I recently viewed this old interview of Milton Friedman by Phil Donahue. See the interview here.Note that Friedman smiles, speaks softly and makes his point brilliantly by turning questions back to Donahue. There is no yelling or interrupting. You are
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Robert Rubin wrote about his experience as Treasury Secretary to President Clinton in a memoir presciently titled “A World of Uncertainty.”Rubin rose through a distinguished career on Wall Street by understanding risk and uncertainty. On Wall Street nobody was absolutely
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Facebook has added a whole new dimension to social networking, in fact reinventing it. Like any new media certain protocols develop; like learning not to capitalize all the letters in an e-mail message for fear of appearing loud or angry.
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Is this a good time to buy? Yes and no. The contrarians are salivating but one can not discount the real risk in this market. Obama’s policies are so radically different on so many different levels that there is a
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The most controversial act during the Six Day War of 1967 was the attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli planes. Thirty US sailors were killed and the ship was severely damaged, but not sunk. Officially, the attack was a
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I remember a now deceased economics professor being asked if he was a liberal or conservative economist. He responded that there were good and bad economics, not liberal and conservative economics. Many of us have long lost the use of
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Politics is rife with words meant to sound very different from their true meaning. The Employee Free Choice Act is being used to deny workers a secret ballot when voting to petition for a union. A secret ballot is sacrosanct
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Correlation is not causation and while many of us feel his policies have not restored confidence there are other causes for the declines that can not be ignored. We are in a demographic shift as the baby boomers are retiring
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Erick Erickson notes the preferred position of his party- That Every Man Can Make Himself- borrowed from Lincoln. Read the whole piece here.
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Conversation is fluid between those who believe this is the best time to buy stocks and those who believe that it is the worst time. Pure contrarian thinking gets more excited about the possibilities the more negative the news gets.
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Obama inherited a severe economic problem regardless of its source. It requires expensive solutions and careful analysis and monitoring. Like past presidents he must balance the government’s role and that of the private sector, but that balance is even more
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On an old Johnny Carson show there is a clip of a commercial break for a dog food where the dog comes out to eat the food during the commercial message and the dog keeps turning away from the bowl.
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“A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.” Read Michael Boskin’s article here.
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Among the many bad ideas of the new administration the idea of raising taxes on the investor class in the midst of a recession is one of the worst. Losses in the market have destroyed 50 years of confidence. It
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The proposal to allow judges to rewrite mortgage contracts through a process appropriately known as “cramming” is the one of the most economically ignorant proposals from our still very new administration that is building an ever growing inventory of bad
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I was planning to go to the quiet college town of Bloomington, Indiana to visit my daughter and I called the Hilton Garden Inn just off the town square where we had stayed before. After asking me of I was
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As the Dow drops another 250 points (2/23/09) I keep seeing disconnects from the bad news. It took me three hours to get from Atlanta to Macon last week (a ninety minute trip). I do not think all of those
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Temple Emanu-El in Dothan Alabama is offering $50,000 for Jewish families to relocate to Dothan, Alabama. Small southern Jewish communites have faced stagnation for decades. The large starting salaries for rabbis make them practically unaffordable for many small communities. This
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Conservatives are comparing Reagan and Obama, noting that Reagan entered office with the country in an economic crisis with the attitude that government is the problem. Obama clearly has a much different, practically opposite approach. But to be fair, this
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