Many normal people — not to mention politicians looking to exploit the latest headline — talk about corporate bankruptcy as if it’s some sort of financial scam, a gimmick perpetrated by malevolent corporations to avoid paying their bills. So...
POLITICS
Stock Picking Systems: Price to Sales and Discipline
A stock-picking system that can consistently beat the market has always been the Holy Grail of investors – desirable, tempting, but unobtainable. Investing just couldn’t be that easy. But a few years ago, James P. O’Shaughnessy, a financial adviser...
Ordeal by Slander
Wall Street Journal reporter John Gasparino has been on a rampage this week to be the first with every new bit of gossip leaked from NY attorney general Eliot Spitzer’s office trying to connect Salomon Smith Barney telecom analyst Jack Grubman’s upgrade of...
Race and Cant
Cant has become the norm in discussions of any issue involving race or ethnicity. However, a new book by Linda Chavez — a memoir of her own remarkable life — should make it inescapably clear what counterproductive and even vile things have been going on in...
Nancy Pelosi? The Dems Just Don’t Get It
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a 15-year member of the House of Representatives, appears poised to succeed Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., as the House minority leader. If one reads the recent Republican off-year victories as an endorsement of Bush’s policies (or at least a...
Whither Democrats?
Democrats have now lost two consecutive elections that, by all the usual standards, they should have won easily. Al Gore lost the 2000 election despite a usually unbeatable combination of peace, prosperity, a declining crime rate and the first budget surplus in...
Whither Republicans?
Even in defeat, Democrats can console themselves that they still have a lock on minority votes in general and black votes in particular. Moreover, given the demographic realities, minority voters are going to be a growing percentage of all voters in the years ahead....
Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein’s Shop of Horrors
As a boy, writes Kenneth Pollack in his masterful new book on Iraq, “The Threatening Storm,” Saddam Hussein would heat an iron poker until it was white-hot, then use it to impale cats and dogs. Years later, when he had boys of his own, he would take them...
Nancy Pelosi: A San Francisco Liberal
Now that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is becoming the Democrats’ House minority leader, she is being celebrated as the first woman to hold such a high post. But she is also being described as a “San Francisco liberal” — which she definitely is....
Gun Statistics for the Second-Amendment-challenged
Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) recently urged a ban on Saturday Night Specials and “assault weapons,” while recommending a national ballistic fingerprint database. The interviewer, CNN’s Judy Woodruff, asked no difficult...
Wins and Losses: Bush’s Dilemma
President Bush can count two unexpected victories in the past week: a broad mandate from the American people — in the form of an unprecedented mid-term congressional sweep — followed by a unanimous United Nations Security Council vote approving the...
Child Sacrifice, Palestinian Style
Israel is criticized for alleged insensitivity to the risks of casualties among civilians, especially children, during counter-terrorist missions. But the tragedy of unintended casualties from justified military actions cannot be compared to a society’s...
Scour the World for Stocks
In the good old days, foreign stocks provided balance. Typically, if U.S. stocks were having a bad year, non-U.S. stocks would be having a good year. One study found that for the 25 years between 1970 and 1995, foreign stocks beat U.S. by a wide margin in 12 years,...
North Korea Building Nuclear Bombs? Perish the Thought
Our leaders express incredible shock that North Korea is building nuclear bombs. This emotion of shock betrays the reasons why we have the whole problem with terrorism in the first place. We are victims of terrorism because too many of us — and all of our...
SEC Should Support Markets and Not Central Planning
Harvey Pitt had to go. He had lost the credibility to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, President Bush should move swiftly to replace him. The SEC has too much on its plate for dawdling. What the country needs is someone who has the guts and stature to...
Live Free or Die: Giving Real Meaning to Veterans Day
Veterans Day arouses three emotions in most Americans: solemnity, because it celebrates the veterans who have defended our great country; sadness, because so many have lost their lives in the process; and pride, because they have fought so well. The supreme value that...
Eliot Spitzer’s Attack on the Securities Industry
Whatever you may think of Microsoft, the decision last Friday by federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kottely to approve the company’s settlement with the Department of Justice was a much needed rebuke to the scorched-earth prosecutorial mindset of today’s state...
Honor Veterans, Rebuff Sacrifice
As a former captain in the US Army, I can attest that I never encountered anyone who joined because of some masochistic yearning to transform himself into a sacrificial animal.
Deformed Reform of Wall Street
The proposed restructuring of stock research at big Wall Street investment banks — if “proposed” is the proper word when NY attorney general Eliot Spitzer is doing the proposing holding a rubber hose in his hand — is an even worse-than-usual...
Do you want your child to die fighting in Iraq?
“Do you want your child to die fighting in Iraq?” This type of question is one of the subtle, insidious ways by which pacifists try to undercut the war against Islamic terrorists. To understand how this is done, we must first take an honest look at our...
Grasping the Essence of the Republican Victory: A Philosopher Analyzes the 2002 Elections
The election results were good. The outcome was, in all modesty, what I had expected for a year: Republican control of the Congress. I expected this because of 9/11, and that is in fact the explanation of the outcome. I agree with those commentators who say that the...
The Thirty Stocks That Returned the Most in the Last 30 Years
Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Money magazine recently crunched the numbers and found the 30 stocks that had returned the most, in price and dividends, since the magazine’s founding in August 1972. The No.1 stock was, of all things, an airline –...
What Will the Republicans Do with Their Victory?
The oh-so-smug and oh-so-glib media “experts” have ended up with egg on their face for the second time in a few weeks. First their “profiles” of the Beltway sniper turned out to be completely wrong — wrong car and wrong race, among other...
Bill Gates and Michael Milken: The War on Capitalism, Then and Now
It’s interesting to compare Bill Gates’ and Microsoft’s victory last Friday in obtaining a favorable settlement of their antrust case with another battle in the war on capitalism from ten years ago — one that turned out very, very differently....
The Election We Deserve
As of the writing of this column, it is mid-day on Nov. 5, and the exit polls have not even begun to predict how today’s elections will end. It might seem like a bad time to make predictions, given that this is considered one of the tightest congressional...
The Meaning of Microsoft’s Victory
On May 16, 1998, Bill Gates walked away from negotiations with the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the attorneys general of 20 states to prevent the threatened filing of a sweeping antitrust suit against Microsoft. Gates had offered many...
Getting Things Wrong: Former Vice President Walter Mondale’s Experience
Former Vice President Walter Mondale made much of his “experience” during his televised debate with his rival for the Senate seat of the late Paul Wellstone, Republican Norm Coleman. The real question, however, is not just what quantity of experience each...
If You Want Growth You Need Technology
Stocks are first and foremost growth instruments — a bet on the potential upside. But the best thing I can say for the stock market right now is that it’s deeply undervalued. That has been reason enough for me to tell clients over the past several months...
The Stockholm Syndrome at the Wall Street Journal?
The markets, big business and Wall Street have been held hostage by politicians and regulators for so long that the hostages are starting to identify with their kidnappers. How else can you explain the October 30th Wall Street Journal front pager, breathlessly...
The Stockholm Syndrome at the Wall Street Journal?
The markets, big business and Wall Street have been held hostage by politicians and regulators for so long that the hostages are starting to identify with their kidnappers. How else can you explain the October 30th Wall Street Journal front pager, breathlessly...
Senator Paul Wellstone: A Soul in Need of Overhaul
“He represented the regular people. He didn’t represent the high and the mighty.” So says a Minnesota resident while mourning the death of Senator Paul Wellstone. It’s an interesting distinction: regular versus mighty. “Regular”...
John Allen Muhammad: Convert to Violence?
It came as no surprise to learn that the lead suspect as the Washington, D.C.,–area sniper is John Allen Muhammad, a Black-American who converted to Islam about 17 years ago. Nor that seven years ago he provided security for Louis Farrakhan’s...
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