It was December 1996 when Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, first questioned if “irrational exuberance” had pushed stock prices too far, too fast. Although his comment sent the market into a brief plunge, history proved Greenspan dead...
POLITICS
How Proposed Securities and Exchange Commission Regulations Will Worsen Fund Performance
Investors punished mutual funds in the 2003 late-trading and market-timing scandals the old-fashioned way — by withdrawing their money and going somewhere else. For instance, shareholders last year pulled $29 billion out of the funds of Putnam Investment...
The Threat of a Faith-Based Defense of America
In the war between reason and religion, declared by militant Islamic fundamentalists, President Bush is firmly on the side of religion. The positions he supports most passionately are those of theocracies: prayer in schools, a national pledge “under God”...
War: Then and Now
It was refreshing recently to see a front page of the New York Times that was not full of editorials disguised as “news” stories, undermining the war and the president. However, it was a souvenir front page, reprinted from the New York Times of June 6,...
World Opinion Be Damned: America’s Attempts to Appease “World Opinion” Are Depraved and Suicidal
It is a testament to the perverse priorities of our politicians and journalists that the biggest American outcry over Abu Ghraib has been not about the gruesome decapitation of American Nicholas Berg by terrorists, but about the fact that many Arabs and Europeans are...
Terrorists Attack Already Priced Into Market
This column is going to be about what no investor wants to talk about: another terrorist strike on American soil, and how could it affect the stock market. How likely it is to happen — and when? “When” is really the only question. Not...
Bashing President Bush Takes Over as Our Number One National Pastime: Part II
Tom Brokaw said it. So it must be true. “There were three big reasons for the United States to go to war against Iraq,” said Brokaw. “Weapons of mass destruction, the connection to terrorists and that we were going to establish a kind of higher moral...
The “Working Poor” Scam
BusinessWeek magazine has joined the chorus of misleading rhetoric about “the working poor.” Why is this misleading? Let me count the ways. First of all, Census data show that most people who are working are not poor and most people who are poor are not...
Three Cheers for Bill Cosby
May 17 saw several gatherings commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. But the event held in Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall will be the one to be remembered because of...
The Day After Tomorrow: The Ice Age Cometh?
Coming to a theatre near you on Memorial Day is “The Day After Tomorrow”, a movie based on the notion that global warming will lead to a new ice age in America. As science fiction goes, this is as fictional as one can get because there is absolutely no...
Majority Rule: The Tyrants Next Door
There’s a funny little radio spot that’s been running locally. It’s a (fake) phone conversation between a man who wanted his car painted midnight blue and a guy at the paint shop who tells him they’ve gone with “a stunning shade of...
Buy, Buy, and You’ll Fare Well
Are your surprised that the stock market has broken out of its funk this week, even though it practically seems like the world is coming to an end? If you’ve been reading this column, you shouldn’t be. Last week I said don’t worry about high oil...
Conservativism vs. Individual Rights
Consider the following paragraph in an unsigned editorial that appeared last month in the Wall Street Journal arguing in support of the detention of US citizens such as suspected al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla as enemy combatants without the writ of habeas corpus: In...
America’s New National Pastime: Bashing President Bush
Move over, NASCAR. Out of the way, major league baseball, horseracing or gambling. For bashing President Bush now takes its place as America’s No. 1 national pastime. Sure, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said the president deceived the American people about why...
Amnesty International: More Than Just Bad Manners
On Wednesday, Amnesty International (AI) issued their annual “International Report” on the state of human rights. It even included a message from AI Secretary General Irene Khan titled, “Why human rights matter.” Her message was apparently...
Managing the Education Disaster
Imagine you’re a head physician faced with a large-scale disaster such as the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing or battlefield casualties. The first thing that must be acknowledged is that you have limited resources. That means...
An Academy Award for John Kerry
Senator John Kerry is giving opportunism a bad name. First, there was his call for President Bush to release oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, in response to high gasoline prices. With a war raging in the Middle East, the last thing we need to do is reduce our...
Bravo for Bill Cosby
Bill Cosby has provided a lot of laughs for millions of Americans over the years but black “leaders” were not laughing after he lashed out at those black parents who buy their children expensive sneakers instead of something educational. He also denounced...
Ready to Compete: The Link Between Productivity, Jobs, and Wages
Nearly lost in the debate over job creation has been the surge of productivity that has taken place over the last two years. Americans workers are producing more goods per hour of work and boosting their own incomes in the process. Increased productivity also means...
Revolutionaries Join European Union
BRUSSELS – “If Mr. Glassman hates Europe so much,” said the head of the Belgian farmers’ union, “then why doesn’t he leave?” Touchy! Actually, I love Europe – the vistas, the culture, the food, the history, even the...
Justice for Little Angelo
Little Angelo finally got justice, though he died too young to even know what justice meant. Angelo Marinda lived only eight months and it took more than twice that long to convict his father of his murder. Tragically, the policies and the mindset among the...
Michael Berg: A Mourning Father’s Misplaced Outrage
After the brutal beheading of Nicholas Berg, his father, Michael, promptly blamed the Bush administration for his son’s death. “Nicholas Berg died for the sins of George Bush and (Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld,” said Michael Berg. “The al...
Educational Ineptitude Revisited
Several weeks ago, my column on teacher ineptitude was about the sorry state of teacher quality and concluded that while teacher ineptitude is neither flattering nor comfortable to confront, confront it we must if we’re to do anything about our sorry state of...
The Hyena Press: Part 2
Two questions would destroy at least half the agenda of the political left: “Compared to what?” and “At what cost?” A third question would wipe out most of the rest of the left’s agenda and demolish the vision behind that agenda:...
The Wreckage of the Consensus Revisited: New York Times Company Admits to Spreading Lies to Undermine America’s War Effort
As you may have heard, the Boston Globe published, as real, fake pictures purporting to show American soldiers in Iraq gang-raping Iraqi women. The pictures were actually from a porn website and were staged (not to make any political point, needless to add). The...
United Nations’ Law of the Sea Treaty
When former president Ronald Reagan declined to enter America into the United Nations’ Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), it seemed the debate over regulating the world’s oceans at the global level had ended, at least for the duration of his leadership. Under...
The Hyena Press
While politicians were expressing their shock to the media over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, the Iraqi terrorists gave us a bitter lesson in what real shock is all about, with the videotaped beheading of an American civilian who was in Iraq to try to help...
Last Economic Recession Began Under Clinton, Despite Rewrites By The Left
Media Matters for America is a new website (mediamatters.org) “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation.” It’s been developed with the zillions of tax-deductible dollars that George Soros and...
Last Economic Recession Began Under Clinton, Despite Rewrites By The Left
Media Matters for America is a new website (mediamatters.org) “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation.” It’s been developed with the zillions of tax-deductible dollars that George Soros and...
It’s Still the Economy, But Are Voters Stupid?
It’s been a miserable month in Iraq, but a wonderful month for the American economy. “The April employment report confirms unambiguously that the labor market is back,” said Economy.com, the respected website, on Thursday. Some 288,000 net new jobs...
Government Approved Relationships
Q: Dr. Hurd, on your article on gay associations, what reasons would you have if a person wanted to have an “association” with a parent, a sibling, a cousin or a minor? Where would you draw the line and what reasoning would you use to make this conclusion...
The Sage of Santa Fe: Laddered-Bond Funds
Five or six years ago, a friend I have known since high school — let’s call him R. — rhapsodized about a money manager who lived in, of all places, Santa Fe, N.M. “Find Garrett Thornburg,” said R. “This guy has the best financial...
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