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. I will use the word precisely in this essay, not in the sense that I will use it in the only “correct” way, but in the sense that when…

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…

A bridge too far — Near where I live, there are two bridges over a wide river. One is part of an interstate highway. The other is a two-lane affair so narrow that most users retract their side-view mirrors when crossing at, or below, the 15 mph speed limit. When you use the interstate bridge…

The Republicans have caught the mail truck — The gold standard in clinical testing of new drugs is the double-blind, placebo controlled trial. Patients are given either a test drug or a placebo that is administered like the test drug. The people getting the doses, administering the doses and rating the outcomes do not know who got which…

No, it’s not Nazis marching in Skokie — Ask most people why free speech is a good thing and they’ll tell you it’s the best way to get to the truth. Some problems have counter-intuitive solutions. If people aren’t free to advocate unpopular ideas, the counter-intuitive solutions never get an airing, and the problems never get solved. All…

No man is below the law. — I am a Never-Trumper. You could look it up. Donald Trump should never have been let anywhere near the White House, and I assume he cheats on his taxes and lies publicly about what his returns would show if we could see them. Nevertheless, the Congress should not reveal confidential…