Unfortunately, as often happens with bad ideas that make some people a lot of money, the idea caught on and has even become the conventional wisdom. . . . “Maximizing shareholder value” turned out to be the disease of which it purported to be the cure. Between 1960 and 1980, CEO compensation per dollar of [...]

Dr. Y. Bauman – “The world’s first and only stand-up economist” – yuk yuk yuk.

[via Andart] SPOILER: The voice of reason suggests fairness – and can’t be picked … for exactly that reason.

When then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson initiated his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in September 2008, I assumed the objective was to restore trust in the market by identifying and weeding out the “troubled assets” held by the world’s financial institutions. Three weeks later, when I asked American friends why Paulson had switched strategies and was [...]

Rarely do people hold feelings of neutrality about any ideology. Few people manage to ignore the higher level structure and consider the component ideas. This means that you can usually consider someone who despises a philosophy as a whole to be just as brainwashed as someone who embraces it completely. A person may know all [...]

via Random_Man “Join a gang,” they said, “see the ghetto,” they said – all I got was this lousy subdural hematoma.

Originally spotted this one over at Dangerous Minds (and you should follow that link for some sadly-true Marxist eye candy) – Minsky’s theories are well worth looking into: As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers – what he called speculative borrowers, [...]

Policy makers and forecasters who see a recovery next year are probably lying to boost public confidence, he said. And the crisis will eventually provoke political conflict, albeit not on the scale of a world war, but violent all the same. … because it [the United States] retains safe-haven status, in a global crisis, investors [...]