Even as a kid, Buffett was constantly making money, delivering papers and whatnot. Viewers won’t be surprised he was nerdy kid, good with numbers, bad at school, and awful with girls.
The shy undertaker was not a swashbuckling Randian hero or libertarian firebrand, but a passive-aggressive political manipulator.
A builder of skyscrapers and ego, Donald Trump’s hubris won’t allow him to consider magazine indicators and such. After his inauguration, he asserted, “Time magazine—and I have been on their cover, like, 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.”
Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen makes no apologies for raising the prices of
stocks and bonds. It’s all for the little people, she says. “We are trying help families afford
things.” What her employer really does is allow the bankrupt to keep operating.
To the minds of most environmentalists, the ham-hand of government is needed to protect wildlife. Private property be damned — the government must step in, otherwise every species on the planet will be hunted into oblivion, or human development will gobble up all remaining wildlife habitat, leading to the complete extinction of all species.
There was a time Nevada was thought to be libertarian, with no income taxes, bars that never close, and good gamble always available. The government was relatively small and the government handouts for business few. When the recently passed Perry Thomas began making bank loans to gambling halls, replacing union slush funds and mob money, legitimate capital sources couldn’t wait to throw money at Sin City and the Silver State.
But the Silver State is not what it used to be. Its freedom ranking has fallen from 5th to 11th. With a ranking of 33rd, the state is among the worst run in the country and its lawmakers cannot help saying ‘yes’ to billionaires, smooth-talking or otherwise, seeking taxpayer largesse.
Like most bubbles this one is being fueled by debt. USA Today reports, 40 million borrowers owe $29,000 each, totaling $1.2 trillion outstanding. Student loan debt is easy to get, but hard to get rid of. It’s hard to pay back without a high salary, nor can it be bankrupted away. “Government either guarantees or owns most of the student loans and has the power to sue and to garnish wages, tax refunds, and federal benefits like Social Security when borrowers default,” Kelley Holland writes.
Jimmy John Liautaud, founder of the Jimmy John's sub chain, applied to move his residence from Illinois to Florida — and his company's headquarters could soon follow. "All they do is stick it to us," he says of the state legislature's move to jack up the personal income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent — and the corporate income tax from 7.3 percent to 9.5 percent.
It's exhilarating to read about working people who do their job better than anyone in the world. These people will never be wealthy or famous, but every day they do a job faster and better than anyone. Bourdain introduces readers to one of these gifted and productive people, in the kitchen at New York City's premier fish restaurant, Le Bernardin.
"If there is such a thing as dog-eat-dog capitalism, this must be it — with customers holding the leash."
While Oliver Stone has had two cracks at the subject, J.C. Chandor bests him on his first try.
Although new, online dating has rapidly grown to be a $4 billion business. Its reported that one in five people in a committed relationship met online. The most successful sites focus on pairing people by race, religion, or sexual orientation. It may not seem romantic, but being introduced to someone with the same intellectual capacity, drive, and common interests only makes sense.
If not for metaphors I doubt I could understand much of the modern world. So much of what it takes to produce what you're looking at right now I can't begin to fathom. But this lack of knowledge doesn't absolve me from making decisions involving this modern technology.
The author draws from a variety of disciplines in his quest to understand booms and crashes, spending the first part of the book explaining the lenses that he uses to examine these events. He disposes of the efficient-market hypothesis in his microeconomic lens and instead opts for George Soros's theory of reflexivity.
Thankfully, the Yale instructor is clearer in his writing than Mr. Soros. Instead of higher prices meaning lower demand and lower prices increasing demand thus leading to equilibrium and efficient markets, reflexivity takes into account human behavior.
In Triumph of the City, Glaeser makes the comment that he has "a taste for free markets," but anyone interested in his book should know going in that the author's free-market palate is slight; and the author's blind spot for markets and soft spot for government monopolies keeps an interesting book from being a great one.
Paterson was not just adventurous with her words — calling Eleanor Roosevelt "a pathetic fool" for instance — but the first time she flew, November 5, 1912, she set a record for reaching an altitude of 5,000 feet, flying higher than any woman had to that point. The 26-year old Canadian frontier girl sat beside pilot Harry Bingham Brown in the tiny Wright biplane, constructed of cloth and wood and said afterward, "It was the greatest experience of my life."
In Utah, she attended school but a month before asking to leave. She knew more than the teacher and at seven years old she was already reading "a consideration of Bryan's stand on the free silver question." So readings the teacher offered, like the Little Red Hen, provided no stimulation.
You always remember books that change your mind, because these books are so few and far between. We're drawn to books that reinforce what we already believe. It makes us feel smarter that an author shares our opinion and provides words we can use to make our case on the off chance that's required.
Hyman's most enlightening chapter is entitled "Securing Debt." After decades of urging the American public to borrow and banks to lend, in the 1960s the government planted the securitization seed that would grow to tip the financial system over in 2008. LBJ's Great Society looked to push capital into decaying cities, but the buying and selling of individual mortgages was cumbersome. Mortgage paper needed to be bondlike, and the Housing Act of 1968 implemented this vision, remaking "the American mortgage system in a way that had not been done since the New Deal."
