Half life of percocet. Percocet. How do i get off percocet. Percocet and nightmares….

Are people qualified to pick their doctor?

After all, half of all doctors graduated at the bottom half of their class.

Duke: Tell him the good part.

Duke: The good part is that no matter whether our clients make money, or lose money, Duke & Duke get the commissions.

Well, what do you think, Valentine?

Valentine: Sounds to me like you guys are a couple of bookies.

Nah. We common people couldn't possibly understand it.

The voters might also invest well in aggregate (and probably even do), but enough might do poorly that it could be argued that somebody ought to protect them from themselves.

So it's a single aggregate decision versus individual poor decisions.

Your buddy Caplan claims that the "noise" isn't random and that aggregate decision is faulty. I have two problems with his analysis. First, he assumes that people want to maximize economic well-being and libertarian style freedom. My observations tell me that, for the majority, neither of those is even remotely true. Second, there doesn't seem to be a path to a better alternative. The looters won't go away no matter how much you wish they would.

Not if you keep cooperating with them.

It's not really funny.

Most investment fraud uses the church to avoid close scrutiny –

Most political fraud uses the church to avoid close scrutiny –

I think that our desire to believe is our greatest threat.

I've always loved economics because of what it taught me not to believe in … and that was "man" …

Politics and investing = power and money.

Sheetwise:
"I've always loved economics because of what it taught me not to believe in … and that was "man" …"

I couldn't agree more.

But I do believe in "men"

You wrote,

"After all, half of all doctors graduated at the bottom half of their class."

How the hell do you know that?

Because the other half told them?

There is a quiz at the end — isn't there?

What is really interesting to me is that Don, in defending the actions of companies that create complex financial derivatives specifically to defraud massive amounts of money from the productive economy is defending a company that runs the Fed and owns the government to such a degree that Don will be paying taxes and taxes and hidden taxes as will his children to bail out these companies for years to come. So what are you defending Don? In defending fraud are you defending liberty? In defending opaque products and monopolies are you defending competition and market forces?

I pride myself in having put forward the idea of this stated regulation of financial products long ago on this blog.

Quite simply like requiring makers of food to document the ingredients of their product ( so peanut anaphylactoids don't die a preventable dearth) a financial product with the label "COMPLEX FINANCIAL PRODUCT" will never be bought by me or the general public again. Then they will go the way of the DoDo as the Wall Street scum-bags who push them will have no one to defraud except their fellow scum-bags. Then they can go and get real jobs and start contributing to the productive economy rather then parasitizing it.

I implore anyone interested in the details of complex financial products to read his testimony.

Of note Peter Wallison will be giving his testimony to the same committee today. Might be interesting to compare their positions.

The big point is that Mr. Whalen puts the lie to the defenders of these products as we have seen some here do in a most nasty way deriding and belittling those who might question the utility of these products and of the people who trade them… profit from them.

Some key points;

"Perhaps the most important issue for the Committee to understand is that the structure of the OTC derivatives market today is a function of the flaws in the business models of the
largest dealer banks, including JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS). These flaws are structural, have been many decades in the making, and have been concealed from the Congress by the Fed and
other financial regulators."

The fact that today OTC derivatives trading is the leading source of profits and also risk for many large dealer banks should tell the Congress all that it needs to know about the areas of the markets requiring immediate reform. Many cash and other capital markets operations in these banks are marginal in terms of return on invested capital, suggesting that banks beyond a certain size are not only too risky to manage – but are net destroyers of value for shareholders and society even while pretending to be profitable.

" Most CDS contracts and complex structured financial instruments fall into this category of deliberately fraudulent instruments for which no cash basis exists."

"While an argument can be made that currency, interest rate and energy swaps are functionally interchangeable with existing forward instruments, the credit derivative market raises a troubling question about whether the activity creates value or helps manage risk on a systemic basis. It is my view and that of many other observers that the CDS market is a type of tax or lottery that actually creates net risk and is thus a drain on the resources of the economic system. Simply stated, CDS and CDO markets currently are parasitic."

Read the whole thing it's very good. And in that light consider the topic and premise of this post.

He should; because this administration lacks the capacity to understand much of anything.

After all wasn't it this ship of fools, with mouthpiece slow Joe Biden at the bow, that said the current administration "misread the economy"?

You didn't really!

"After all, half of all doctors graduated at the bottom half of their class."

How the hell do you know that?

Posted by: dg lesvic | Jul 14, 2009 3:19:07 AM"

What do you call the guy who graduates dead last in his medical class?

What do you call the guy who graduates dead last from a military academy?

Old jokes, my friend. But thanks, I needed the laugh today.

How the hell do you know that?

I can't believe you actually asked that question.

So muirduck,

You want the fu.kups that created the mess to write new regulations to fix the mess.

It is good to know that you are advancing your level of stupidity.

Criminal law is adequate to punish people (except for congress) who commit fraud or theft.

That clever people can bribe their way around, can find openings in regulations already on the book, is just solid proof of the incompetence of the boobs that are sitting in both houses of congress; and, you muirduck, put faith that those boobs can fix the mess, eliminate the openings, and find the honor to refuse the bribes?

It is simpletons like you that hang like dead weights around the necks of the productive.

Of course, they never include themselves in that evaluation. They're not irrational, just everybody else is.

A couple of comments for Mr. Progressive. 1) the people you long to have in power think that YOU, yes YOU Mr. Progressive, are stupid and irrational. 2) why on Earth would I want somebody in power over me who thinks so poorly of me?