I'm not ALL bad." -- Daily Kos President Obama commits political suicide
• We can wave banners about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", but they tend to say, in smaller print, "Made in China". Telegraph
• Holder's DOJ is really the DOSJ (Department of Selective Justice -- comment by Bob Ballentine in WSJ.com
• Can Obama administration be more corrupt and criminal then Bush II? "Yes we can".
• It is interesting and instructive that the Obama Administration found the courage to fight for Bernanke ("Subprime is contained") vs. the lack of interest to fight for Warren.
• "Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity – or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories." -- Robert Shiller
  P.T.S.S. - POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME -- Disease afflicting Obama administration after collapse of Debt Ceiling talks...
• Let Them Eat Cake propaganda system replaced serious financial journalism.)The new Let them eat cake! Slide Show - Salon.com
• What the people hailing a possible Warren run are arguing, effectively, is that the consolation prize for the banks having beat her on CFPB should be junior membership in a body that–as Dick Durbin has told us–the banks own. -- March Wheeler
• Obama is a thoroughly unremarkable man except perhaps for his ability to charm and lie... The Dem party under Obama is, even more than it was under under Clinton, competing with the Repubs to be the most-favored party of the plutocracy.... I miss George W. At least he was an honest hypocrite. -- Selections from several Naked capitalism comments
• President Obama has delivered change "Chicago style." It is what the Windy City calls chump change. -- Naked Capitalism discussion, July 18, 2011 at 8-54 am
• [By throwing Elizabeth Warren under the bus, Obama proved that he] is the leader of the moderate wing of the Republican Party. Nateked Capitalism
• Obama administration doesn't do negotiations, it does concessions
• The formerly-disciplined Republican party is unable to rein its Tea Partiers, who are happy to throw Molotov cocktails and don't care if a firestorm results
• Playing poker is part of politics, as is theatrical posturing. That's fair enough. But what America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics. And the whole world is being held hostage. -- Bild Zeitung
• There is very little democracy in Democratic Party, but there is no republicanism whatsoever in Republican Party, which now can probably be called "Grand Old Cult".
• "Best Practices," a euphemism meaning if your competition is getting away with something, you should be able to do the same. In many cases, "Best Practices" bear little differentiation from "Worst Practices." Pam Martens Conspirators Unmasked in the DSK Drama
• there are 3 kinds of people: 98% of us are morally OK, 1% are congenitally criminal and deserve to be in jail, and 1% are investment bankers and fund managers and "… die haben uns in die Scheisse geritten." They rode us into the shit. -- Helmut Schmidt's column "Das Geldhaus" Links Bastille Day " naked capitalism
• On derivative trading: Remember, nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire. Commissioner of baseball, Chief Justice Roberts
• Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well. Alan Wolfe in Why Conservatives Can't Govern (Washington Monthly July 2006)
• Had Trotsky not been assassinated he would no doubt be working for the Hoover Institute -- Stephen J. Tonsor (sited from ESR March 22, 2004 Neoconservatives and Trotskyism - Page 1)
• Greed is like radioactivity it can be harnessed but it is extremely dangerous when not tightly controlled. The Communist Origin of the Modern Conservative Movement VI - Page 4
  URL: http://able2know.org/topic/170827-4
• Free-market Republicans? Don't they mean Captured-Market Republicans?Decline of the Empire
• [Murdoch's] media is the propaganda arm of kleptocracy. -- naked capitalism readers forum
• As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you've been treated [ by law enforcement] -- The next, worse financial crisis Brett Arends' ROI - MarketWatch
• Given the President's rhetoric both earlier in the discussions and at the news conference it has become clear to most observers that the President has given up on the Democratic Party and has secretly switched his affiliation so that he is now a moderate Republican.
• Zbigniew Brzezinski forgot that if walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck:

"I don't want to be a prophet of doom -- and I really don't believe that we are approaching doom -- but I think we're going to slide into intensified social conflicts, social hostility, some forms of radicalism, there is just going to be a sense that this is not a just society." -- Ex-National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski

• A curious proposal of Rand Paul to adopt Argentinean style finance -- Econbrowser Ron Paul's debt default proposal
• If James Bond had a license to kill, the Fed has a license to operate a Ponzi scheme. Econbrowser Ron Paul's debt default proposal
• "the Forces of Selfishness and of Lust for Power Met their Match"
• The extent to which our leadership seems determined to follow in the path of the Japanese is absolutely stunning. -- Fed Watch- Grim
• The whole social space of an established large corporation mirrors the totalitarian society. -- Reader comment to the Naked Capitalism post The Pathology of Elite Organizations
• A couple of years ago, I wrote that I didn't know whether I was proud or ashamed that investment bankers weren't dangling from the lampposts along Wall Street. I've since decided I'm not proud. Naked Capitalism reader
• Perhaps prop trading really should be banned to protect banks, if not from their stupidity, then certainly from their hubris. PIMCO- +$50 Million; Morgan Stanley- -$50 Million
• Mark Zandi Says Jamie Dimon Would Be "Fabulous" Replacement To Geithner, Unclear On Madoff Succession Chances -- Zero hedge
• Leo Strauss'(neo-conservative philosopher) category "the Vulgar Many":

  "The vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe."

• The Goldman Sachs Administration (of President Obama): ...even Mayor Bloomberg mistakenly introduced him [Geithner] as a Goldman alumnus at a public event in New York last year -- New York Magazine
• Even while it was still opposing the Soviets, the US military morphed into a sort of grand extortion scheme: the American intelligence community exaggerated global threats, and the military spent copious public funds pretending to counter them.
• I've always treasured the irony of poor black kids paying hundreds for overengineered shoes made by offshore slaves. dex3703
• "...Often the only distinction between official and unofficial predation was that the former was sanctioned by the local aristocracy." ClubOrlov Sailing craft for a post-collapse world
• What's left today, three decades after Reagan's victory, is a ruling class of Rotary Club nihilists. Right-wing degenerates. And they're not even interesting degenerates anymore, the way some Right-wingers used to be. They just scream a lot. Scream and bang a stick on the ground–and at the end of the stick-banging, they go to pick up their checks from their billionaire sponsors. --Mark Ames
• Quantitative greasing: the gift to the oil market casino operators
  At the meeting on staff reduction (actually the Corporate BS term headcount optimization was used) in one of Wall Street firms VP of HR said: "we need to make sure that people get a positive downsizing experience".
• "There will be no rush to judgment," New York Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus said at a hearing where the former IMF chief was released from house arrest and his bail revoked. LOL. Little late for that, eh? -- Zerohedge Jul 1, 2011
• Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway).

[Jun 30, 2011] Random quotes

• The Three Ds: Delegitimization, Definancialization, Deglobalization
• If Ronald Reagan was known as the actor who became a president, then Barack Obama should become known as the president who became an actor.
• You gotta remember that, to homo economicus, fines are just part of the price of doing business. Economist's View Lawyers and Accountants Helped to Cause the Financial Crisis
  
• On signing the bill that killed Glass-Steagal, Clinton said, "The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is a major achievement that will benefit American consumers, communities, and businesses of all sizes. I thank all of those individuals who played a role in the development and passage of this historic legislation." NYTimes.com
• "Obama Gives In to Whining on Wall Street" (title of the post at Economist's View
• Ctrl+Alt+Bernanke
• If War Is Too Important To Be Left To The Generals, Isn't Economic Policy Too Important To Be Left To Economists\
• But, but, I thought Larry said the economy had reached "escape velocity."And he escaped!Economist's View How to Avoid a Lost DecadeThe Efficient Market Hypothesis - at least as practiced by Wall Street economists - is the rough equivalent of a million monkeys with a million typewriters creating Hamlet. That somehow out of a crowd of emotional, irrational, ill-informed and greedy humans, some form of truth will emerge. Shiller- More Expectations Theory, Less Efficient Market Hypothesis
• The best joke of 2011: Republicans Are Fiscal Conservatives. Runner-up: President Obama Is an Enemy of Wall Street -- Financial Armageddon, The Nose Knows
• "I see nothing in the Constitution that cabinet secretaries have to be alive" -- Economist's View Romer versus Geithner
• Remembering The Fed's Definition Of "Sound Money" Nothing quite like hearing it from the printer's mouth every now and then...
• That last thing we can afford is four more years when nobody in Washington is watching anyone on Wall Street because politicians and lobbyists kill commonsense regulation -- Barack Obama (Lifting the Veil , 11:14)
• There are two kinds of Libertarians; those who don't know that Ayn Rand wrote fiction, and those who don't know that Robert Heinlein wrote fiction.
• "'Atlas Shrugged' is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should." - Alan Greenspan, recipient of the 2001 Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service

[May 30, 2011] Random quotes

• If Ronald Reagan was known as the actor who became a president, then Barack Obama should become known as the president who became an actor. "The President Who Became an Actor"- And This Year's Oscar Goes To… Barack Obama
• One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans-around half-are complete idiotsThe Problem of Republican Idiots The Nation
• "[Jun 04, 2011] ost of the rewards of the presidency, in these degenerative days, have come to be v
• sery trashy. The honors that heaped upon the President ... are seldom of a kind to impress and content a civilized man... The life seems to be dull and unpleasant.. Yet... all ex-Presidents try their level damnedest to get back, even at the expense of their dignity, their sense of humor, and their immortal souls." H.L.Mencken
• ... has been left the innoble role in of prostituting knowledge to the basest of uses. When time to come to look back those scoundrels will find everything o be ashamed of and nothing of which they could be proud. Variation of Sir Robert Hadfield speech to Faraday Society about Nazi scientists.
• It looks like invisible hand of market is somewhat touchy feely -- John Steward
• There is no such thing as an alpha male economist.
• Perhaps IMF should be moved closer to Rikers Island. -- NYTimes.com
• Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers? MAUREEN DOWD
• The street that separates the I.M.F. and the World Bank, where Paul Wolfowitz lost his job over financial hanky-panky with his girlfriend, is now nicknamed] the Boulevard of Bad Behavior.
• "DSK still favourite for the presidential erection". -- Maître Eolas
• Just think what LinkedIn will be worth if they become profitable!
• Central planning is experiencing a renaissance courtesy of financial crisis brought by central banking
• Even cleaning ladies can defend dollar, if it's absolutely necessary.
• No one told Dominique Strauss-Kahn that being Director of the IMF doesn't mean you get to do to people what the IMF does to countries -- kjhealy (Twitter)
• New textbook and course for Harvard MBAs: Sex as the favorite weapon of revenge in financial world.
• Obama has become "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats" -- Cornel West
• It almost makes you wonder whether a dumbed down executive, aggrandizing finance, capital business monopoly, military worshipping, sado porno entertainment society built on public relations and propaganda creates the best of all possible worlds... jake chase
• With Trump, Gingrich, Bachmann, and possibly Palin now in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, "GOP" is starting to mean Goofy, Outrageous, and Peculiar. Robert Reich
• If you can fool enough of the people enough of the time the media the school system and the riot police can go the rest
• Is USA trying to imitate Russia? Looks like the answer is yes, as 10% of all the capital gains in the US goes to just 400 people!
• "Money can't buy friends. But you can afford a better class of enemy." -Lord Mancroft
• In FDR's day, he created the jobs. In LBJ's day, he treatened to create jobs. In BHO's day, he waited for the mostly Republican businessman to create jobs. And he waited, and waited, and waited...
• Republicans actually love big government. They just want big government only for themselves. -- Yasha Levin (Exile)
• Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has a new definition for GOP: "Get Old People."
• FAMEDY: The unholy alliance of fantasy and comedy.
• We've achieved a new economic paradigm that ensures permanent growth (without inflation, and only 12% unemployment) and that doesn't require facts to support it.
• The first law of Chicago school economics: do not reject the null hypothesis if the few profitting are going to take less than they feel due.
• The law of supply and demand of Ann Rand jerks:
  • On the positive side: At least the next time around we probably won't have a libertarian follower of Ayn Rand as chairman of the Fed.
  • On the negative side: we probably will have them in house and senate.
• Banks versus retailers, or as one Senator broke it down further(HuffPo ):

  The big greedy bastards against the big greedy bastards; the big greedy bastards against the little greedy bastards; and some cases even the other little greedy bastards against the other little greedy bastards

• When all is said and done, the people who populate Washington determine our national future. Based on the past 30 years the end result will not change: The people will be left in sole possession of their ankles.
• Once the toothpaste is out of the tube (jobs that moseyed down the internet), kind of hard to get it/them back in. Fred C. Dobbs
• I think we all believe in "shared sacrifice". It's just that now, well, it's their turn.
• I'm trying to have some positive aspect to everything I say these days. It sure makes it hard to talk about economics though! Texas Manufacturing survey shows slower expansion in April
• Good thing we've saved enough in this recovery to cover the coming recession
• A merger of England and America as a strategy for reforming (by replacing) our most seriously deranged institutions: Congress, the Supreme Court and the Constitution

[Apr 30, 2011] Random quotes

• Few remember that finance used to provide other functions besides the creation of fictitious capital via baseless mathematical formulas and stock masturbation via HFT.
• Solvent: in the case of a bank, one operating with the unlimited backing of the Fed and the US Treasury. All others are insolvent. jake chase (April 25, 2011)
• So what do we call the OCC? The Office of Capital Corruption? The Office of Criminal Capitulation? OCC Makes Patently False Claim
• The GOP performs economically valuable services for many sectors of the economy. Red States. Defense contractors. Farm subsidies. Oil and gas drilling subsidies. Government contractors taking over the functions of an independent bureaucracy.
• Economists generally are blind to the fact that a huge proportion of the population have lifestyles that are mostly supported by their political connections.
  We learned in the 20th century that socialism does not work. We learned in the 19th century that laissez-faire capitalism does not work. Now we relearning the lesson from 19th centrury...
• People have been distracted [from economic problems] by guns, gays, and god. Masonboro
• Someday, Janet Yellen will be buying bad loans on Somalian pirate ships off Citi's balance sheet. Cedric Regula
• "I work for a morally bankrupt multinational company, part of my job is coming up with novel ways to get around tax and foreign ownership laws in developing countries."
• I'm trying to have some positive aspect to everything I say these days. It sure makes it hard to talk about economics though! ac
• Good thing we've saved enough in this recovery to cover the coming recession just like Keynes insisted and acolytes like Kruggles advocated. Rob Dawg
• President Bambi: a sad tale of what's left of the left: grasping the steering wheel of the kleptocracy, and drove it faster in the direction it was already going.
• [In divorce ] now dividing up the debts is as critical an issue as dividing the assets... Latest "New Normal" Sighting Divorce Rebound " naked capitalism
• Call me crazy, but I can still imagine a world in which politicians are not all shysters, executives are not all looters, economists are not all toadies. Satyajit Das Dead Hand of Economics " naked capitalism
• Asked how he was doing, G.B. Shaw was fond of saying, 'Parts of me are excellent.' That is applicable to the US housing market.
• McDonald's hiring day offers hope. This is the saddest headline I've seen all day. Actually those jobs might well be counted as 'manufacturing'. Hamburger manufacturing.
• On track for for a second half recovery. Second half of the decade. Thoughts on Residential Investment Recovery
• "Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus."
• The "Education Bubble"; Student Loan Debt Passes Credit Card Debt, Expected to Hit $1 Trillion
• It's time to rename the SEC to the Securities Exchange and Gaming commission.
• If Goldman Sachs is guilty of doing as much damage as outlined by the Senate investigation, during the normal course of business, what could they do if weaponized as a primarily destructive organization committed to not accumulating capital, but instead, destroying its enemies?
• Geithner doctrine: "elite frauds go free". We should leave felons in charge of our largest financial institutions as a means of achieving financial stability. naked capitalism
• Earth is not simply an impotent casualty of humanity's predations... The planet is also a complex organic system with many potent defenses against alien intervention...
• Can Ben Bernanke be the second coming of Joe Cassano ? (Doubling Down To (DXY) Zero)
• Get savvy enough at the free market, and your reward is a fiefdom.
• Kill Medicare off, and then see how happy the tea party folks are, and how they will compliantly vote republican.
• "As Keynes so correctly showed, broken windows, destroyed nuclear power stations, and perforated eardrums are good for the economy because they circulate money and raise aggregate demand." Stone McCarthy
• When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
• I am shocked, shocked I tell you that a single mother living on disability benefits more from the government than she pays in taxes. I think we should shoot her and the kids, "and your little dog, too". EMichael, April 15, 2011
• Back in USSR: Treasury Department = Ministry of Bank Boosterism
• The USA Government is all for deviancy as long as it is about financial sector.
• Lately Joseph Stiglitz' Vanity Fair article "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" has gotten a lot of airplay. Unfortunately, Stiglitz appears to have been a decimal comma off. Charting America's 0.1% Exceptionalism
• The President is stuck in his self image as the man who can bridge the divide between the two sides. The problem is, what do you do if one of the sides proposes nonsense?
• The Onion's next headline: Obama Declares Total Bipartisanship with certificate of Republican Party Membership
• Land of the free ... enterprise
• "I Print Therefore I Am" - The Fed
• Larry accomplished just about all he wanted to accomplish: he engineered just enough stimulus to turn a general contraction into a job market stagnation while providing flanking cover for the bank bailout
• Goldman creates a trash portfolio by request, sells it short confidentially and is [still] considered the pillar of finance naked capitalism
• The Magnetar CDO beneficiaries are economically radioactive. naked capitalism
• At the height of the 2008 banking crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said he had evidence to suggest the proceeds from drugs and crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to banks on the brink of collapse. "Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade," he said. "There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."…Wachovia Paid Trivial Fine...
• ''Britain has no selfish or strategic or oil-related interest in what is happening in Libya.'' David Cameron

[Mar 31, 2011] Random quotes for March 2011

• "With notably rare exceptions, Russian Roulette is a fun, safe game for all the family to play," Mocking Greenspan in "With Notably Rare Exceptions"
• In the past I've often wondered whether they're knaves or fools. Now I'm sure. Robert Reich about Tea Party Repugs.
• "So it's not a war; it's a kinetic military action that is time-limited and contribution-limited on the front end." -- the State Department acting deputy spokesman Mark Toner (NYT)
• ...the Wall Street Traitors (oops...didn't I mean traders?). Comment from Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance
• Winning the hearts and minds of the world... one missile at a time Zero Hedge
• I don't mind getting cancer to support the expediency of U.S. corporations' quarterly profits. It's getting cancer from Japanese radiation leaked due to their corrupt practices that I object to. -- Wile E. Capote:
• "Too-Stupid-To-Fail" banks are stealing from Main Street's "Too-Dumb-To-Stop-Trading" investors. Paul B. Farrell
• You can never tell "fiscal responsibility talking republican" from "tax evader with foreign tax haven accounts"...
• US economics: One big Ponzi scheme -- Aljazeera headline
• "Under our Leader's sky, it's an age of abundance." Those North Koreans look like they're enjoying themselves. Singing and dancing. Why can't we have something like that?
• A Soviet proverb: "In The [Financial] Truth there is no news, and in The [Financial] News there is no truth."
• "Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play." - Joseph Goebbels - Nazi Propaganda Minister.
• "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand" -- Paul Ryan
• A spectre is haunting Europe, comrades …
• "It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." -- matt-taibbis-latest-why-isnt-wall-street-jail
• If a financial innovation doesn't looks like a scam it just means that the mechanics of scam still remains hidden.
• A block grant is a solid mass of money surrounded on all sides by governors. -- Baker's First Law of Federal Geometry:
• State budget gaps are small relative to Bankster Bonuses.
• The men at the Fed Reserve are professional serial bubble blowers. We're talking Real Pros! -- call me ahab
• ...most famously, the machines of the movie The Matrix ruled over a ruined wasteland and seduced people with a beguiling virtual reality in order to maintain their passivity while they tapped humanity's body heat as an energy source. Now, a lot of investors believe that life is imitating art in an alliance of the Federal Reserve and the big banks to create the illusion of healthy equity markets despite massive retail equity withdrawals in the years following the financial crisis.
• I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian. -- Slashdot
• "The mathematics can be a harsh mistress for 401K investors"
• It would be perfect if Mr. Blankfein named his yacht "The Golden Fleece".

[Jan 15, 2011] Random quotes

• The wealth effect is all about their wealth
• Element of 'heads we win, tails you lose' in QE II: if long rates had fallen, the Fed would have taken credit for it. But since they rose, the Fed instead took credit for boosting growth prospects. They can't lose!
• The BLS [Bureau of Lying Statisticians] says U.S. food prices rose an imperceptible 0.1% last month, as food riots break out in Asia and Africa.http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm ( naked capitalism Jan 15, 2011)
• S&P500: State Assisted Ponzi for 500 bankers. Stocks are now a fraudulent respresentation of economic reality. It's an interesting academic exercise whether we're seeing Fed-financed ramping, Fed-financed churning, Fed-financed pump and dump, Fed-financed painting the tape, or what have you.
• After QE2 started, Helicopter Ban was officially renamed to B-52 Ben. Obviously Bernanke thinks Americans are stupid. The only thing going for the Bernanke is that about 70% of the US population is financially illiterate.
• "Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H. L. Mencken
• ...the biggest difference between democrats & republicans is the spelling. The Lull Before The Storm
• QE -- putting expensive makeup on a dead man
• Are you suggesting the bonds backing all these 'out of thin air' reserve notes be forgiven? Don't stand under that falling dollar piano
• Truthiness applies to finance just as much as it does to politics. Stacy-Marie Ishmael (FT Tilt)
• You may not care about the macroeconomy, but the macroeconomy cares about you. Jared Woodard (Condor Options)
• Congress, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, Inc
• "Excessive risk taking" by financial institutions means gambling with your money. And you own the losses.
• The CPI is one of the most massaged organs the US Gubbment has
• Economists only make predictions so that the weather guys have someone to laugh at.
• "Fox is a non-reality based belief system" Chris Hedges
• Greenspan appears to have taken to heart the old adage that "if you can't forecast well, forecast often" (Telegraph)
• Can someone explain to me what is the essential difference, other than size and power, between the actions of the Federal Reserve and the Maddof scam?
• "It's for good reason the stock market was dubbed "the bond market's idiot kid brother." Mike Santoli's Barron's
• "The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. " --Thomas Merton
• Having Rubin write about the economy is like having Pol Pot write about human rights... [Naked Capitalism]
• "There is an old saying in Washington that if you are not at the table, you are on the table."Lobbying to Keep the Capital Markets a Casino
• A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. Joan Robinson
• Larry Summers, the most brilliant idiot on the planet (from comments to Fiscal Patriotism)
• "He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator." -Francis Bacon, Essays

[Jan 1, 2011] In 2009 I Learned That…

The Reformed Broker

• Trend followers eventually take it in the rear. StockJockey (1440 Wall Street)
• "Yes We Can" was truly a slogan to reignite the charge for Wall Street banks who needed taxpayers as a silver lining for a global scam-gone-wild. Damien Hoffman (Wall St Cheat Sheet)
• Doing God's work pays better than I thought...also, too much credit is the problem... and the solution. Ben Shoval (Hedge Fund Comedian)
• $10 trillion will always buy you 4000 DOW points. Lawrence McDonald (Author, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense)
• No one is better at navel gazing than the media. Stacy-Marie Ishmael (Financial Times)
• Pundits and analysts continue to validate the theory that a broken clock is right twice a day and you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
• Celebrity death is great for the economy. Justin Paterno (Zero Beta)
• Ben Bernanke can remain irrational far longer than I can remain solvent. Trader Mark (Fund My Mutual Fund)
• Nausea is the very best buy signal. Steve Sears (Barron's)
• If you owe ten thousand, the government owns you, but if you owe ten billion, you own the government. Jason & Alyx (LOLFed)
• There is a lot of truth to the following quote from The Economist (1986) "The best investors are like socialites. They always know where the next party is going to be held. They arrive early and make sure that they depart well before the end, leaving the mob to swill the last tasteless dregs." Prieur du Plessis (Investment Postcards)
• No one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of government. OneTwo (1-2 Knockout)
• People who didn't make money in the massive rally this year are hurting almost as bad as people who lost a ton of money in 2008.Jay (Market Folly)
• Money covers a multitude of sins, usually those of politicians and bureaucrats. Patty Edwards (CNBC Fast Money)
• Junk bond investors could go from depression to mania in six months. David Merkel (Aleph Blog)
• Only three words matter when it comes to investing in today's markets: ignorance is bliss. Michael Panzner (Financial Armageddon)
• Dumb persistence trumps lazy genius more often than not... Greg Battle (Leftover Takeout)

[Dec 22, 2010] Random quotes December 2010

• Truthiness applies to finance just as much as it does to politics. Stacy-Marie Ishmael (FT Tilt)
• You may not care about the macroeconomy, but the macroeconomy cares about you. Jared Woodard (Condor Options)
• Congress, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, Inc
• "Excessive risk taking" by financial institutions means gambling with your money. And you own the losses.
• The CPI is one of the most massaged organs the US Gubbment has
• Economists only make predictions so that the weather guys have someone to laugh at.
• "Fox is a non-reality based belief system" Chris Hedges
• Greenspan appears to have taken to heart the old adage that "if you can't forecast well, forecast often" (Telegraph)
• Can someone explain to me what is the essential difference, other than size and power, between the actions of the Federal Reserve and the Maddof scam?
• "It's for good reason the stock market was dubbed "the bond market's idiot kid brother." Mike Santoli's Barron's
• "The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. " --Thomas Merton
• Having Rubin write about the economy is like having Pol Pot write about human rights... [Naked Capitalism]
• "There is an old saying in Washington that if you are not at the table, you are on the table."Lobbying to Keep the Capital Markets a Casino
• A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. Joan Robinson
• Larry Summers, the most brilliant idiot on the planet (from comments to Fiscal Patriotism)
• "He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator." -Francis Bacon, Essays

• "The problem with posting quotes off the Internet is you never know if they're genuine."

  --Gen. George Washington at the Battle of Gettysburg, February 30, 1908

[Dec 22, 2009] Oh, CRE- Holiday parody of the song O Christmas Tree

Here is a musical parody of the traditional song "O Christmas Tree (O Tannenbaum)," about commercial real estate.

That video has been going around a bit but today is the first I have seen it.

[Dec 22, 2009] Fictional Reserve Lending And The Myth Of Excess Reserves

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Fractional Reserve Lending is really Fictional Reserve Lending.

[Dec 21, 2009] Economics is mathematics bent to the service of political propaganda.

[Oct 30, 2009] Glossary of Trading Terms and Phrases By Barry Ritholtz

October 30th, 2009

Time for some Friday Fun:

via the Dopey Cowboy, we get a Glossary of Trading Terms and Phrases. A few of my favorites:

• Better Lucky than Smart – The only thing we have going for us.
• Clean up - If you believe that I have a bridge to show you.
• Down a Touch – This thing just came off like a f**king prom dress.
• Find out who's moving the stock - Pick a name out of a hat.
• Floor Looks: The only way to be 100% wrong 100% of the time.
• Good Guy – Doesn't ask me any difficult questions.
• Great Guy – Doesn't ask me any difficult questions and gives me business.
• Happy – "Happy to get involved", "Happy to get you started" – Although coming across like Mr. Sunshine, It's Wall Street's way of reminding you that your sales trader is just a whore at heart and willing to take one in the keester if it gets him an order.
• I have a call into my analyst – If it's important, go get the info somewhere else.
• I won't embarrass you: Unbuckle your pants.
• Lay Up – You're fucked and/or customer wants something.
• Make it Right: Let's ignore all those pesky rules, regulations and what actually traded for a minute.
• Must Be the Program Desk – That's how you explain to an inquiring account about a stock you're #1 in but failed to shop even once.
• On the side-lines – Synonymous with you're done for the day and I'm moving on to the next broker.
• Open Up Down - If you hear somebody say "the stock is going to open up down fifty cents", that's code for they should be flipping burgers for a living and you need to hang up the phone immediately.
• PM Limit - Sure it is.
• Short Squeeze – explanation given for any stock up more than 4% when you're too busy with another client to check it out.
• Smart Money – 65% of that crowd has gone out of business over the past 18 months and half of what's left is either getting squeezed or subpoenaed. There is no smart money.
• Takes me out of the name – there's a few million more. I'll just pretend to catch another seller tomorrow… or later.Traded Away – Your client just douched you.
• Understood - I'm not sure what you just said so I'm just gonna wing it and hope you don't call.
• VWAP – No conviction.
• We're big boys, we can take it – Son of a bitch! That stung like a mother f**ker.

The full run is here.

Hat tip Mike Panzner

[Jul 14, 2009] Securitization: "There's a name for this - it's called 'passing the trash,' Wall Street Fraud

[May 14, 2009] After this bizarre time period is over (gonna be a while), the terms "green shoots" and "better than expected" will be running jokes to repeated ad nauseum.

[May 1, 2009]

• Financial engineering: a politically correct way of saying "organized crime."
• Pandemic debt. Debt will cause more stress that a pandemic flu.
• cheese-eating surrender monkeys

  It's funny that many Americans will call the French 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys' and, yet, the French would never quietly slip away into the night to live in a carpark or a tent city while bankers get billions in taxpayer financed bonuses. So why do Americans go so quietly?

• whack-a-mole
  • Ben game with agency paper and LIBOR, as a result of which Ts are popping up again. The man behind the curtain better get busy, as some of ARMs are tied to the ten year.
• Suppressing interest rates.
  • Raping savers to protect fools and fraudsters. I don't see the low rates helping much because for every pardon my french dipshit who is underwater on their mortgage your killing a retiree who needs interest income.
• swiss army knife of financial innovation.
  • "Bankers have no tool making skills??? Doesn't debt qualify as a tool? They make a hell of a lot of that and look how versatile of a tool it is. It can be securitized, monetized and seniorized; floated, bloated and off -loaded, It can be used to indemnitize, pauperize and paralyze a nation. Its a veritable swiss army knife of financial innovation. Why are bankers still being treated like royalty ~ Angry Bear Comments
• "Inflation is the senility of democracies."-- Sylvia Townsend Warner Equities Are Likely Heading Lower Resist the Temptation to Short Them -- Seeking Alpha
• Worst Slide Story
  • The classic "West Side Story" is enjoying its Broadway revival. Now comes the remix, "Worst Slide Story."Animation Recession Sing-A-Long! (Walt Handelsman) - Newsday.com
• Attractiveness of the career of a bankster:
  • "First you get the money, and then you get the power, and then you get the woman." My suggestion ... is to try a more honorable career, like record-company executive or drug-dealer. Slashdot Future of Financial Mathematics
• Obamism
  • Since going long "hope" and short "realism" doesn't seem prudent for me I guess I'll keep waiting for the buzz to wear off.
• Real America

  Look, I get it, "real America." After an eight-year run of controlling the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, this latest election has you feeling like a rejected husband. You've come home to find your things out on the front lawn -- or at least more things than you usually keep out on the front lawn. You're not ready to let go, but the country you love is moving on. And now you want to call it a whore and key its car.

[Apr 28, 2009] Flight to quality:

Looting emerging economies by repatriation of speculative capital

[Dec 22, 2008] Larry Kudlow financial advice

"... anyone who has ever read Larry Kudlow wonders how he's able to manage a folding chair without assistance"

Ezra Klein

[Dec 15, 2008] Humor - updated stock market & business terms: Value Investing -…

December 6, 2008 | by WcP Blog - World Culture Pictorial

CEO -- Chief Embezzlement Officer.

CFO -- Corporate Fraud Officer.

BULL MARKET -- A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.

VALUE INVESTING -- The art of buying low and selling lower.

P/E RATIO -- The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing.
... ... ...

[Oct 3, 2008] wolf pack

Hat tip to Kenichi Ohmae (FT.com)

This is a syndrome known as "wolf pack" in a group theory. While the wolves are good at attacking the victim as a team, they have a tendency to attack the weakest of the cohort should extreme hunger prevail. The banking crisis is like this metaphor. If Lehman goes, people look at the "next" and all of a sudden, the victim is the weakest of the bunch. When Lehman goes, it is Washington Mutual, and the next is Wachovia. When Wachovia merges with Citicorp, then people look for another victim, and could point to National City. This is an endless process and continues until the last wolf no longer finds anybody to point its finger. In Japan, we have now only three money center banks, down from over a dozen in the 80's. The remaining banks are all mega-banks, and according to the Japanese Financial Services Agency, they are too big to fail.

Socialism:

Who would have guessed that when socialism comes to America, it would be wearing a business suit and carrying a corporate logo?

[Sep 28, 2008] O.P.M

other people money. Opium for Wall Street.

[Sep 27, 2008] Passing the trash

Approving risky or fraudulent mortgage loans: borrowers with payments they couldn't afford, houses with inflated appraisals, people lying about their income. See Wall Street Fraud

[Sep 26, 2008] Ponzi Finance Dynamics.

Politically correct term for Bear and Lehman bankruptcy

[Sep 26, 2008] Paulson's Economic Patriot Act is about marking to market

"Economic Patriot Act" -- Paulson Plan

[Sep 25, 2008] The Big Picture We should toss him a couple of bucks...

False Prophet Index -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average

[Aug 20, 2008] Bear market

Russell famously comment on Bear Markets is fully applicable to 401K investors:

"In a bear market, everyone loses, and the winner is the one who loses the least."

[Aug 20, 2008] BenSteinery

Hat tip to Barry Ritholtz

Ignorant, foolish or disingenuous comments in mass media.

[Aug 11, 2008] Age of Froth

Hat tip to John Wasik (Greenspan's `Age of Froth' Is Over for Decade)

How do you describe a time of obscenely easy credit; stock and housing bubbles; stratospheric Wall Street profits, outlandish banker salaries and general prosperity?

In his Bloomberg commentary John Wasik wrote:

I derive the concept of froth from former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who told Congress on July 20, 2005, that "the apparent froth in the housing markets appears to have interacted with evolving practices in mortgage markets."

Greenspan's remarks coincided with the peak of the bubble, when U.S. median home prices hit $230,200 that July. We may not see house values reach that level for another decade or so.

More disturbing about Greenspan's observation is his acknowledgement that interest-only adjustable mortgages that were used "to purchase homes that would otherwise be unaffordable'' may leave "some mortgagors vulnerable to adverse events.''

As it stands now, that was the financial understatement of this young century. Greenspan and the Fed -- with the exception of former Governor Edward Gramlich, who wrote a prescient book about mortgage abuses -- did nothing to curb these "exotic" mortgages, hence the current crisis.

[Aug 11, 2008] Ace of Spades

Hat tip to Tim Iacono (The Age of Ignorance and Froth)

Not long ago, Peter Schiff famously called "The Maestro" the "Ace of Spades" in an Iraq War-style deck of playing cards that had, as its purpose, identifying the most important and dastardly members of the Iraqi government.

[Aug 8, 2008] Fuel:

Hat tip to Jim Fitch of Some Assembly Required. Also at Americans want cheap fuel....

Americans want cheap fuel, no matter what it costs.

[Jul 31, 2008] Free Trade:

Hat tip to Dean Baker (NYT Hides Its Preferred Protections as "Free Trade")

The U.S. policy of selective protectionism, which protects workers in highly paid professions from foreign competition. Free trade is simply not on the national political agenda, although political figures who support subjected non-college educated workers to competition with low-paid workers in the developing world like to refer to their policies as "free trade."

[Jul 29, 2008] Ideological idiots:

Hat tip to Barry Ritholtz ( SEC, Fed Fiddled As Rome Burned - Seeking Alpha)

The collection of ne'er do wells, clueless dolts, political hacks, and oh, let's just be blunt and call them what they are -- total Idiots -- expands into an ever larger circle.

While the Republic burns due to the unsavory combination of incompetence, ideological rigidity, and crony capitalism, the fools and assclowns seem ever more determined to avoid any personal responsibility for the damages they have wrought. Instead, they flail about blindly, blaming everything and everyone -- except their own horrific negligence.

This is financial incompetence writ on a scale far grander than anything seen for centuries.

As a nation, our institutions have failed us: Under Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve slept through the most reckless and irresponsible expansion of bank lending in history for reasons of ideological purity. His opposition to the Fed's regulatory role reached the point of malfeasance long ago. History is unlikely to be kind to the Maestro

There is a choice to be made: Either we regulate the Banks, or leave it to the vagaries of the free markets to punish those who trade with, or place their assets in the wrong institutions. But for God's sake, do not give us the worst of both worlds -- do not allow banks the freedom to make horrific but preventable mistakes (i.e., only lending money to those who can pay it back), but then expect the taxpayers to foot the trillion dollar bill.

That's not capitalism, it's not socialism, it's not regulation, and it's sure as hell isn't what free markets are. Our language is insufficient to describe this hodge-podge system, other than to call it a random patchwork of quasi-capitalism, quadrennial-socialism, and politics as usual. Ideological idiocy is the only phrase I can muster that has any resonance with the daily insanity.

[Jul 29, 2008] Orwellian madness

Hat tip to Barry Ritholtz ( SEC, Fed Fiddled As Rome Burned - Seeking Alpha)

The American Capitalists, long the globe's leading advocates for free markets, have become near Socialists. Halfway around the world, the Chinese Communists have picked up the baton, and are moving rapidly towards a form of Capitalism. Ironically, it is the once largest communist nations -- the Chinese and the Russians -- who hold much of Fannie and Freddie's paper.

Hey comrades, who's selling the rope to whom?

[Jul 29, 2008] Financials:

Hat tip to Barry Ritholtz ( The Big Picture / Rinse. Lather. Repeat )

Group of firms which obviously think investors are utter fools and fleecing them left and right. And for a while, they were correct. They suckered people into buying into this mess the whole way down. Bottom calls each and every level -- all of which failed.

Release earnings. Issue guidance. A few weeks later, lower earnings. A few weeks after that, take more write-downs. Raise more capital. Start it all over again next quarter.

Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

The banks have adopted a Chinese water torture approach -- dribbling out the bad news in small doses over time. Its been working up until now, but I doubt it will keep working much longer. Can they keep fooling people much longer? >

[Jul 29, 2008] Kookyville:

Hat tip to Almost Daily 2¢ - Lost His Marbles?

"The place occupied by Al Kuldow and his friends "including those complete fools Jerry Bowyer and Don Luskin"

[Jul 28, 2008] Phony and Fraudy:

Hat tip to Seeking Alpha ( SEC, Fed Fiddled As Rome Burned)

Fannie and Freddie with their phony status and phony accounting: they operate at much higher leverage ratios than any bank or hedge fund. JP Morgan Chase or BAC, for example, have almost as much bank-level capital as this two GSEs combined supporting only one fifth of the commitments. In reality GSEs should maintain minimum capital of 10 to 12% of assets almost eight times more then OFHEO has let them get away with. If taxpayers pay to support the GSEs, shareholders should be wiped out and the GSEs should be nationalized. But instead, the powers that be are pretending we can have our cake and eat it too. We can have a "backstop" and the rest of the world will be satisfied that the US is supporting Fannie and Freddie. No cost (what's a mere "tens of billions") yet we've satisfied the demands of our friendly funding sources. Isn't finance grand? Some people are now planning to make money by betting that the U.S. government's AAA rating would crumble like Parmesan cheese. As in "a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money." See The rescue of Fannie and Freddie by Hankie and Feddie

[Jul 27, 2008] Fed discount window:

It's not a window anymore. It's a widemouth cargo door

[Jul 27, 2008] Anchored:

Politically correct term for "intoxicated to the level of loss of sensitivity" Means relatively insensitive to incoming data like inflation ("inflation expectations are well anchored")..

Recommended

"Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings...Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer."

Erich Fromm

"The transnational corporations and the money markets have declared the era of human-designed regulations over. Now the market must reign. Because few people in the business community are paid to think about phrases such as 'western civilization,' they don't seem to realize that they are proposing the arbitrary denial of 2,500 years of human experience...

Ever since the democratic systems permitted their various courts to give corporations the status of persons, the individual as citizen has been on the defensive. How could it be otherwise? If you are a person before the law and Exxon or Ford is also a person, it is clear that the concept of democratic legitimacy lying with the individual has been mortally wounded...

If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is, after all, not a natural state...Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet."

John Ralston Saul

"The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences."

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

"Money was invented so we could know exactly how much we owe." -Cullen Hightower

A joke on the streets of Moscow these days: "Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true." -John Nellis, World Bank

"If you owe someone a thousand pounds, you've got a problem. If you owe someone a million pounds, he's got a problem."

"The best investors are like socialites. They always know where the next party is going to be held. They arrive early and make sure that they depart well before the end, leaving the mob to swill the last tasteless dregs." -The Economist (1986)

"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity, but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money." -David Crockett, Member of Congress, 1827-31, 1832-1835

"..banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity and even wealth of the nation, than they.. ever will do good. Our whole banking system, I ever abhorred, I continue to abhor, and shall die abhorring.. every bank of discount, every bank by which interest is to be paid or profit of any kind made by the deponent, is downright corruption."

- US President John Adams, 1799.

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

- Henry Ford.

"There is a huge statistical fog around the US economy."

FT.com

Joe Granville

Lord Keynes

--Richard Nixon

Three percent exceeds 2% by 50%, not by 1%.

-- Edward Denison

Almost every holder of a PhD in economics who works for a formal economic body like the Treasury, the RBA or the OECD has been deeply schooled in "neoclassical" economics, often without knowing that there is any other way of thinking about how the economy functions. They think they are simply "economists", and anyone who objects to their analysis or models must be uneducated about economic theory.

Financiers – like bank robbers – do not create wealth.

"Financiers – like bank robbers – do not create wealth. They merely distribute it. While the mob may idolize holdup men in good times, in the bad times it lynches them. What they will do to the new money men when their blood is up, we wait eagerly to find out." - Mobs, Messiahs and Markets

In eastern Washington, a "free market Republican" is someone who expects the government to give him free grazing rights, water, and electricity.

[Jan 1, 2011] In 2009 I Learned That… The Reformed Broker

• Trend followers eventually take it in the rear. StockJockey (1440 Wall Street)
• "Yes We Can" was truly a slogan to reignite the charge for Wall Street banks who needed taxpayers as a silver lining for a global scam-gone-wild. Damien Hoffman (Wall St Cheat Sheet)
• Doing God's work pays better than I thought...also, too much credit is the problem... and the solution. Ben Shoval (Hedge Fund Comedian)
• $10 trillion will always buy you 4000 DOW points. Lawrence McDonald (Author, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense)
• No one is better at navel gazing than the media. Stacy-Marie Ishmael (Financial Times)
• Pundits and analysts continue to validate the theory that a broken clock is right twice a day and you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
• Celebrity death is great for the economy. Justin Paterno (Zero Beta)
• Ben Bernanke can remain irrational far longer than I can remain solvent. Trader Mark (Fund My Mutual Fund)
• Nausea is the very best buy signal. Steve Sears (Barron's)
• If you owe ten thousand, the government owns you, but if you owe ten billion, you own the government. Jason & Alyx (LOLFed)
• There is a lot of truth to the following quote from The Economist (1986) "The best investors are like socialites. They always know where the next party is going to be held. They arrive early and make sure that they depart well before the end, leaving the mob to swill the last tasteless dregs." Prieur du Plessis (Investment Postcards)
• No one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of government. OneTwo (1-2 Knockout)
• People who didn't make money in the massive rally this year are hurting almost as bad as people who lost a ton of money in 2008.Jay (Market Folly)
• Money covers a multitude of sins, usually those of politicians and bureaucrats. Patty Edwards (CNBC Fast Money)
• Junk bond investors could go from depression to mania in six months. David Merkel (Aleph Blog)
• Only three words matter when it comes to investing in today's markets: ignorance is bliss.Michael Panzner (Financial Armageddon)
• Dumb persistence trumps lazy genius more often than not... Greg Battle (Leftover Takeout)

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

-Richard Feynman

The singular feature of the great crash of 1929 was that the worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to ensure that as few as possible escaped the common misfortune.

The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost.

-John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Great Crash"

"Hell begins the day that God grants you the vision to see all that you could have done, should have done, and would have done, but did not do." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria." -Sir John Templeton

"Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground." -George Carlin

"Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything." -Benjamin Graham

Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain. -- Napoleon Bonaparte,

There are three sorts of economist. Those who can count, and those who can'

"Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left." - Clint Eastwood

"Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse" -Joseph Roux in 1770.

"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." -H. L. Mencken

"They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen."

from a Huey LongLong speech given in support of re-election of Senator Hattie Caraway (D-AR)

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. Simon Cameron US financier & politician (1799 - 1889)

the famous quote from Anatole France:

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

ch. 12 of the General Theory, in which Keynes says:

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism - which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.

"The best investors are like socialites. They always know where the next party is going to be held. They arrive early and make sure that they depart well before the end, leaving the mob to swill the last tasteless dregs." -The Economist (1986)

"The best things in life are free, but sooner or later the government will find a way to tax them." -Anonymous

One rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it . . . Never lend any money to anybody unless they don't need it. -Ogden Nash

"Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God and over these ideals they dispute, but they all worship money." -Mark Twain

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies. -Woody Allen

Every set of published accounts is based on books which have been gently cooked or completely roasted. -Ian Griffiths (from his book, Creative Accounting)

Corruption and an apathetic, ignorant public seem to go hand in hand.

A printing press in every home............a chicken in every pot...... Warren Buffoon

We've had thirty years of deregulation garbage in our economy thanks to Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan and the dubious ideas they espoused. The terrible results speak for themselves. In the electricity/energy industry we had Enron. In the telecom industry we had MCI Worldcom. In the finance/banking industry we had Arthur Andersen, Lehman and AIG. Why one earth would anyone presume that industries in which executives only motives are to line their own pockets can regulate themselves. It's been the foxes guarding the hen houses for thirty years. When the Glass Steagall Act and Regulation Q were revoked the entire finance sector went downhill. Bring them back now!

The good news is that the US Gov is too big to fail. The bad news is that it is failing.

"When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life. Now that I'm old--I know it is." - Oscar Wilde

"Money often cost too much." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We face two possible states of the world. One is a world in which our economic problems are largely solved, profits are on the mend, and things will soon be back to normal, except for a lot of unemployed people whose fate is, let's face it, of no concern to Wall Street. The other is a world that has enjoyed a brief intermission prior to a terrific second act in which an even larger share of credit losses will be taken, and in which the range of policy choices will be more restricted because we've already issued more government liabilities than a banana republic, and will steeply debase our currency if we do it again. It is not at all clear that the recent data have removed any uncertainty as to which world we are in."

John Hussman

Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions. -Wassily Leontief, Science, Volume 217, 9 July 1982, p. 106.

Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -Bertrand Russell, Mathematics and Metaphysicians.

We have two classes of forecasters: Those who don't know . . . and those who don't know they don't know. -John Kenneth Galbraith

"Save a little money each month and at the end of the year you'll be surprised at how little you have." -Ernest Haskins

Clemenceau once said, that the graveyards are full of indispensable men.

It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

"He who defends everything defends nothing." – Frederick the Great

The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.

~Jean-Paul Kauffmann

"When I'm bearish and I sell a stock, each sale must be at a lower level than the previous sale. When I am buying, the reverse is true. I must buy on a rising scale. I don't buy long stocks on a scale down, I buy on a scale up."

-Jesse Livermore

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

H. L. Mencken

Economics is simply "mathematics bent to the service of political propaganda."

"You know, someone once told me that New York has more lawyers than people. I think that's the same fellow who thinks profits will become larger than GDP. When you begin to expect the growth of a component factor to forever outpace that of the aggregate, you get into certain mathematical problems."

Mr. Buffett once noted on the Stock Market (Fortune magazine, November 1999)

"We have, in this country, one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board. This evil institution has impoverished the people of the United States and has practically bankrupted our government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it".

- Congressman Louis T. McFadden

"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity, but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."

-David Crockett, Member of Congress, 1827-31, 1832-1835

"A corporation's primary goal is to make money. Government's primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others."

-Larry Ellison

"While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position."

-Anonymous

The Golden Rule - He Who Has the Gold, Makes the Rules

"If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability."

-Henry Ford

Hyman Minsky, 1986

Keynes quotes:

See also John Maynard Keynes - Wikiquote

• "A 'sound' banker, alas, is not one who forsees ruin and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."
• It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
• Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others. As quoted in Isms (2006) by Gregory Bergman, p.105
• The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. National self-sufficiency (1933) Section 3, republished in Collected Works Vol. 11 (1982).
• They offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilization which we have already attained. On the Conservative Party; Skidelsky (1992:231) quoting Collected Writings Volume IX page 296-297
• The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
  
• Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone
  
• The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
  
• Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
  
• If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid. John Maynard Keynes, "The Future" Ch. 5, Essays in Persuasion (1931)
  
• The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. John Maynard Keynes, (attributed)
  
• The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) Ch. 3
  
• I do not know which makes a man more conservative-to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire (1926) Ch. 1
  
• The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (13 December 1935)

"When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing." Chuck Prince, Financial Times, July 10 2007

"Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give." -William A. Ward

Asked once what developing countries should do with the annual reports the IMF prepares on member nations, Stiglitz recommended "picking it up, saying `thank you very much' and dropping it straight in the garbage can."

"Any time you hear a money manager say there's $3.5 trillion dollars in cash on the sidelines, take your money away from them. Because he doesn't know what he's saying."

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. --Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Those in possession of enough power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true." Eric Hoffer

"It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges." -John Maynard Keynes

henry-blodget-vs-ken-fisher

Back2Bat:

FR banking: Stealing purchasing power from all money holders including the poor and lending it out.

Deuteronomy 24:14
"You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy,
whether he is one of your countrymen
or one of your aliens who is in your land or in your towns."

Job 20:19
"For he has oppressed and forsaken the poor;
He has seized a house which he has not built."

Proverbs 14:31
"He who oppresses the poor taunts his Maker,
But he who is gracious to the needy honors Him."

Proverbs 22:16
"He who oppresses the poor to make more for himself
Or who gives to the rich, will only come to poverty."

Proverbs 28:3
"A poor man who oppresses the lowly is like a driving rain which leaves no food."

Proverbs 29:13
"The poor man and the oppressor have this in common:
The LORD gives light to the eyes of both."

Ecclesiastes 5:8
"If you see oppression of the poor and denial of justice and righteousness in the province, do not be shocked at the sight; for one official watches over another official, and there are higher officials over them."

Ezekiel 18:12
"...oppresses the poor and needy, commits robbery, does not restore a pledge, but lifts up his eyes to the idols and commits abomination,... "

Ezekiel 22:29
"The people of the land have practiced oppression and committed robbery, and they have wronged the poor and needy and have oppressed the sojourner without justice."

Amos 4:1
"Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on the mountain of Samaria,
Who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
Who say to your husbands,
"Bring now, that we may drink!"

Zechariah 7:10
"...and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another."

James 2:6
"But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court?"

• "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." -JP Getty
• The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance." -Oscar Wilde
• I know from experience that nobody can give me a tip or a series of tips that will make more money for me than my own judgment. - Jesse Livermore, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator).
• Economics is the only field in which two people can get a Nobel Prize for saying exactly the opposite thing. -Anonymous
• an aphorism of Warren Buffett's: invest only in businesses that an idiot can run, because sooner or later an idiot will.
• "One of the lessons that investors seem to have to learn over and over again, and will again in the future, is that not only can you not turn a toad into a prince by kissing it, but you cannot turn a toad into a prince by repackaging it. But very imaginative people in the securities market try to do that. If you have bad mortgages they do not come better by repackaging them. To some extent the chickens are coming home to roost for the mortgage originators and securitisers." Warren Buffett, Financial Times, October 26, 2007
• "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Dick Cheney to Paul O'Neill

• "'The bottom line is that all those McMansions that were bought during this housing boom are going to go the way of the 1973 Lincoln Continental

  ...The housing bubble was the most over-owned, overleveraged and oversupplied real-estate market ever, and its unwinding will take years.

  The revival of consumers saving their money for retirement - rather than expecting their homes to provide the cushion - added with 'move down' buyers will depress real-estate prices."

  David Rosenberg, Dow Jones, December 20, 2007
  

• The free market didn't build subways, bridges, highways and tunnels. Not to mention adequate numbers of schools and hospitals. It never will.
  
• What we now see coming is the inevitable result of the west's switching over to fiat currencies. In the past spending was limited to how much gold could be squeezed out of the population. The "moderns" decided that it wasn't always necessary to tax people outright, that they could take peoples wealth by devaluing their savings. The bureaucrats got giddy with this and threw all spending restraints to the wind. It became fashionable to tar anyone who was fiscally responsible as evil . In reality printing money does not create wealth from nothing. It takes wealth from everybody.
  
• The rednecks don't realize they are meant to play this foolish left v. right blame game while the Banksters laugh all the way to the ... the Bank of course.

• "I care not who controls the government, as long as I control the printing of its money"
  Nathan Meyer Rothschild
  

• "It is well enough that people of our nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I beleive there would be a revolution before morning."
  Henry Ford
  

• "Economics was the only profession where a person could be considered an expert without having once been right."

  -George Meany

• "There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle" Alexis de Tocqueville
  
• "Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version."

  John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria
  

• Jean Baptiste Colbert once said, "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing"
• Some of the most serious fallacies of traditional economics have been due to confusion between optimum and equilibrium conditions; the apparent influence of Dr. Pangloss upon the development of economic thought is for the most part nothing but pure intellectual error. -J. R. Hicks, "The rehabilitation of consumers' surplus," Review of Economic Studies 8(2), February 1941, pp. 108-116, footnote 1, p. 112.
  
• At the beginning of the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, adviser James Carville was stunned at the power the bond market had over the government. If he came back, Carville said: I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.
  • Wall Street Journal (February 25, 1993, p. A1)
  • James Carville - Wikiquote
    

• "When it comes to being visionary in stealing, the Republicans do better than anybody. It's really something to see." - in his 25th January 2006 appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
  

• Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops: it's easier to get away with murder.
  

• Don't get mad. Don't get even. Just get elected
  
• Between Paoli (one of Philadelphia's westernmost suburbs) and Penn Hills (one of Pittsburgh's easternmost suburbs), Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks.
  
• "Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."
  
• "There is a huge statistical fog around the US economy." FT.com
• Markets will always move ahead of the news. Joe Granville
• '"When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino,
  the job is likely to be ill-done.'' Lord Keynes
  
• Honesty may not be the best policy, but it is worth trying once in a while. --Richard Nixon

• Three percent exceeds 2% by 50%, not by 1%. -- Edward Denison
  

• Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions. -Wassily Leontief, Science, Volume 217, 9 July 1982, p. 106.
  

• It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense.... Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, Colophon edition, 1975, p. 76, footnote 3.
  
• Niccolo Machiavelli "Never waste the opportunities offered by a good crisis."
  
• "Money is of value for what it buys, and in love it buys time, place, intimacy, comfort, and a private corner alone." -Mae West
• Do not value money for any more nor any less than its worth; it is a good servant but a bad master. ~Alexandre Dumas fils, Camille, 1852
  
• An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. -Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)
  
• "When I'm bearish and I sell a stock, each sale must be at a lower level than the previous sale. When I am buying, the reverse is true. I must buy on a rising scale. I don't buy long stocks on a scale down, I buy on a scale up." -Jesse Livermore
  
• $700 Billion Dollar Attaboy The Big Picture
• "The uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. Like the unknown principle of animal life, it frequently restores health and vigour to the constitution, inspite, not only of the disease, but of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor." -Adam Smith

  Financial crises can hit you regardless of whether you are a saint or a sinner.

  Guillermo Calvo's presidential address
  at the International Economic Association Congress

• The financial market globally is up to its elbows in one of the strangest and most complicated credit crises in history. Events have come in rapid succession with mind-numbing effect. No sooner does the dust settle in one part of the market than it is kicked up in another. Through it all, the reactions on the part of the participants have been the stuff of a good financial thriller. We thought it would be interesting to catalog some of that reaction for you on one web page. So here they are - from the witty and profound to the scary and downright silly - our Top 25 Quotes on the Credit Crisis of '07.
• In one way, I'm sympathetic to the institutional reluctance to face the music. I'd give a lot to mark my weight to 'model' rather than to 'market.' - Warren Buffett, Fortune, 8/16/07 (On the financial institution practice of valuing subprime assets on the basis of a computer model rather than the free market price.)
• The Federal Reserve was not founded to bail out Bear Stearns or a few hedge funds. It was founded to keep a stable currency and maintain its value. - Jim Rogers, Rogers Commodity Fund
• For the second time in seven years, the bursting of a major-asset bubble has inflicted great damage on world financial markets. In both cases--the equity bubble in 2000 and the credit bubble in 2007--central banks were asleep at the switch. The lack of monetary discipline has become a hallmark of unfettered globalization. Central banks have failed to provide a stable underpinning to world financial markets and to an increasingly asset-dependent global economy. - Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley
• There is a lot of pain still to be had in the equity markets, particularly aimed at the risky end of the spectrum. We think the fair value on the market is about a third lower in the U.S. . . - Jeremy Grantham, Grantham, Mayo and Van Otterloo

• Suddenly, the world is realizing that gold is still a safe haven asset. We've seen pretty substantial losses in equity markets. I think this is genuine safe-haven buying. - James Moore, theBullionDesk
• At this juncture, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained. - Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, Congressional testimony, March, 2007
• "If prices go down, we will have problems -- problems in the sense of spillover to other areas," Greenspan said. While he hasn't seen such spreading yet, "I expect to." - Former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, speech, March, 2007 as reported by Bloomberg.com

• This is not a rescue. - Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer David Viniar after Goldman poured $3 billion into one of its hedge funds
• When you're in a pit, the first thing to do is to stop digging. - James Ellman, Seacliffe Capital
• The US financial system is teetering. Its USDollar currency is losing global support, with some outright revolts in crucial territories. The chief private sector export from the US financial sector has been fraud-ridden asset-backed bonds and their toxic credit derivatives. What should anyone expect? For years an institutional dishonesty within all things financial in the United States has been engrained, spreading, and become integrated with high levels of the USGovt. The Wall Street hucksters exported fraud. The backlash might be more severe than the soft soap gurus anticipate. Look for an international boycott. The shock waves in the US financial markets are preliminary symptoms of bigger events soon to come. Stability identified is nothing but quiet between tremors. - Jim Willie, Hat Trick Letter
• The German banks' situation is not uncritical. - Alexander Stuhlmann, Germany's Landesbank
• After all, in a credit crunch, cash is deemed to be king. In which case, gold owned outright has just been crowned emperor. - Adrian Ash, BullionVault
• [C]apitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich. - James Grant, Grant's Interest Rate Observer
• US sub-prime is just the leading edge of a financial hurricane. - Bernard Connolly, AIG
• When the music stops in terms of liquidity, things will get complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing. - Chuck Prince, Citigroup
• Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early '90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007? - Bill Gross, Pimco

• So perhaps the most worrying single remark made by a responsible banking official during the current crisis came from Jochen Sanio, the head of Germany's banking regulator BaFin. He warned on Aug. 1 that his country could be facing the worst banking crisis since 1931 -- a reference to the collapse of Austria's Kredit Anstalt, which provoked a wave of bank failures across Europe. - Martin Walker, United Press International

  Angelo Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial Corp, which is one of the chief victims of the sub-prime home loan debacle, said the housing crisis was the result of "one of the greatest panics I have ever seen". When asked if housing would lead the US into a recession, he said: "I can't believe ... that this doesn't have a material effect ... on the psyches of the American people and eventually on their wallet." - Phillip Inman, The Guardian

• As calamitous as the sub-prime blowup seems, it is only the beginning. The credit bubble spawned abuses throughout the system. Sub-prime lending just happened to be the most egregious of the lot, and thus the first to have the cockroaches scurrying out in plain view. The housing market will collapse. New-home construction will collapse. Consumer pocketbooks will be pinched. The consumer spending binge will be over. The U.S. economy will enter a recession." - Eric Sprott, Sprott Asset Management
• The U.S. economy, once the envy of the world, is now viewed across the globe with suspicion. America has become shackled by an immovable mountain of debt that endangers its prosperity and threatens to bring the rest of the world economy crashing down with it. The ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis, a result of irresponsible lending policies designed to generate commissions for unscrupulous brokers, presages far deeper problems in a U.S. economy that is beginning to resemble a giant smoke-and-mirrors Ponzi scheme. And this has not been lost on the rest of the world. - Hamid Varzi, International Tribune
• It's a crisis if everybody calls it a crisis. - Morgan Downey, Lasalle Global
• It's inappropriate [for money market funds to invest in credit derivatives]. It doesn't have a place in money market funds. When I created the first money market fund, I said you have to have immediate liquidity, safety and a reasonable rate of return. You also have to have a situation where you're not giving people headline risk. - David Evans
• The crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market could bolster the gold price not only because gold provides a safe investment haven. The crisis is expected to slow GDP growth, spurring lower real interest rates and a weaker US dollar that will boost gold investment demand. Gold's traditional role as a safe haven asset in times of financial turbulence and instability is enforced in the current market as the metal recouped the majority of losses which occurred in a flight to cash in the beginning of August. Supporting this view is the fact that gold recovered despite a rise in the US dollar caused by a European Central bank intervention that boosted liquidity in Europe. - Dr. Peter Richardson, Craton Capital

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: March 15, 2020