Failed Bailout Vote Data

Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker, gives five positives that have come out of the current financial crisis. An excerpt:

Our willingness to believe that we can hire some expert to tell us how to outperform markets is a big problem, with big consequences. It underpins Wall Street's brokerage operations, for instance, and leads to a lot more people giving out financial advice than should be giving out financial advice.

Thanks to the current panic many Americans have learned that the experts who advise them what to do with their savings are, at best, fools. Merrill Lynch & Co., Morgan Stanley, and all the rest persuaded their most valuable customers to buy auction-rate bonds, telling them the securities were as good as cash.

Those customers will now think twice before they listen to their brokers ever again.

Many, I'm sure, are just waiting to get their money back from their brokers before they race for the exits and introduce themselves to Charles Schwab.

Here is the full article.

Doing the Bull Dance

Just like Happy Gilmore - this guy has to be my favorite golfer.

"I believe in Sewanee with all my heart. I do not know of any institution of its size in any part of our country which has done more for the cause of good citizenship than Sewanee has done. As an American I am proud of it; as a citizen I am grateful to it. It is entitled The University of the South, but it is much more than that; it is a University of all America, and its welfare should be dear to all Americans who are patriotic and farsighted, and therefore anxious to see every influence strengthened which tends for the betterment and enlightenment of our great common country."

— President Theodore Roosevelt, June 4, 1907

Russia/Georgia Conflict Debunks McDonald's Theory of War

Excerpt below from the article here at The Guardian.

The logic is thus: countries with middle classes large enough to sustain a McDonald's have reached a level of prosperity and global integration that makes warmongering risky and unpalatable to its people.

The Russia-Georgia conflict has finally blown this theory out of the water.

Thomas Friedman, who invented the theory in 1996, said people in McDonald's countries "don't like to fight wars. They like to wait in line for burgers."

Don LaFontaine 1940 - 2008

Read more about him here.