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I must confess I don't know anything about Gordon Brown. Why is he considered to be so lousy? I only watched the movie "The Deal" (2003) and his reputation seems to have been that of a smart dedicated liberal.

Fuck You money is an old concept on Wall St, and I think it is worth thinking about deeply because it tells you a lot about who you are and what you want. Fuck You money is an old concept in general, 200 years ago you would have been called a man of independent means, and you would have...

It's very natural for people to want to ask who is the best at X ... even though if you were to think about it rigourously, it is a meaningless question with no reasonable answers. This is really a popularity competition - who do *most* people agree is the best trader, so we can then proceed...

The most important driver of employment by far is the viability of the underlying product being produced - do people around the world want to buy it at the price you can produce it at? Everything else is just hand waving nonsense. If Washington could dictate prosperity and meaningful...

Don't worry, no one wants to own a Trabant anyway. Getting Germans to produce worthless cars was a remarkable achievement by State control.

This is like me claiming I know of people who can win at roulette and you claiming that based on mathematics it is impossible. And then you asking me to prove it by naming these people ... all of whom you wouldn't recognize anyway because they are not public figures and have no interest in...

I don't disagree with what you have said. As a free market capitalist & member of the human race I believe we as a species are better off for having cheap rubber, fridges, etc. But if it was now the year 1915, and you were the mayor of Manaus, it would probably have been in your people's best...

Good thread, probably a must read for all those "What should I do with my life" threads that appear on ET regularly. Nothing sj says is untrue. But what the vast majority of institutional people don't understand (because they don't come into contact with it) is the opportunity set that exists...

Larry Williams does (did) that.

Not to detract from the main argument, but to point out that in certain cases, replacement jobs can be produce less value. eg, the rubber workers in Manaus, Brazil circa 1915 probably weren't too happy when they start to get hollowed out by rubber workers in Malaysia. In their case, the...

The problems with healthcare are legion. But many countries have a reasonably working kludge that is regarded as satisfactory, especially given how much they spend on it. In the US of course, we spend more than anyone else and we don't generally have a system that we can be proud of...

In terms of *any* quality of life metrics - life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, susceptibility to any disease you might care to name, quantity of clothes used per lifetime, calorific intake, purchasing power on education, human beings in G10 countries have simply experienced vast...

When most people say "the market is rising" they usually mean to say "the market *was* rising".

During the year ended December 31, 2008, income before income taxes in our market making segment increased 43%, compared with the same period in 2007. A healthy increase in trading gains was driven by a productive trading environment throughout most of the year when trading volumes and...

The other explanation is that he doesn't care whether his advice is informed or not. If he gets some marginal buying from his speech, then maybe the market recovers, and he can take political credit for engineering a recovery. If the market tanks, burning all those who bought on his say...

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with...

dood ... Moody's is a credit rating agency .... they rate the ability of borrowers to repay their creditors US infrastructure is long pieces of pressed bitumen with white stripes painted on them. Oh wait, did you mean the state and local governments who are supposed to keep our pieces of...

We already had in recent history two gigantic bonanzas of government spending that government was totally incompetent at being accountable for. After Katarina and Iraq, I think we should conclude that the govt spends money like a drunken sailor on his first day in port : throwing dollar bills...

Asking civil engineers how much infrastructure we need is like asking dentists how much tooth work you need. "um ..... plenty!"

Baron, Chat doesn't appear to have many users at any one time, but the number of different users who have used chat at any one time probably numbers in the thousands. And chat has been a resilient beast - some loyalists have been in chat every trading day for the past 3 or 4 years. Some of...