Monthly Archives: April 2010

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

A Return to Normalcy

From The Wit and Wisdom of Will Rogers edited by Alex Ayres When the nation plunged into the Great Depression in the late 1929, President Hoover swiftly took bold action.  He appointed a commission to investigate. “I could have told

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Catering to Deceit

I use a money management firm, Banyan Capital Management , owned and run by Gary Watkins.  Douglas Ott, II  is a portfolio manager for Banyan, and like Gary is a real student of the market.  I have been very satisfied

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Limiting Radical Change

About ten years ago I attended a national Metals Service Center  Convention in Palm Desert, California.  One of the programs featured Jeff McMahon, CEO of Enron Industrial Markets.  He shared the stage with Don McNeeley, CEO of Chicago Tube and

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Financial Regulation: The Solution is the Problem

George Melloan writes in The Wall Street Journal,  The Lessons of Basel’s Bean Counters Summarized: In 1988 the banking regulators from  20 leading industrial nations of the International Monetary Fund met in Switzerland and created Basel I to create a

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Southpark Jihad

Zachary Adam Chesser I am certainly not advocating any violent action, but I  wonder if  fanatics who publicly threaten the lives of America’s most popular cartoon creators would be in greater danger than Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Can you

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Financial Regulation Needs to Solve the Whole Problem

The debate of financial reform is looking eerily like the debate on health care reform. In both cases both parties clearly see the need for change, and in both cases they disagree sharply on the means. When the financial meltdown

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Keynes vs von Mises

The work of noted economist John Maynard Keynes is used to justify a bigger government role in the economy.  After the recent (or more accurately current) crisis it is understandable that many would return to this economist.  Yet most who

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The New Aristocracy

When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America in the early 19th century in his classicDemocracy in America, he was comparing America’s democracy to the declining norm in Europe: aristocracy. The European aristocracy, a landed aristocracy, ruled with inheritance and privilege.

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Hysterical Headlines in Place of History

“Once cherished, history is currently viewed as onerous- unless employed for social engineering. The results are political leaders who cannot weigh the consequences of their actions; journalists who confuse the exciting with the significant; military officers who view their profession

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In Search of Substance on the Health Care Issue

My article in American Thinker. Distractions used to hide Obamacare’s failures Excerpt: But public outbursts fit much better into 20 second news bites than pertinent analysis or clarification of the substance of the bill that is causing such concern. It’s

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Standing Apart from History

“The citizens of the United States do not stand apart from history.  We are in it and of it. Many of our ancestors came here hoping to escape it, but history is a pack of bloodhounds.  Desperate to put those

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If Wall Street Spoke the Truth

A thorough review of what caused the financial crisis is needed and it should be  a fascinating subject. Unfortunately the hearings are weak and boring. In the Wall Street Journal’s “After the Crash, a Crashing Bore The men behind the

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Buffet’s Sweet Goldman Deal

While the players and regulators were struggling to get investors to commit capital to the major banks to avoid a meltdown, Warren Buffet was called upon several times.  He consistently turned them down because the assets were too complicated to

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The Voting Machine vs The Weighing Machine

The stock market is pushing to new highs and we are seeing some real improvement in the employment picture.  Does this mean that the president’s economic plan is working ? Does it mean that the card check bill, Cap and

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Is It Healthy to Kill Jobs?

As bitter as the controversy concerning the health care bill was, that was when we only discussed the generalities of the bill.  As the details come forth it looks even worse. For example: Employers with fewer than 25 employees can

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The Danger of Success

“Washington may also be tempted to go on as before for the same reason it did in the wake of its Continental Illinois and Long-Term Capital management bailouts. Back then government regulators and financial executives came to believe: if we

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The Content of Health Reform Matters More than the Ideological Labels

I am a fan of Fareed Zakaria and his CNN show “GPS”.  Today (April 4, 2010)  he had Tom Friedman (The World is Flat).  While I disagree with much  of Freidman, Zakaria allows different ideas to surface without the rudeness

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Clarity Beats Compromise

Clifford Asness, Ph.D. writes in Stumbling on the Truth The Republican Way Forward Excerpt: We must win by explaining, no matter how long it may take and hard it may be, that free people acting in a free market is

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The Other 99 Percent

From Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society “Central planning is just one of a more general class of social decision-making processes dependent on the underlying assumption that people with more per capita knowledge (in the special sense) should be guiding their

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