Monthly Archives: March 2013

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Was the Financial Collapse Overstated?

Many traditionalists, including Warren Buffett, lashed out at the stress tests as wrong and unnecessary. He was quoted in the Financial Times complaining that Citigroup’s high-profile problems had tainted the entire industry. Most of the banking institutions were relatively healthy,

Read More

How to Fix Stupid

from Alan Binder at the New York Times, Financial Collapse: A 10-Step Recovery Plan, 1/19/13. Excerpts: 5. Use Less Leverage Excessive leverage — otherwise known as over-borrowing — was one of the chief foundations of the house of cards that

Read More

“Bull By The Horns”- a review

Sheila Bair was the Chairman of the FDIC under Bush and later reappointed under Obama.  In Bull by the Horns she gives her perspective on the housing crisis and the financial collapse. Sheila was a Republican and voted for McCain,

Read More

Strategic Ignorance

“The attempt to turn strategy into a rigorous academic discipline has done considerable violence to the core value in almost all strategic thinking—the fundamental idea that one should always keep an eye on the big picture. Seeing the big picture

Read More

Statist Medicine

Scott Gottlieb writes in The Wall Street Journal, The Doctor Won’t See You Now. He’s Clocked Out ObamaCare is pushing physicians into becoming hospital employees. The results aren’t encouraging. 3/15/13 Excerpts: ObamaCare’s main vehicle for ending the autonomous, private delivery of

Read More

The Value of Political Connections

“In the world of investment finance it is increasingly important to be well connected politically. As briefly mentioned earlier, one study by two economists looked at 351 hedge funds between the years 1999 and 2008 and found that “politically connected”

Read More

The World’s Largest Insurance Broker

Americans are losing trust in government by Glenn Harlan Reynolds  in USA Today February 11, 2013 Excerpt: New York Times blogger Nate Silver — best known for his prescient election projections in 2012 — matches up the data on distrust of government with the

Read More

Free Markets and Big Business

Ezra Klein writes in The Washington Post, Derek Khanna wants you to be able to unlock your cellphone, 3/9/13 Excerpt: There’s a difference between being the party of free markets and the party of existing businesses. Excessively tough copyright law

Read More

Human Drones

From Daniel Greenfield in the Sultan Knish, The Dreaded Drone, 3/11/13 Excerpt: We aren’t dealing with fascism, we’re dealing with bureaucratic collectivism. Rather than a militarized society, what we have is a socialized society. The people who run it don’t

Read More

The Other Side of Wealth Mobility

Missy Sullivan writes Lost Inheritance in the Wall Street Journal, 3/8/13 Excerpts: THE VANDERBILTS Where the $ came from: Shipping and Railroads “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) amassed more than $100 billion (in today’s dollars). His early heirs went hog-wild building

Read More

Making Better Things

Daniel Greenfield writes in Sultan Knish Making the World  A Better Place, 3/10/13. Excerpts: The idea that making the world a better place begins with dedication to humanitarian activity is a dangerous fallacy. There are extraordinary people who can genuinely

Read More

A Conservative Lack of Focus

Erick Erickson writes in the Macon Telegraph, Conservative Journalism is Failing,  3/8/13 Excerpts: There are scandals to uncover and there are outrageous stories to be outraged over, but I would submit conservatives are spending a lot more time trying to

Read More

When to Glorify a Tyrant

Getting Rich by Fighting for the Poor from the blog of Daniel Greenfield – Sultan Knish, 3//7/13 Excerpt: Chavez died with an estimated net worth of 2 billion dollars making him the 4th richest man in Venezuela and the 49th

Read More

The New Orthodox

The Orthodox Surge by David Brooks at the New York Times Excerpt: Those of us in secular America live in a culture that takes the supremacy of individual autonomy as a given. Life is a journey. You choose your own

Read More

Unable to Squelch our Capitalist Spirit

My article in today’s American Thinker, An Exhaustion of Pessimism Excerpt: Like learning to live with the nuclear bomb and the threat of imminent destruction we have learned to live in the land of the all-powerful Oz, pulling the levers

Read More

Why The Middle Class Does Not Want to Soak the Rich

From The American Lee Harris writes Why Not Soak the Rich? 3/6/13 Lee raises the question of why so many middle class republicans are so reluctant to raise the taxes on the wealthiest.  This confounds liberals who voiced this question

Read More

Creating New Expertise

An economy can continue to grow only if its profits are joined with entrepreneurial knowledge. In general, wealth can increase only if the people who create it control it. Divorce the financial profits from the learning process and the economy

Read More

Hungarian Anti-Semitism on the Rise

NYT Letter to the editor from Michael Salberg of the ADL – Anti-Semitism in Hungary: While a number of far-right parties in Europe run on xenophobic platforms, Jobbik is the only parliamentary party of a European Union member state that

Read More