Quotes of the day

It works in practice, but not in theory.--anonymous

... profit is not satanic.--John Varley

The man who will not believe in hell must surrender his right to believe in heaven.--A.W. Tozer

Chris Dodd, Bank Reformer, Finally Loses His Mind.--Douglas McIntyre

The objective in the design and marketing of innovative products is not market efficiency, but profitability for the banks. And market efficiency is the bane of profitability. The last thing a bank wants is a competitive, efficient market, because then it would not be able to extract economic rents. So the incentives are to create innovative products that reduce market efficiency, not enhance it.--Rick Brookstaber

How did Kentucky shoe store owner Buddy Moore save nine jobs with just $889.60 in federal stimulus money?--Louise Radnofsky

... the Pelosi/Reid/Obama stimulus bill saved 935 jobs at a Georgia state agency that only employs 508 people. For decades in Chicago dead people voted; now Obama has figured out how to put them to work.--Tom Maguire

New York has onerous business taxes, a deeply problematic workman's comp system, and various rules about public sector unions that are slowly destroying the budgets of the local cities. Combine this with a whole lot of cold weather, and there's no way they can attract new businesses to replace the big industrial plants they've lost. --Megan McArdle

Am I in the wrong business? Is something wrong with me? It was hard to be rejected, it was a lonely period.--John Paulson

Most art wouldn't be described as beautiful. The Mona Lisa, for example, is skillfully done, but the subject is homely. If other people hadn't told you it was worth a fortune, you wouldn't hang it in your living room. And like music, there is no universal standard for beauty in art. But there's still a correlation between art and survival impulses. It's probably no coincidence that so much art includes food, babies, and well-fed women during childbearing years.--Scott Adams

I’m haunted, though, by their existential question: “What you gonna do with that junk in your trunk?”--Tony Woodlief

Letting old people die instead of saving their lives will undoubtedly reduce medical payments considerably. But old people have that option already-- and seldom choose to exercise it, despite clever people who talk about a "duty to die." A government-run system will take that decision out of the hands of the elderly or their families, and thereby "bring down the cost of medical care." A stranger's death is much easier to take, especially if you are a bureaucrat making that decision in Washington. ... The United States has one of the highest rates of cancer survival in the world-- and for some cancers, the number one rate of survival. We also lead the world in creating new life-saving pharmaceutical drugs. But all of this can change-- for the worse-- if we listen to clever people who think they should be running our lives.--Thomas Sowell

Everything the Fed has been doing over the past fifteen months makes sense if you think of their goal as transferring wealth from taxpayers to banks. If you try to explain it as an attempt to implement an expansionary monetary policy, you won't even get past my high school students.--Arnold Kling

Ben Bernanke has a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, he wants to be a credible inflation hawk, to keep expectations of inflation from doing bad things to the economy. On the other hand, he wants to reassure everyone that he's going to keep the liquidity in as long as necessary, to keep expectations of deflation from doing bad things to the economy. So he did something rather clever.--Megan McArdle