Quote of the day. From Harry Truman's diary, Dec. 25, 1947

I appointed a Secretary for Inflation. I have given him the worry of convincing the people that no matter how high the prices go, nor how low wages become, there just is not any danger to things temporal or eternal. I am of the opinion that he will take a real load off my mind-if Congress does not.

Then I have appointed a Secretary of Reaction. I want him to abolish flying machines and tell me how to restore oxcarts, oar boats and sailing ships. What a load he can take off my mind if he will put the atom back together so it cannot be broken up. What a worry that will abolish for both me and Vishinski.

I have appointed a Secretary for Columnists. His duties are to listen to all radio commentators, read all columnists in the newspapers from ivory tower to lowest gossip, coordinate them and give me the result so I can run the United States and the World as it should be. I have several able men in reserve besides the present holder of the job, because I think in a week or two the present Secretary for Columnists will need the services of a psychiatrist and will in all probability end up in St. Elizabeth's.

I have appointed a Secretary of Semantics-a most important post. He is to furnish me 40 to 50 dollar words. Tell me how to say yes and no in the same sentence without a contradiction. He is to tell me the combination of words that will put me against inflation in San Francisco and for it in New York. He is to show me how to keep silent-and say everything. You can very well see how he can save me an immense amount of worry.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Quote of the day:

"Our greatest triumph is usually not doing, keeping things in balance, refraining from the act we can't redeem."

-- Sam Tanenhaus, Literature Unbound, 1986

This is at the core of the conservative ethos. (Note he said "usually"!) Such wisdom, or at least the ability to express it, is often not obtained until middle age or later. So it's interesting that Tanenhaus, now editor of the New York Times Book Review and Week in Review sections, published this when he was 31.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Quote of the day:

"Invest at the point of maximum pessimism."

-- Sir John Templeton, who bought every stock trading below a dollar on the New York Stock Exchange when Hitler invaded Poland.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Quote of the day:

"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted, counts."

-- Attributed to Einstein

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Quote of the day:

"We have argued for many years that the No. 1 rule of asset allocation is that returns on capital are in markets in which capital is scarce. Investors should always want to play the role of the provider of scarce capital."

-- Richard Bernstein, chief U.S. strategist, Merrill Lynch, 2006

This is exactly what Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are doing by opening up a bond insurance company at the worst moment for bond insurers in many years. From AP:

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway will receive a license in New York to open a new bond insurance business, a state regulator said Friday.

The license for Berkshire Hathaway Assurance Corp. will officially be approved no later than Monday.

Also on Friday, Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy NRG N.V., the reinsurance unit of ING Group said for about $435.7 million in cash.

Buffett's new insurance unit could take some business away from other insurers, said Donald Light, a senior analyst with Celent. Light owns Berkshire Hathaway shares.

Buffett will have the advantage of setting up operations with a strong balance sheet and a clean book of business, making his operation attractive for bond issuers, Light added.

Buffett's foray into the bond insurance sector comes at a tumultuous time for his new competitors. In recent weeks, bond insurers have come under fire as rating agencies have downgraded them, or warned of possible downgrades, because of their exposure to the deteriorating credit markets.

Standard & Poor's downgraded ACA Capital Holdings Inc.'s bond insurance unit to "CCC" from "A" on Dec. 19, while Fitch Ratings has placed two of the largest bond insurers, MBIA Inc. and Ambac Financial Group Inc., on negative credit watch.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

"Pakistan was once called the most allied ally of the United States. We are now the most nonallied."

-- Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, President of Pakistan, New York Times, July 6, 1973

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

are nothing new. Quote of the day:

"We have much to learn of the right keeping of Christmas. I do not think children now-a-days find the pleasure we found when we were young in preparing our simple little gifts and hiding these from one another. Now there is a surfeit of gifts, and a most unwise choice, and the children are not trained into the joy of giving. The hurry and bustle obscure the sacredness of the season."

-- Elizabeth Channing, Dec. 25, 1900. Autobiography and Diary of Elizabeth Parsons Channing (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1907) 253.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
                    

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

-- John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

"Balbus has assured me that you are going to be a rich man. Whether he uses the word in plain Roman style, meaning that you will have plenty of cash, or after the manner of the Stoics when they say that all are rich who can enjoy the sky and the earth, remains to be seen."

-- Roman politician Marcus T. Cicero, letter to Trebatius, late November, 54 B.C.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Harvard professor and former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers N. Gregory Mankiw, blogging on July 14, 2006, on his broad-ranging interests:

“If I had been much broader than I am, I would have been so shallow that I couldn't have managed an academic career at all. I suppose I could have been a journalist.”

Posted by Jay Hancock at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

“At a most basic level, there can be only two rationalizations for the state's participation in an economy. The first is as a social equalizer, redistributing the fruits of a nation's production under the presumption that a particular social need takes precedence over private desires. The second justification for government intervention is the assertion that markets may fail to produce an efficient outcome."

-- Jerry L. Jordan, (now former) president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, speech to the Pacific Northwest Regional Economic Conference, 1997

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

“Every hurtful and divisive thing that I’ve done in my life, I’ve done when I was feeling insecure.”

-- Former congressman & House majoirty leader Dick Armey, on the Diane Rehm Show, Nov. 8, 2006.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

"A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming weaker or a powerful one too powerful."

-- Primo Levi, If This is a Man, 1947

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

“All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.”

-- Alex Tabarrok, associate professor of economics, George Mason University, Marginal Revolution blog, August 2006

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

"I have always felt that, as a first approximation in handling questions relating to the lives and actions of large masses of people, the approach which counts one man as one, and, on that assumption, asks which way lies the greatest happiness, is less likely to lead one astray than any of the absolute systems. I do not believe, and I never have believed, that in fact men are necessarily equal or should always be judged as such. But I do believe that, in most cases, political calculations which do not treat them as if they were equal are morally revolting."

Lionel Robbins, London School of Economics, 1938

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)