Quotes of the day

We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes.--President Obama

[Babe] Ruth would have had a lower batting average, but he would have hit 199 more homers, making him the greatest home-run hitter ever.--Carl Bialik

If anyone tries to start a fight with you, the first step should be “choke them with heel dust”.--Doug McGuff

There's no incentive to bet against a bubble. If you're a pretty well-paid guy on Wall Street, if you bet with the masses, with the market, and you lose, well, OK, so everybody else has too and you give some good explanation and on to the next gig. But if you bet against the bubble and you're wrong you lose your job.--Gregory Zuckerman

Give Us This Day Our Daily Gains,
And Bankrupt Our Nearest Competitors,
Just As You Taught Lehman And Bear A Lesson. And Bring Us Not Under Indictment.
For Thine Is The Treasury,
The House And The Senate
Forever And Ever. --Rick Ambrose

You don't understand the problems in your own firm.--John Paulson, to Bear Stearns executives

Aram Hong, a juror [selected for the Bear Stearns fraud trial] from Woodside, Queens, said the exchanges between [Ralph] Cioffi and [Matthew] Tannin shown to the jury proved to her that the two men were working “24-7” to save the funds in the months before they collapsed. She noted a defense exhibit that showed the fund managers were working at 4 a.m. “If this was really a fraud case, they wouldn’t have worked that hard,” said Hong, 27, a food and beverage director at the Iroquois Hotel in midtown Manhattan, adding that she would invest with the two men if she had the money.--Patricia Hurtado and Thom Weidlich

Richard Lewontin has written about the way in which even scientists cannot understand, still less reproduce and judge, experiments outside their fields. But he's a sort of Marxist and easy to ignore. In any case, his assumption was that scientists were on the whole interested in the truth. That is what the creationists, and their successors, now dispute.--Andrew Brown

For anyone who thinks that big Wall Street and Big Government aren't joined at the hip, promoting policies and laws that keep each other fat and happy often at the expense of the American taxpayer, consider the career of Robert Rubin.--Charlie Gasparino

Alan Greenspan was the kingpin in the impoverishment of the American people. The middle class barely exists today, though the barrage of government spending prolongs the illusion of stability. As Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements were sacrosanct. He told the American people they were getting richer when they were becoming poorer. It is axiomatic that when savings are depleted and debts are rising the person, or company, or government is poorer.--Frederick Sheehan