An Experiment in Scotch

I recently started receiv­ing Kiplinger’s mag­a­zine, a Christ­mas gift from my dad. I was work­ing through the first issue I received when on page 9, I ran into an arti­cle of such glar­ingly bad advice that I almost thought it was par­ody. Thank­fully, though Kiplinger’s is foment­ing stale finan­cial advice on their read­ers, they have …

The priv­i­leged have reg­u­larly invited their own destruc­tion with their greed. — John Ken­neth Gal­braith If you fol­low the finan­cial news on a semi-regular basis, you know that MF Global, a futures fund run by Jon Corzine, for­mer gov­er­nor of New Jer­sey, went bank­rupt last week. If you don’t read the finan­cial news, well God …

Imag­ine if you will a friend–perhaps imag­i­nary, per­haps not–who spends money as if it grew on trees. He buys things con­stantly, upgrad­ing to the lat­est and great­est, always dri­ves a new car. None of this is a prob­lem if he’s inde­pen­dently wealthy but let’s say he’s not. Let’s say he makes $40,000 a year but …

Last week, it appeared that some­thing of a plan, how­ever roughly sketched out, had been drawn up in the great Euro­pean debt cri­sis. Mar­kets around the world rejoiced with some­thing bor­der­ing on aban­don even though astute observers ques­tioned the lack of details in the plan. The plan revolved around bond­hold­ers tak­ing an approx­i­mate 50% hair­cut …

The Repub­li­can response to the Occupy Wall Street move­ment is one of shal­low­ness and mis­un­der­stand­ing. It’s hyp­o­crit­i­cal in nature. Instead of seiz­ing on the anger that is clearly dri­ving OWS as well as the Tea Party, con­ser­v­a­tives are malign­ing the motives of indi­vid­u­als and miss­ing the entire point which is that peo­ple are sick and …

Here is a sim­ple descrip­tion of what is dri­ving the mar­kets. It is basi­cally a counter party risk sit­u­a­tion involv­ing the biggest banks in the West­ern finan­cial sys­tem. If you keep this in mind most of the things that are hap­pen­ing will be more clear, even though the mind of the sta­tus quo rebels against …

This week, Tim­o­thy Gei­th­ner made com­ments in the finan­cial media regard­ing how he thought Europe would get out of the mess they are in. “I think you’re going to see them draw on the lessons of our cri­sis, draw on the lessons of things that worked here in the United States,” Gei­th­ner said in a Bloomberg …

Last night, I attended the Jones Day lec­ture in the Tate series at SMU. The talk was given by Pro­fes­sor Joseph Stiglitz who’s CV/biography can be found here. It was an inter­est­ing talk and I thought it would be worth writ­ing a syn­op­sis of Pro­fes­sor Stiglitz’ ideas and views along with my thoughts 24 hours later. …