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. …

God is in the details… — Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230) says: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider A couple of years ago, I published an article aimed at providers…

Variable and Fixed/Float preferred stocks — Heads I win, tails I win There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we…

Avoiding a Comey Moment — The talking heads (media pundits, not David Byrne & Co.) say that the public “needs” to see the affidavit to prove that the Justice Department is acting in good faith. Those talking heads are wrong at best, dishonest at worst. When Jim Comey announced that he was not going to…

You want chips with that? — The Ransom of Red Leader. Do you remember those “Baby on Board” stickers? They’re gone now, but I recall a satiric piece that likened them to ransom notes: “Slow down, or the kid gets it!” Sort of like the guy with a gun to his own head shouting “Stop or…

Clean up your mess, America — Mostly, I like apathy. I like when apathy isn’t a problem, when good enough people are providing good enough government, and most of us can vote for incumbents, or even stay home if its raining on election day, and nothing bad happens. No, apathy is not a civic virtue. There…