Monthly Archives: March 2009

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

A Lesson from Uncle Milton

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

Read More

In Search of Doubt

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

Read More

A Living Rolodex

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.

Read More

Investing Odds

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

Read More

The USS Liberty

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

Read More

Sectarian Conservatives

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

Read More

Orwell Lives

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

Read More

Is Obama Really Responsible for the Market Drop?

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

Read More

A Recipe for a Republican Resurection

Erick Erickson notes the preferred position of his party- That Every Man Can Make Himself- borrowed from Lincoln. Read the whole piece here.

Read More

Contrarian Conflicts

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.

Read More

Flying Too Close to the Sun

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

Read More

The Dog Doesn’t Like the Damn Food

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.

Read More

Is Obama Effecting the Dow?

“A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.” Read Michael Boskin’s article here.

Read More

Discouraging Charity

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

Read More

Cram This

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

Read More

Pricing Cynicism

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

Read More

Rolling Recession

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

Read More

Sweet Home Alabama

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

Read More

The President’s Reckoning

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

Read More