Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

You just have to love Dr. John Malone. The guy's a certified genius but also a "what you see is what you get" straight-shooting kind of guy. His Ph.D. is from Johns Hopkins, BA is science from Yale, worth $2.3 billion (according to Forbes, but probably way low because they just couldn't find all of it). He ran TCI (America's largest Cable company) and sold it to ATT for $54 billion. He's the kind of person that you could just sit and listen to for hours. He's so logical, well informed and well spoken. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal here's a few nuggets from what he had to say... (I agree with him about Obama) WSJ: What are the biggest risks for Liberty right now? Mr. Malone: I think the biggest concern I have for the next year or two would be on the retail side, because of the consumer sentiment and the macro conditions. The concerns really tend to be much more macro: Is America going to make it, rather than are we going to make it?...

Dr. Albin F. Turbak, Ph.D. from Sandy Springs, GA wrote a very interesting blog post picked up and printed by one of our local newspapers today. The gist of his argument is that Congress, government regulators and the Fed were seduced by unsustainable economic growth and allowed (even encouraged) banks to run what amounted to a Ponzi scheme (primarily with mortgage backed securities). When the bank Ponzi scheme collapsed, it sent the world economy into a depression based on fear and uncertainty. He blames the Ponzi scheme and those who allowed it for wiping out half the retirement savings of innocent bystander consumers. Although I largely agree with his analysis and I like his simple, easy to understand explanation, I disagree with one important aspect of what I think he is saying. To me, the value of our collective "retirement savings" was at least partly an illusion caused by the Ponzi scheme that Dr. Turbak pointed out. So, since we never really had it (because it was an ...

Kurgman is writing a blog now in the newly "free" NYTimes website. He's probably doing it to promote his new book. I assume he'll give the proceeds to the poor to alleviate income inequality, right Paul? Anyway, out of curiosity I looked at the source of the chart that Krugman uses to make his point (by the way, it was pointed to not by Krugman but by a reader who made a comment). The very first paragraph of that report says this... According to Kuznets’ influential hypothesis, income inequality should follow an inverse-U shape along the development process, first rising with industrialization and then declining, as more and more workers join the high-productivity sectors of the economy [Kuznets 1955]. Today, the Kuznets curve is widely held to have doubled back on itself, especially in the United States, with the period of falling inequality observed during the first half of the twentieth century being succeeded by a very sharp reversal of the trend since the 19...