Let me first establish my bona fides. Here’s an excerpt from an article I posted on financial site Seeking Alpha more than ten years ago: The time has come to ban all naked short-side derivatives. The only way to take a net short position on an asset should be traditional…

Quantity has a quality all its own. — Fifty years ago, internet fraud wasn’t a thing. But if someone told you in 1980 that you should not expose your personal data on line, would you cite the lack of data breaches at that time as a reason not to worry? What we all do changes what we can…

A little counterfeit never hurt anybody — Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is getting a lot of attention these days. Proponents of MMT tend to be politically liberal, and many use MMT to explain why their schemes for massive government spending won’t bankrupt the country. Of course, those schemes may be bad ideas on their own merits regardless…

Inflation is … Inflation is one of the most misunderstood concepts in finance, perhaps because the term is often used imprecisely. …

One old lawyer’s two cents — They say you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. But, of course, you should do exactly that if you believe the theater is on fire. In doing so, however, you are not exercising your right to free speech; you are sounding an alarm as surely as if you broke…

But I do watch women’s tennis. — Samuel Johnson wrote: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” That’s pretty much how I feel about women’s basketball. The sport rewards a sort of athleticism that men exhibit…

Voting blue, no matter how stupid — I vote blue no matter who, because today’s Republican Party is a coalition of morons and assholes. But I’m not a Democrat, not a liberal (except maybe in the classical sense), and not a progressive. I vote against Republicans, not for Democrats, which means that every so often I feel…

What’s an instrument? — Why does a portrait artist get credit for painting a face that he did not create? The face was there. The artist merely transcribed it. Some people are better at transcribing faces than others. Does that make them artists? Apparently so. But why? A great pianist plays Chopin. Who’s the…