One of the reasons why I'm a libertarian

comes from my experience with financial regulators. They are totally out of their depth, not understanding where risk really lies because the essential information simply can't be grasped by flying in and looking and talking to people for 2 weeks. I have never worked in a financial firm where I felt I understood what was really going on for at least a couple years. They fill out reports conceived by someone ten years ago that would have caught last decade's big error, and come back next year.--Eric Falkenstein

Me, too.--Cav

Quotes of the day

[Charles] Dickens knew what a nasty place, both literally and figuratively, the chimney was. He easily passed many a chimney sweep on the London streets, possibly as young as four years old – weary, sooted boys earning a dangerous, miserable, and likely short living, and reaping the contempt of London’s more civilized citizens. The wealthy of Victorian London looked upon the chimney sweeps and saw villains in the making. They depended on those blackened boys for household cleanliness and warmth and, above all, safety, but wouldn’t trust them farther than they could throw their stockings. ... There is no Santa Claus herein. There are only the chimneys themselves, bright symbols of the cheery, loving home and dark images the deepest filth the city – or the human soul – can scratch up. It might be said that Dickens’s fiction – holiday and otherwise – plumbs the blackened, sooty depths of human depravity to ultimately offer hope in visions bright as a blazing hearth. A different type of Christmas spirit, indeed.--Rebecca Martin

And I heard, “Merry Christmas! You still have a job!”--unattributed



... do 46 percent of Golden State voters really identify with drum circles, pot smoking, public urination, indecent exposure, violent brawling, and semi-literate rants against capitalism? And did I mention lice?--Joe Hicks

A Manhattan hedge-fund manager has stepped in to pay for the funeral for Delores Gillespie, the 73-year-old woman who was set on fire in the elevator of her Underhill Avenue apartment building,  ... He called the office of Councilwoman Letitia James, who had set up a fund to collect donations on Monday, and offered to pick up the entire bill. He has since been in touch with the family, said a spokeswoman for James' office.  Relatives and friends remember Gillespie as a warm-hearted, community-minded  woman who helped the down-and-out find jobs and laid out a feast for the homeless every Thanksgiving.--Amy Sara Clark

I thought about making an "every team HAS to have one white guy" rule just because it's fun to think of someone heading into the last round of the draft thinking, "Crap, I don't have a white guy yet — is Steve Blake still available?" But then that opens the door to the whole "Does someone like Gortat or Gasol count as a white guy or a foreigner?" debate which has never been solved. It's like the Roe v. Wade of basketball arguments.--Bill Simmons

[Greg Engert] left a Georgetown graduate literature program to dive into the beer world full-time, and he approaches it partly as a humanities professor might, if such professors were young, unpretentious, boundlessly energetic, fast-talking, and decked out in quietly stylish clothes. Get him going and out come elaborate, colorful tales about the evolution and history of a particular beer. It’s beer as narrative, and he’s an entertaining, passionate storyteller. Engert also displays a scientist’s pride as he shows off the elaborate system of climate control and piping, custom-built to guarantee every drop is served through clean lines at the temperature appropriate for each style.--Mark Garrison

Quotes of the day

Simply saying that you take allegations with misconduct seriously does not mean that you actually take the allegations of misconduct seriously. In other words, their response came only about three weeks after the presentation and there was an enormous amount of material that if somebody was going to take the material comment seriously, they would have to review. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me -- or even be possible -- to think that somebody who took our concerns seriously would even be able to review it in three weeks. As a result, it kind of feels like a whitewash to me. The question at this point, since the company wasn't able to give any substantive answers to the most serious of the questions that were raised -- they instead deferred to a general statement from the audit committee -- the question now becomes whether the audit committee itself is part of the problem as opposed to being a part of the solution.--David Einhorn

Perhaps it is not ideal that so many of us go on to Wall Street, but targeting individuals looking at career options in this way is hardly the appropriate remedy. Many students who enter these fields are not the scions of banking families but rather hard-working students looking for a challenging job that lets them experience a newfound financial prosperity. To exhort students to consider their contribution to society when choosing a career is one thing but to target those who want to work for Goldman Sachs misses the point; whatever negative impact the company has on our economy is due to structural issues rather than questions of individual morality. Deterring a couple dozen Harvard students from working at Goldman will not change income inequality nor will it create a more equitable society. Goldman will just hire the next people in line. Occupy’s actions continue to erode whatever student support it gained on the heels of a successful janitorial contract. Pitching a simplistic conception of the financial crisis and targeting fellow students is not the way to have a successful movement. Occupy ought to refrain from such ill-conceived protests in the future.--Harvard Crimson

This will sound insane but I think this is Bill Belichick's best coaching job ever. Better than the Super Bowl years. Better than when Tom Brady was lost for the season and the Patriots still won 11 games. Best he's ever done.--Mike Freeman

I know there are people who think only first-ballot Hall of Famers should be Hall of Famers -- only the slam dunk choices, only the ones you just KNOW are Hall of Famers the way you know that the sky is blue, that every exotic meat tastes "a little bit like chicken" and that Parks and Recreation is on NBC on Thursday nights. But Yogi Berra wasn't a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Juan Marichal wasn't a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Larry Doby wasn't voted in at all by the writers, nor was Johnny Mize or Arky Vaughan, who was probably the greatest shortstop between Wagner and Ripken. I don't want a Hall of Fame without them. I'd rather have a Hall of Fame WITH Yogi Berra and Juan Marichal and Larry Doby than one WITHOUT Jim Rice and Bruce Sutter. That's not close for me. I am a Big Hall guy.

Photo links here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

There was no point to continue to support an institution [SUNY] that the state was backing away from. Inexpensive access to mediocrity is not doing anyone such a favor.--Jim Simons

No child was ever born without having been conceived.--Filipino

For all of [Jerry] Jones' Hall of Fame accomplishments, his inability to replace Jimmy Johnson remains his greatest flaw. Since Barry Switzer's tenure ended in 1997, a run that included a championship won with Johnson's players, the Cowboys have won only a single playoff game.--Mike Freeman

[Phil] Jackson's NBA impact has been massive, but his ongoing influence will be muted. It appears that he will not be remembered as the NBA coach who ran the Triangle best; in all likelihood, he will be remembered as the only NBA coach who ran it at all. If the Triangle truly dies, it dies with him.--Chuck Klosterman

Data on sales of previously owned U.S. homes from 2007 through October this year will be revised down next week because of double counting, indicating a much weaker housing market than previously thought. The National Association of Realtors said a benchmarking exercise had revealed that some properties were listed more than once, and in some instances, new home sales were also captured.--Reuters

... very vague.--Steven Cohen, on insider trading rules

Conspiracy theories abound with Bernanke, and I’m sure somebody somewhere really thinks that Ben Bernanke intentionally put the U.S. on a path to the Weimar-style hyperinflation that is coming any day now just to save a hundred bucks a month on his mortgage payments, but…I’m with her that it’s an amusing coincidence.

...

If you like a slightly different flavor of conspiracy, though, you might ask: why wasn’t Bernanke refinancing in, say, July or August? Sure, maybe he was busy with the whole stewardship of the economy and/or after-dinner Kindle reading. Or maybe he knew that the Fed was going to move to lower long-term rates and so abstained from trading based on that. Maybe he was taking advantage of his insider knowledge to make a personal profit, or at least avoid a loss.

...

Or not, whatever, what a stupid thing to think. But I thought of it again when I read Mr. Steven A. Cohen’s cogent argument that insider trading rules are somewhat more ambiguous than the proper form of address for him.--Matt Levine

If Sarbanes-Oxley did not deter MF Global, did it deter anyone? Or is this a case of a law which obtained compliance (at great cost in terms of scarce executives' time) from honest firms, while doing nothing to deter dishonest ones?--Arnold Kling

So [Donald Trump] was more upset at the Chinese government for giving American consumers a low price than at OPEC for charging Americans too high a price.--David Henderson

Two politicians — President Obama and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine — made pronouncements last week about financial failures. One of them was hiding something, or just didn't understand much about the job that he was supposed to do. The other one was Jon Corzine.

...

Obama, too, may be clueless rather than disingenuous. In his Kansas speech last Tuesday, Obama had this to say about the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law: "Now, unless you're a financial institution whose business model is built on breaking the law, cheating consumers and making risky bets that could damage the entire economy, you should have nothing to fear from these new rules."

...

To the contrary, Americans have plenty to fear. Dodd-Frank took the fatal errors that American politicians and regulators made in their stance toward the financial industry in the years leading up to 2008 — and wrote them all down as a model.

...

Dodd-Frank's biggest problem is that it treats big, complicated financial firms differently from how it treats littler, simpler firms.--Nicole Gelinas

So why did 6.3 million jobs disappear between September of 2008 and June of 2009?--Russ Roberts

Liberals often point out that public employment has been declining in 2010 and 2011, partly offsetting job growth in the private sector. They bemoan budget cuts that lead to shrinking headcounts. But then they — including President Obama — defend a public-sector collective-bargaining regime that takes non-layoff savings options off the table. If liberals really want state and local governments to be able to maintain their headcounts, they should push to end collective bargaining for public employees, not to strengthen it.--Josh Barro

Graduate from high school, get married before you have children, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. Fewer than 10 percent of families that follow his blueprint live in poverty, while 79 percent of those who don't follow the three-step plan end up poor. There is no redistribution scheme imaginable close to this in reducing poverty.--Eric Falkenstein

We were in New York this weekend, and we took an architectural tour of some recent skyscrapers. The tour guide said that the way to get rich is to be a zoning lawyer. He also said that a lot of zoning issues end up being resolved politically, that is by developers buying off politicians. The result is to make real estate in New York a field for crony capitalism. And it is not surprising that any attempt by anyone to try genuine capitalism is likely to run afoul of the law.--Arnold Kling

"Protesters" named Time Magazine Persons of the Year; SEAL Team 6 not available for comment--Iowahawk

Photo links here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

Today's young women make $1.17 for every $1 their moms earned back in 1980. Young men, however, are earning 10 cents per dollar less than their fathers did 30 years ago, new research shows.--Annalyn Censky

Big losers had to have been small losers first. You have to be down 2% before you can be down 5% before you can get down 10% and so on. Cut your losers at the knees before they cut your throat.--Michael Martin

It's a cliche to say risk management is the combination of art and science. You need to know something about history, statistics, and programming to be useful as a risk manager. You also need common sense, and that is best informed by experience ...--Eric Falkenstein

... now it’s looking increasingly as though Corzine demonstrated virtually all of the pathologies of the rogue trader more generally. Lots of financial firms make big bets and blow up. But what we saw at MF Global was much more than that. In fact, as Corzine detailed at great length in his prepared testimony last week, his big sovereign-debt bet didn’t actually lose money at all. But MF Global died all the same, because the bet was so large and risky that it caused a fatal cascade of downgrades and margin calls.--Felix Salmon

In a democracy people are free to express and debate their opinions. This is valuable in itself. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because it is claimed that through open free debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit. Democracy thus has an epistemic value as a kind of truth machine. In a democracy therefore there should be no dogma, no knowledge that cannot be questioned. Not only is this view mistaken, but it is so obviously wrong that it is astonishing that it has ever been taken seriously.--Philosopher's Beard

“Public choice” economics explores the problems of concentrated interests. There are fewer corn farmers than taxpayers, and the gains from ethanol subsidies are large for each corn farmer, while the costs per taxpayer are quite small. The costs of coordination and the financial incentives mean the farmers will get their way so long as the government has the power to subsidize or penalize. This simple dynamic explains much of how our government allocates resources.

...

And, unlike Marx or Citizens United, it is something the Tea Party and Occupy can agree upon. Although it may seem far-fetched at first glance, if Occupy found common ground with the Tea Party or the sentiments behind it, much could be done politically. After all, there are many 99 percents. But so far, Occupy has absorbed or been co-opted by various one percents.

...

For example, in education policy, teachers are the one percent, while students and parents are the 99 percent. But it is generally the power of the concentrated teachers’ unions that drives decisions about education spending and policy. The fact that teachers unions support Occupy undermines its power. A true movement of the 99 percents would be on the side of students, not teachers.

...

Examples abound that cut across typical ideological lines. For instance, military contractors are the one percent, while soldiers and the citizens they defend are the 99 percent. It is for this reason that in the recent census, 7 out of the 10 richest counties surround Washington, D.C.--M. Todd Henderson

Any time someone gets fired, a manager has failed. He or she hired the wrong person, moved someone into the wrong job, or screwed up in some other way. When it’s necessary to show an employee the door, it’s going to be because we’ve tried and failed to fix whatever in the relationship and the structure wasn’t working. It’s never going to be because the person fits a category that someone has outlined for us. That, in fact, is the opposite of leadership.--Liz Ryan

Fail a lot before you are paying for the failure….I got fired or asked to leave from all my jobs.--Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga

In 2002, a schoolteacher with previously normal sexual desire began experiencing sexual desires that he was not used to. He began looking at child pornography and engaging in sexual activity that was not common to him before this point. Little did he know, he had an egg-shaped tumor in the orb frontal cortex of his brain, and when he had the tumor removed his sexual desires stopped. A little while later the desires reappeared, so he went back to the doctor’s office. Lo and behold, the tumor had returned to the same region of his brain.--Mike Friesen

... changing your offense makes all your seniors freshmen.--unattributed

In the same way that there are people who never thought they'd see a black American president, there are also people who never thought they'd see a black basketball star dressed like a nerd.  ... If you happen to be someone who looks at Durant, James, or Amar'e Stoudemire's Foot Locker commercials — in which he stalks along a perilously lit basketball court wearing a letterman's cardigan, a skinny tie, and giant black glasses (his are prescription) — and wonders how the NBA got this way, how it turned into Happy Days, you're really wondering the same thing about the rest of mainstream black culture. When did everything turn upside down? Who relaxed the rules? Is it really safe to look like Carlton Banks?--Wesley Morris

On Dec. 12, 1991, [Paul] Kunz set up a Web interface based on a Web server to search a popular database of particle physics literature at Stanford, and sent an email to Tim Berners-Lee about it. It was the first Web site in North America and one of the first dozen in the world.--Liz Gannes

The smartest worriers are learning to code or marrying a developer.--Howard Lindzon

By virtue of its size, business model and popularity, Facebook is the rare company that doesn't need Wall Street to go public. It should press home the advantage and blaze a trail for others to follow.

...

Mr. Zuckerberg's has two options: a traditional IPO, in which banks distribute shares to investors in exchange for a percentage of total proceeds; and the little-used "Dutch auction" that cuts out the Wall Street middlemen by making the allocation of shares dependent on prices bid by each investor.

...

The biggest difference between the two systems, apart from the lower fees paid by companies in auctions, is that when IPOs go Dutch, banks don't choose who gets shares, giving all investors a fair shake and avoiding potential conflicts of interests.

...

This is particularly important for "hot" IPOs, like Facebook. Since these deals often record sharp rises in the first days of trading, there is a temptation for banks to dole out shares to their favorite investor clients, who stand to profit if they get in early.

...

Wall Street's penchant for being both poacher and gamekeeper has left banks with conflicted loyalties; they take companies public while at the same time trying to keep hedge funds and other high-paying customers satisfied.--FRANCESCO GUERRERA

Image links here, here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

I guarantee you’ve never been in a meeting at work and someone said, “In order to hit our sales numbers this quarter, we’ve got to have discipline like a child.” No politician has ever said, “If I’m elected, I’ll run the country with wisdom like a child.” No coach has ever said, “In order for us to win Saturday’s game, we need to work hard like a child.” It’s difficult to find another context in life where being “like a child” is held up as something to emulate--Jon Acuff

Failure is as important to healthy capitalism as success. The nation’s handful of huge banks, however, are spared the indignity of failure.--ADAM DAVIDSON

Speculation has long existed that U.S. presidents age at twice the normal rate, with many tabloid stories fixating on President Obama's every new wrinkle, gray hair and weight change. But a new study finds just the opposite: Most U.S. presidents live longer than predicted for men of their same age and era.
...
23 of the 34 U.S. presidents who died from natural causes lived longer, and in many instances significantly longer, than predicted. Their average age at inauguration was 55.1 years. Four presidents who were assassinated were removed from the analysis.--Jennifer Viegas

[Mitt Romney's 42-yr marriage is] a tremendous accomplishment and something in which he can rightly take pride. We applaud him.--Gingrich advisor

The motivations to impose a financial transactions tax are one part Occupy Wall Street and one part Willy Sutton. Some see it as a way of penalize bankers, or at least correcting excesses of “speculators.” Others are attracted to imposing a tax on financial transactions because, as Sutton used to say when asked why he robbed banks, “that’s where the money is.” Let’s hope this idea never makes it into actual public policy. The Robin Hood tax is so deeply flawed that it is unlikely to raise much revenue or fix the financial system.
...
It would lead to increased consolidation, increased risk taking and increased systemic risk in the financial sector. Robin Hood, you may recall, met his end when he went to his cousin for medical treatment. She doesn’t just bleed him — not an uncommon treatment at the time. She overbleeds him, and Robin Hood dies. So maybe this is a Robin Hood tax after all, something that will kill the thing it promises to fix. --John Carney

While the number of people who commandeered Zuccotti Park was pathetically small—several hundred a night—compared with the weight of media attention lavished upon them, their sense of entitlement to take other people’s property, whether public or private, is unfortunately widespread.--Heather MacDonald

I, hayseed that I am,  had not realized that the New York Times and CBS – not the editors of the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy,  or the Quarterly Journal of Economics — are (or were to [former NY Times editor Bill] Keller’s regret) the true arbiters of what is good or bad economics.--Paul Gregory

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success", to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.--F.A. Hayek

Image links here, here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

Ironically, the topic of [my Harvard economics] lecture that the protesters chose to boycott was economic inequality, including a discussion of recent trends and their causes.

...

like most economists, I don’t view the study of economics as laden with ideology. Most of us agree with Keynes, who said: “The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.”

...

That is not to say that economists understand everything. The recent financial crisis, economic downturn and meager recovery are vivid reminders that we still have much to learn. Widening economic inequality is a real and troubling phenomenon, albeit one without an obvious explanation or easy solution. A prerequisite for being a good economist is an ample dose of humility.

...

My fervent hope is that any students who are still protesting the class will return — and that, while recognizing our limitations, they will learn from us what they can. A few might choose to become economic researchers themselves. Their contributions will surely be welcome. They might even improve the next generation of textbooks.--Greg Mankiw

"Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" which translated from Latin means "Truth for Christ and the Church."--Harvard motto, adopted in 1692

If there’s any strong ideological undercurrent in Mankiw’s teaching, I would say that it’s Nerdism: the belief that people should listen to, and learn from, nerds…. Because believe me—and I say this with genuine respect and affection—Mankiw is a nerd’s nerd.--Connel Fullenkamp

Down-on-her-luck protester Tracy Postert spent 15 days washing sidewalks and making sandwiches at Zuccotti Park — then landed a dream job at a Financial District investment firm thanks to a high-powered passer-by who offered her work.--CYNTHIA R. FAGEN

I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space.--Dan Palotta's Valley Girl 2.0

You should meet this guy with the SIO. He's sort of this kind of social entrepreneur thinking outside of the box in the sustainability space and working on these ideas around sort of web-based social media, and he's in a round two capital raise in the VP space with the people at SVNP.--Dan Palotta, again

It was fifeteen years ago today that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan gave his famous "irrational exurberance" speech, suggesting that U.S. equities were overvalued.

...

Between then and now, on an annualized basis,
the return on the U.S. stock market has been 5.55 percent.
the return on the U.S. bond market has been 5.98 percent.
Score that as one point for Alan.--Greg Mankiw

America looks like Mexico of the 70’s – 90’s. The last election cycle brought us the biggest economic crisis in 70 years. The next election will be no different. Dozens of landmines have been planted. They are timed to go off in 2013. Some may be fixed, others kicked further down the road. However the odds of the country addressing all of the things that have been programmed to explode is, in my opinion, close to zero. One or more of these things is going to trip us up. There are too many big issues to confront. When history looks at this period it will point to the incredible mismanagement of the economy that has taken place. A crisis is being programmed. It will go off like clockwork; it is now set on autopilot. I blame the partisan politics in D.C. for setting the country up for a big fall. But the reality is that the politicians are deeply divided because the voters are equally divided.--Bruce Krasting

Why are men less willing to work with a woman who attempts to negotiate?--John Carney

1) Does imprisonment reduce crime? Yes.
2) Do many crimes cause considerable harm and hardships to victims? Yes.
3) Does America imprison too many people?  In light of my answers to 1) and 2) you might expect my answer to this question to be “no”, but it is a strong “yes”.--Gary Becker

Hang up some stained glass windows. Where? I don’t know. I’m not in charge of logistics. My job is awesome ideas. And nothing says old school like a 3,000 pound stained glass window.--Jon Acuff

Image links here, here, here and here.

Manhattan Real Estate: Asking for $10,000 per square foot

and getting something close to it.

Photos link here.

Quotes of the day

Hugo is the ultimate kid’s movie, in a sense, because its director, Martin Scorsese, turns out to be the ultimate kid. It’s a movie about movies, and the ways in which they came to occupy people’s hearts and minds. There’s a pair of inquisitive children, a hazardous quest, and a wondrous treasure. But the child at the center of the story, looking back more than a hundred years to the wellspring of his art, is Scorsese himself.--Kurt Loder

When Teddy [Forstmann] got to one [Croatian refugee] camp where all the kids seemed to be down with colds and the flu he was distressed. How could such conditions exist in civilized Europe? He pledged a few million dollars to rebuild the camp with proper sanitation. And just before leaving, Teddy spotted a very fetching young lady and gave her his coat. He figured she would need it in the winter. If there was a pretty woman present Teddy would spot her. He was fun in a good cause or a great deal. There was no one else like him.--R. EMMETT TYRRELL, Jr.

... a wave of firings that has washed away more than 200,000 jobs in the global financial-services industry this year, eclipsing 174,000 in 2009, data compiled by Bloomberg show. BNP Paribas (BNP) SA and UniCredit SpA (UCG) announced cuts last week, and the carnage likely will worsen as Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis roils markets.--Max Abelson and Ambereen Choudhury

The text of the Second Amendment is maddeningly ambiguous. It merely says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Yet to each side in the gun debate, those words are absolutely clear.
...
The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.
...
For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.
...
Justice Scalia [the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism], in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.--Adam Winkler

In the twentieth century philosophy of mind became one of the central areas of philosophy in the English-speaking world, and so it remains. Questions such as the relationship between mind and brain, the nature of consciousness, and how we perceive the world, have come to be seen as crucial in understanding the world. These days, the predominant position in philosophy of mind aims at equating mental phenomena with operations of the brain, and explaining them all in scientific terms. Sometimes this project is called ‘cognitive science’, and it carries the implicit assumption that cognition occurs in computers as well as in human and animal brains, and can be studied equally well in each of these three forms.--Laura Weed

Do you see the problem with [Ronald] Green’s assertion? He asks us to believe that just because obesity is 80% genetic, it can’t also be 80% due to laziness. But why? What are those two hypotheses viewed as mutually exclusive? Is it because genetic characteristics are viewed as “not one’s fault,” whereas laziness is viewed as a character flaw? But why shouldn’t character flaws be genetic?--Scott Sumner

Students want not knowledge, but certification. Future employers only see your grade and diploma - and the less a professor teaches, the less students have to learn to get the grade and diploma they want. So, human capital extremists, what gives? Do you deny that canceling class makes students happy? If not, how can you reconcile your theory with the facts?--Bryan Caplan

The tax attacks on Republicans therefore look like this:

• Republicans refused to raise taxes as part of a deficit deal. No longer valid.
• Republicans refused to buck Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform. Invalid.
• Republicans refused to raise taxes on the rich. No longer valid.
• Republicans would not raise taxes enough.
• Republicans would not raise taxes on the rich enough.

As you follow the deficit reduction debate over the next year, it will be important to remember how significantly the Super Committee Republicans changed the negotiating playing field during these negotiations, and how their offer has changed the nature of the fiscal policy debate.--Keith Hennessey

In short, the modern revolutionary, being an infinite skeptic, which he must be, is always engaged in undermining his own mind.  In his books on politics he attacks persons for trampling on morality, but in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on persons.  Therefore the modern rebel has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt by rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything…  There is a kind of thought that stops thought, and that is the only kind of thought that ought to be stopped.--G.K. Chesterton

I could summarize the employment environment of the times this way:

Lots of jobs for people who were willing to relocate
Low entry-level pay
Company-paid healthcare
Company-paid training, including external degree courses
Inexpensive cost of living
Clear opportunities for advancement

How's that different from today? The quick answer is that every part of what I described is different. And you need the whole system in place or else the economy can't be a sustained job creation machine. So I don't think we can tweak the current economy, or stimulate it, enough to make much difference. What we need is Cheapatopia.--Scott Adams

John Hempton swats Felix Salmon's derrière

here.

As with all else on this blog, most safe for work.

Quotes of the day

We want social returns, as well as financial ones. When you look at the major financial institutions, you have to realize there is greed involved.--Sister Nora, the Sisters of St. Francis

I completely agree, Sister Nora, but greed also infects non-financial institutions, including governments and charities and church.--Cav (who may have more cross-institutional experience than Sister Nora)

Jay-Z is releasing a new line of T-shirts in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement Friday via his Rocawear clothing label, but he doesn't plan to share any of the profits with the protesters.--Kimberly Nordyke

There are all sorts of forms of honest grafts that congressmen engage in that allow them to become very, very wealthy. So it's not illegal, but I think it's highly unethical, I think it's highly offensive, and wrong.
...
For example insider trading on the stock market. If you are a member of Congress, those laws are deemed not to apply.
...
They do. The fact is, if you sit on a healthcare committee and you know that Medicare, for example, is-- is considering not reimbursing for a certain drug that's market moving information. And if you can trade stock on-- off of that information and do so legally, that's a great profit making opportunity. And that sort of behavior goes on.
...
It's really the way the rules have been defined. And the people who make the rules are the political class in Washington. And they've conveniently written them in such a way that they don't apply to themselves.
...

If you were a senator, Steve, and I gave you $10,000 cash, one or both of us is probably gonna go to jail. But if I'm a corporate executive and you're a senator, and I give you IPO shares in stock and over the course of one day that stock nets you $100,000, that's completely legal. And former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband have participated in at least eight IPOs. --Peter Schweizer

All of a sudden [a congressman] from a background maybe in law, maybe in some other unrelated business area, all of a sudden is picking winners and losers in the market.--Jack Abramoff, disgraced Washington lobbyist

How then can we explain the high and persistent levels of long-term unemployment during this recession? One clearly important factor is the extension in July of 2010 of unemployment insurance to cover workers who have been out of work for 99 weeks instead of having their payments end after 6 months of unemployment. Studies have shown that many unemployed find jobs just about when their unemployment payments expire, after 6 months of collecting benefits under the old system. It does not require any complicated economic analysis to conclude that the extension of unemployment payments to 99 weeks will encourage many individuals to remain unemployed after 6 months of unemployment, although they would have found jobs under the old rules. They will turn down jobs that may not be as good as those they had before becoming unemployed in order to continue to collect unemployment benefits. For that reason I opposed the extension to 99 weeks in my post on 7/25/2010 Should Unemployment Compensation be Extended?.
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Long-term unemployment may also partly be the result of uneven employment opportunities and uneven prospects for housing prices in different states and regions of the US. States like California, Nevada, and Florida that had major construction, jobs, and housing booms in the years before the onset of the recession suffered the largest hits to employment and to housing prices. Unemployed workers in such states may be reluctant to move to states where more jobs are available at good wages since they may be involved in foreclosure litigation and other issues related to the depressed housing market. They may also turn down jobs that pay much less then the unusually good wages they had during the boom times to continue to collect unemployment benefits for up to 2 years.
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Other factors are also involved in the sharp rise in the number of workers unemployed for over 6 months. Yet overall they do not justify the conclusion that many unemployed individuals are unable to find jobs because the American economy has too little demand for their set of skills.--Gary Becker

We're running out of guys there [in the defensive secondary]. [College quarterback and NFL receiver Julian Edelman] stepped in and made a nice hit there and a made a nice tackle on [LaDainian] Tomlinson. You never know. It's a long season. We have a lot of games left. Who knows who will be playing where, but I know one thing: These guys are tough, mentally and physically. They'll stand up to the challenge and give their best. That counts for a lot. The game's not too big for them.--Bill Belichick

There’s so many things I’ve learned from him over the years about mental toughness. His ability to stay even-keeled through the wins and the losses. I remember the year that we went undefeated, you never would have thought we were undefeated. You would have thought we were 0-16 the way that he coached us. The last two weeks have been rough, but he never lost faith in us or confidence in what we were doing. He just said ‘Look we just gotta do better.’ He doesn’t ride those highs and lows and he comes in every week with a goal in mind. All the guys who play for him really appreciate that and appreciate his consistency and appreciate the way that he listens to the team as well.--Tom Brady

How Muhammad Wilkerson doesn't get that [dropped] ball is beyond me. For Brady to go in there and fight for that ball was a great sign of how tough that guy is. I know what goes on in those piles. It's a dark place. A lot of things are done I can not speak of. Kudos to Brady.--Tedy Bruschi

Victories since Oct. 23: Tebow 3, Tom Brady/Michael Vick/Philip Rivers (combined) 2.--Peter King

Historically, investors have assumed 25% to 30% of student loans bundled into their bonds will default. But today they are baking in between 30% and 40% default rates among the current crop of graduates, said Chris Haid, a director in asset backed trading at Barclays Capital. Even those assumptions are a best guess and defaults could ultimately go higher if unemployment rises, Mr. Haid said. This analysis translates into some surprising insights for students and policy makers. For example, in the current economy, it may make more sense to enter a technical college than to go to law school. Not all lessons from the bond market are so counterintuitive. The most important, in fact, is a slight twist on a maxim most students know from childhood: stay in school, just not too long.
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In recessions, law school graduates have a harder time finding work than other graduates from professional programs and are more likely to default on their student loans.--Matt Wirz

When you see a guy in a loan made in 2005 that is still in school, you throw that away.--Rubin Bahar

I’m amazed that in a park full of revolutionaries, there are large contingents that can’t throw away their own trash.--Jordan McCarthy, a member of the protesters’ sanitation team

I am amazed that she is amazed.--Cav

Photo links here and here.

Deoccupy Wall Street

What if all financial intermediaries took a month off? Say December. Then everyone could see how much they miss us, if at all.

I am thinking the world would not be happy if we took a break, and would be really happy when we got back to work.

Quotes of the day

The great value investor Benjamin Graham suggested that investors should never have less than 25% or more than 75% of their money in stocks.--Jason Zweig

I realized technical analysis didn’t work when I turned the charts upside down and didn’t get a different answer.--Warren Buffett

I’m already highly irritated. What makes this canuck think that “the simplest model you can imagine” has any bearing on whether NGDP targeting is a wise policy for our highly complex economy? Theoretical macroeconomists love to play with their little toy models, but unfortunately these models don’t actually describe the world we live in. In their models the IS curve slopes downward. Output depends on real interest rates. Inflation depends on output gaps. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the world I inhabit.--Scott Sumner

Well, you're gonna be dead a long time. Might as well have fun when you're alive.--Rex Ryan

In terms of guardrails in the financial system, I think automatic saving for me is the best example for this. You know the rational thing to do is to look at the end of each month and see how much money we had, how much expenses we had and then at the end of each month decide how much to send for our long-term savings. But I think we all intuitively realize that if this was the case we would not save as much. American savings rates are nothing to be proud of, but they will probably be even lower. And it clearly doesn’t make rational sense because we have different levels of expenses in the winter and in the summer. There are fluctuations. There are things that come as emergencies. Saving should not be the same every possible month. But we know that if we relied on our mediocre cognitive ability and thinking and demanded that every month we make this decision, the odds are we will never make this decision. Or at least we’ll make it very infrequently. So by creating a system that takes this decision out of our hands we actually do much better.--Dan Ariely

[At Goldman, Jon Corzine] was called ‘Fuzzy’ because he’s a sloppy thinker.  You can never really figure out what he’s doing because he doesn’t know. He just kind of wings it.--Goldman Sachs executive

I suggest that a rich person can consistently favor taxes on the rich without volunteering to pay such taxes him or herself. The argument is simply that the world in which every rich person pays is preferable to me to the world in which no rich person pays which is preferable to me to the world in which only I pay.--Karl Smith

... I learned far more from 3 months with the Assimil self-study course than from 5 years of school French. The absurdity of that comparison only grows upon comparing the hours spent. The Assimil method took 0.5 hours per day for about 90 days: That’s 45 hours. The 5 years of school French happened every school day for roughly 50 minutes. A school year has roughly 180 days, for a total of 750 hours over the 5 years. Including homework, the total is probably 900 hours. That’s a time-invested ratio of 20 to 1. Thus, despite spending 5 percent of the hours that I spent in school, with the self-study method I became far more competent in the language.--Sanjoy Mahajan

The history of English’s global diffusion is littered with important dates: the planting of the Jamestown colony in 1607; Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which ushered in the dominion of the British East India Company; the creation of the first penal colony in Australia in 1788; the British settlement at Singapore in 1819 and establishment of a Crown Colony in Hong Kong in 1842; the formal beginning of British administration in Nigeria in 1861; the foundation of the BBC in 1922 and the United Nations in 1945; the launch by AT&T of the first commercial communications satellite in 1962. This list is condensed. It takes no account, for instance, of the various waves of Anglomania that swept much of Europe in the eighteenth century. But it will be apparent that the diffusion of English has had a lot to do with material reward, the media, and its use as a language of instruction. A fuller list might intensify the impression of a whiff of bloodshed. Wherever English has been used, it has lasted. Cultural might outlives military rule.--Henry Hitchings

Retractions of research papers have soared in recent years, which demonstrates how unethical scientists, like financial criminals, cut corners to tell people what they want to hear.--Edward Tenner

Together with a string of other recent cases, the Bronx case suggests that a culture of corruption and entitlement has spread through the ranks of the thin blue line. Worse, it is clear that police union officials are the mainstay of the illegal ticket fixing enterprise, so much so that prosecutors considered indicting the union as a corrupt organization under racketeering laws. The police demonstration in the Bronx was apparently orchestrated by the union, which sent text messages to officers urging that they show up to support colleagues involved in ticket fixing. “It’s a courtesy, not a crime,” was the slogan.
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This of course is what everybody thinks of special privileges. That’s what doctors and lawyers think when they cover up professional wrongdoings by their guild brethren. It’s what investment bankers think when they pass on inside information to favored clients — a courtesy not a crime. It’s what politicians think when they do favors in exchange for money and it’s what Don Corleone and Tony Soprano think when they do favors for their friends. The essence of privilege (private law, etymologically speaking) is exactly that: exemption from the laws that govern other people. The police union in New York believes that based on longtime practice it possesses certain unique rights to circumvent the written law.
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What that Bronx courtyard shows us is a political culture in decline and a development model on the brink. New York’s dependence on Wall Street and the federal government is becoming more acute by the year. Post bubble and post stimulus, neither source of revenue can be expected to grow at an adequate rate, and it is not unlikely that both will be shrinking for years. The pieces of the coalition are venting their rage and hostility, and new supplies of money are nowhere in view.--Walter Russell Mead

But if we are headed toward collapse, what would an American “Oh sh*t!” moment look like? An upsurge in civil unrest and crime, as happened in the 1970s? A loss of faith on the part of investors and a sudden Greek-style leap in government borrowing costs? How about a spike of violence in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, as insurgents capitalize on our troop withdrawals? Or a paralyzing cyberattack from the rising Asian superpower we complacently underrate? Is there anything we can do to prevent such disasters? Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a “civic great awakening”—a return to the original values of the American republic. He’s got a point. Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.
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What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic. Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden.
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And finally we need to reboot our whole system. I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe’s PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it’s America.
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But the lesson of history is clear. Voters and politicians alike dare not postpone the big reboot. Decline is not so gradual that our biggest problems can simply be left to the next administration, or the one after that. If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle.--Niall Ferguson

The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own. If you get sick, you’re on your own. If you can’t afford college, you’re on your own.--President Obama

Roosevelt transformed millions of Americans from citizens into clients. The direct effect of this was evil, and the indirect effect was even worse, for all these people were robbed of their self-respect.--H.L. Mencken

A president’s approval rating at the beginning of his third year in office has historically had very little correlation to his eventual fate. In January 1983, Reagan had an approval rating of just 37 percent, but he won in a landslide. George H. W. Bush had a 79 percent approval rating in January 1991 and was soundly defeated. But voters start to think differently about a president over the course of his third year; they view him more on the basis of his performance and less on the hopes they had for him. These perceptions are sharpened by the beginning of the opposition party’s primary campaign, which, of course, accentuates the negatives.  A president’s approval rating toward the end of his third year, therefore, has been a decent (although imperfect) predictor of his chances of victory. Reagan saw his approval rating shoot up to 51 percent in November 1983 amid the V-shaped recovery from the recession of the previous year — the first sign that he was headed for a big win. Obama’s approval rating may have rebounded by a point or two from its lows after the debt-ceiling debacle — but not by much more than that. In late October, it ranged between 40 and 46 percent in different polls and averaged about 43 percent.  There have been two presidents stuck with similarly low approval ratings a year in advance of the next election. Gerald Ford had a 44 percent approval rating a year before his loss to Carter. Johnson had a 41 percent approval rating in November 1967, and although he was eligible for another term, he opted not to run. His vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, did, and he lost.--Nate Silver

Quotes of the day

Unemployment represents a crisis of imagination, a failure to figure out how to make potential workers productive in the modern economy. The people who make creative leaps to solve that problem are entrepreneurs. If we want to bring America’s jobs back, our governments—federal, state, and local—need to tear down barriers to entrepreneurship, create a fertile field for start-up businesses, and unleash the risk-taking innovators who have always been at the heart of our economic growth.--Edward Glaeser

Yeats was right from the beginning: Everything does fall apart. Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. The Greeks have followed that aphorism to its logical terminus, but we ourselves have not, not yet. The Grecian formula could be instructive to the Occupy Wall Street loons, whose policy preferences, to the degree that they can be discerned at all, are to reject the qualities which once made this nation great in favor of those which are tearing Greece apart. A good lesson indeed, if only they had the wit to attend. They don’t, of course. Which is why the grown-ups will have to do the thinking for them, while there is still time.--Neptunus Lex

... it's time that Americans who lament the loss of that which wasn't so great see what the prevailing wage - once again provided by investors - is for manufacturing. Considering average income in the rising country itself, that works out to $2,000/year (as of 2007), according to The Elephant and the Dragon author Robyn Meredith. Even the poorest of the working poor in the U.S. don't earn so little. And what about factory wages in China? According to Meredith "Chinese factory workers, whether making light bulbs, talking toys, or tennis shoes, earn each day about what Americans pay for a latte at Starbucks." These are the kinds of jobs we want to lure back to the U.S.? The simple and happy truth is that there are no jobs without investment, and factory worker pay in China reveals, investors have no interest in paying anywhere near the wages Americans have grown accustomed to. So assuming we resumed manufacturing light bulbs and tennis shoes stateside thanks to some benevolent investor, the wages that support this activity are so low that no Americans would apply for the work. Extremely low pay in China supports the positive pronouncement that we long ago left low value factory work in the rearview mirror, and with good reason. One can't get by on one Starbucks latte per day. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned his readers about falling for the "deceitful dream of a golden age." Manufacturing is just that. Once the employer of many at high wages, those days are long past, so to dream of a manufacturing future for the United States is to pine for excruciating poverty.--John Tamny

... the percent of Americans’ personal consumption expenditures used to buy Chinese-made goods and services in 2010 was 2.7 percent. And if we exclude expenditures on food and energy, the percent of our 2010 personal consumption expenditures spent on goods and services from China rises to only 3.1 percent. In contrast, the percent of Americans’ personal consumption expenditures spent on goods and services made in America in 2010 was 88.5 (and 88.0 percent if we look at personal consumption expenditures excluding those on food and energy).--Don Boudreaux

Who was in charge of regulating MF Global? Everybody and nobody, it seems. In the days since that midsize brokerage company filed for bankruptcy, officials at many regulatory agencies have defended their actions, all the while explaining that they had narrow, limited roles. At MF Global, there were at least six different agencies and industry groups minding separate parts of the store.--LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH

Illinois is like the Bears after Walter Payton, the Bulls after Michael Jordan. Except that it's been even longer since the state could claim it had a championship season. As Josh Barro showed in a City Journal article earlier this year, the state has long tried to deliver services without having the revenues to pay for them. It essentially wanted to be a low-tax (or at least a moderate-tax) state with high services and rich employee pensions. One result has been that the state hasn't really balanced its budget for a long time. Instead, even during the national good times earlier this decade, Illinois used borrowing and gimmicks to create the appearance of fiscal propriety, though few people were fooled. As Indiana's Gov. Mitch Daniels likes to say whenever he talks about his own state, it's easy to look good when you have Illinois for a neighbor. But late last year it seemed as if Illinois had finally reached the limit of its shenanigans. Investors balked at buying the state's bonds except at a significant premium over what other states had to pay investors.--Steven Malanga

... the thing that will always be most unfathomable about [Kareem Abdul Jabbar aka Lew] Alcindor was his very first game, played when he was an ineligible freshman: UCLA was coming off back-to-back national championships. As an exhibition, the Bruin varsity — ranked no. 1 in the nation — opened the season by scrimmaging the freshmen team. Alcindor had 31 points, 21 boards, and eight blocks. The freshmen hammered the varsity by 15 points; the no. 1 team in the country could not beat a player who could not yet play. As an ineligible 18-year-old, Alcindor was (at worst) the fourth or fifth-best basketball player in the world. So I guess talent does matter, sometimes.--Chuck Klosterman

Participants were more likely to make memory errors after they'd passed through a doorway than after they'd travelled the same distance in a single room. Another interpretation of the findings is that they have nothing to do with the boundary effect of a doorway, but more to do with the memory enhancing effect of context (the basic idea being that we find it easier to recall memories in the context that we first stored them). By this account, memory is superior when participants remain in the same room because that room is the same place that their memory for the objects was first encoded.--Radvansky, G., Krawietz, S., and Tamplin, A.

No matter how stable you think your time machine is, your first jump should always be into the future. It’s a mistake to visit President Lincoln on your maiden voyage. The past is loud, smelly and dangerous. And without at least one pit stop in the future, the road backwards is a million times more difficult.--Jim Behrle

A bad day for MF Global counterparties

A better day for the country, now that Corzine's stock has sunk below the level of an Obama appointment.

Quotes of the day

No matter what technology and science bring us, the dystopias of our future will always be of our very own, all-too-human design.--TED

And as long as we continue to pay attention, we lose. Because we all tuned in to her stupid wedding special and allowed her to be a star, Kim Kardashian is the 1 percent and we are all bottom-feeders.--Molly Lambert

Finally, I am part of a 1%!--Cav, who did not nor does not pay attention

The President has imposed on himself a ban on taking contributions from lobbyists.--David Axelrod, President Obama's close advisor

No the President has not done this. He still takes contributions from lobbyists. He still has lobbyists raising money for him. A few examples: Lawrence Rasky and Joseph Baerlein, Chairman and President of the lobbying firm Rasky Baerlein, are Obama donors. Google public affairs manager Ginny Hunt and Blue Shield public policy VP Tom Epstein are Obama donors. Obama donors Mark Boatwright, James O'Neill and Soyla Fernandez list themselves on Obama's FEC filings as "lobbyists." There are plenty more. What Obama has done is tried to exclude registered federal lobbyists from donating. Of course, lobbyist registration is basically unenforced on the federal level, so that's a cosmetic rule.--Tim Carney

He doesn't, uh, hire lobbyists.--David Axelrod

The most accurate description for this Axelrod statement --  a colloquial term for the manure of a male cow -- is not fit for a family-friendly blog.  At least 50 former lobbyists have taken senior positions in the Obama administration. This includes multiple cabinet secretaries. The former lobbyist for the Swiss Bankers Association is Obama's general counsel at the IRS. A former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs is Obama's Treasury Department Chief of Staff.  I think Axelrod knows everything I've blogged above. That's why it's hard to avoid the conclusion that David Axelrod is lying.--Tim Carney

Defense attorneys, embracing the new rights, did not bring forward evidence of their clients' innocence but instead sought to suppress evidence of their guilt. Whatever the other merits of the procedures, they were bound to make the justice system do a worse job of separating defendants who deserve punishment from those who don't.  Mr. Stuntz powerfully argues that such decisions have perversely worsened inequality in the criminal-justice system. The Miranda rule, for example, gives sophisticated suspects—mainly recidivists and white-collar defendants—the ability to "lawyer up" and avoid questioning altogether. Many other suspects—including the innocent but poor—waive their rights and receive less protection than they did before Miranda.--PAUL G. CASSELL

The scandal isn’t what’s illegal -- but what’s legal.--Nicole Gelinas

Being a former Goldmanite [like Jon Corzine] has long been considered the ultimate calling card. But, in some cases, it has proved to be a liability: A series of blunders by former senior Goldman executives raises questions about whether Goldman’s secret sauce can actually be exported. Think John Thain. Or Robert Rubin. Or J. Chris Flowers.--Andrew Ross Sorkin

If the practical effect of any rescue proposed by Greece is to force Greece to "live within its means," the logical response is to repudiate debt. If you are living within your means, you don't need access to global credit markets. Still differently: If you owed $40,000 in credit-card debt you could not afford to pay and decided to swear off ever incurring more debt, why not declare bankruptcy? You don't need good credit if you aren't going to use it.--John Carney

Credit-rating companies routinely award higher rankings to debt issued by banks and corporations that pay them the most, a conflict of interest that may escape Congressional efforts to change the way they do business. Bonds from countries and cities that pay about half as much as issuers of less creditworthy debt are “rated more harshly,” according to a study by scholars at Indiana University in Bloomington, Washington, D.C.-based American University and Rice University in Houston. Sovereigns rated A had no defaults over a 30-year period, compared with 1.8 percent of corporate bonds and 27.2 percent of securities backed by debt such as mortgages and loans assigned that ranking, the study of Moody’s Investors Service data said.--John Detrixhe

Businesses give back to society every day by pleasing their customers and employing their employees. There's nothing business owes other than selling the best product at the best price.--William Frezza

With a long early is just early. With a short early is plain wrong.--John Hempton

Dangers lurk, no question about it. The thing we just stress is keep climbing; we don't want to hang on. Like a rock climber, it takes more energy to hang on than to keep climbing.--Jim Harbaugh

We are atoms connected to create big, awkward, intelligent animals, animals complex in construction, equipped with minds, hearts, and the like. Spinning secretly around us is an intricate system of interconnected physical laws, completely dependent upon one another for effectiveness. And we are in the middle of it; actors on Shakespeare’s stage, madmen in Nietzsche’s streets, accidents in Sagan’s universe, children in God’s creation.--Don Miller

Information is cheap; meaning is expensive.--George Dyson