Quotes of the day

If we progress at our current growth rates and China progresses at its current growth rate, what that means is that in about 27 years the average Chinese will be richer than the average American.--Ed Lazear

The stock market is now where it was before Lehman Brothers collapsed. And if you exclude financial stocks, the market value of U.S. equities is now within about 15% of the October, 2007, peak. To believe that (non-financial) stocks are reasonably valued today implies that they were pretty reasonable then, at the peak of the bubble - and that therefore most of the last three years was little more than a bad dream. Do you believe that? Do I?--Brett Arends

My guess is that Congressfolk would rather hear horror stories of crime than horror stories of granny being turned down by a government bureaucrat. And since it is their voters but not their money, here we are.--Tom Maguire

How many of us would prefer that the Founders had written the First Amendment so as to focus on fairness rather than freedom and instead wrote: "Congress shall make no unfair laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the fair exercise thereof; or abridging the fairness of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble in a fair fashion, and to fairly petition the government for a redress of grievances"? How supportive would you be to a person who argued that he was for free religion but fair religion, or he was for free speech but fair speech? ... As a matter of fact, it's never American consumers who complain about cheaper prices. It's always American producers and their unions who do the complaining. That ought to tell us something.--Walter Williams

As many of you are aware, at the end of every year I move completely to cash and lock myself in a bank vault for a couple days with all of my money and all of my annual trading records. I carefully review all of my trades and try to learn what mistakes were made and what worked. I physically handle my cash; it helps me appreciate that trading is not simply an intellectual exercise involving numbers, but one which involves real money with real wealth creation and destruction. This year, I have relocated this exercise 2,300 feet underground inside an abandoned mine at a slag dump site in Monaca, Pa. I have appropriated thirty-seven Chinese nationals from a Scandium Mine in Longba Town, Zhuxi Country, China, that have secured and transported my gadolinite, promethium, cerium and yttrium and other rare earth minerals holdings. As many of you are aware, I recently acquired these minerals, as well as the laborers, on a recent site visit to a rare earth mining facility in the P.B.O.C. My rare earth mineral holdings represent precisely half of my net worth.--anonymous, satirical trader