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. …

Hard cases make bad law-making — Filibuster reform! Slowly, I turned… Yes, the filibuster is my pet project. I have written in favor of the idea generally and against the current iteration specifically. …

So many followers, so few views — Having followers on Medium is cool, because I hear you need 100 of them to be in the Partner program. I have more than 100 followers and I’m in the program. One month I even earned $5.00. Happily, other sources of income keep the wolf from the door. But something…

Or at least before next January 6 — In September of 2020, I wrote an article that defended the filibuster as a way to stabilize our legislative process. Some laws should take a supermajority to change, and the filibuster was — I emphasize the past tense — a passable way to determine what those laws would be. (In…

No gun. — My two cents Let’s allow that the best way to deal with a bad guy with a gun is to send in a good guy with a bigger gun. But that is true only because the bad guy already has the gun. …

A thing is what a thing does. — Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law) Imagine a bunch of magic tokens. You can send one token, or a fractional part of a token (but let’s stick with one for now) anywhere you want, quickly and verifiably, and the recipient can sell it…