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. …

And they do not like guns. — Sandy Hook Elementary happened in 2012. Kids who were eight years old then are old enough to vote now. Stoneman Douglas High happened in 2018. Every student in that school then is old enough to vote now. These young men and women don’t live in Wisconsin, where the “youth” vote…

Political Theater of the Absurd — What did they do? On April 6, the Tennessee House kicked out two members. The expulsions are pure political theater; they will have no effect on anything in the state’s government. In Tennessee, if a vacancy arises in the House, an interim representative is appointed by the County Commission for…

Some men are above some laws. — Power corrupts. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, not because Nixon deserved to be pardoned, but because prosecuting him would have been bad for the nation. We survived Nixon’s pardon, and, I believe, based solely on what we know so far, that we would survive Donald Trump’s not being prosecuted for…

Because the topic isn’t one you want to hear about… — Dear Senator: Ever since I was a child in the 1950’s, I’ve heard that citizens should write to their representatives and senators as a way of helping them do their jobs. If our elected representatives know what voters want, the argument goes, they will know what laws to pass. …

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…