The expansion of health insurance and government entitlements created "free money" and thus the explosion of healthcare costs. The solution is simple and "impossible": we all pay cash. Here's why healthcare (a.k.a. sick-care) costs cannot be reduced; the entire system is based on vast pools of "free money." The corporate-America or ...read more

Satyajit Das’s book, Traders, Guns & Money, opens with a great anecdote about a meeting with an Indonesian noodle company. The noodle men were “Indonesians of Chinese extraction,” Das writes. “They were part of the infamous ‘bamboo network’ of ethnic Chinese business interests that crisscrossed South East Asia.” The noodle ...read more

In the twilight of the Bush days, in the twilight of the twilight season, a consensus has formed that we are headed into a long, dark passage leading we know not where. Even CNBC's Lawrence Kudlow has been reduced to searching for stray "mustard seeds" of hope on hands and ...read more

I have a good friend named Bill who lives on the convergence of two tidal streams in an area aptly named: Twin Rivers.  Last year his bulkhead was destroyed in a severe storm.  The problem with repairing a bulkhead is that it is underwater, and that presents peculiar challenges.  The ...read more

There are a lot of ways to kill something, either slowly or quickly.  As for a living thing, you can shoot it, run over it, or use some other instant way of getting rid of it.  There are slow ways, such as poison administered gradually, or perhaps destroying its ability ...read more

“U.S. financial firms have taken write downs and losses of $666.1 billion since the beginning of 2007,” according to Bloomberg. There you have it. The number of the bust. The financial end times rolled on yesterday. The latest twist is the decision of U.S. regulators to come to the aid ...read more

As the fiesta of “globalism” (Tom Friedman-style) draws to a close — another consequence of currency problems — we’ll have to figure out how to make things in this country again. We will not be manufacturing things at the scale, or in the manner, we were used to in, say, ...read more

Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it’s hardly reassuring to know that it’s been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the U.S. Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a ...read more

There is nothing so sad as to see an elderly person with a whole medicine cabinet full of various prescription drugs, which are regularly taken several times a day and for some strange reason their health doesn’t seem to improve. Thousands of times, a son or daughter has come upon ...read more

“Well, God knows you don’t need any brains to buck barley bags...” — John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) Alpha used to be what hedge-fund managers promised their clients. Better still, portable alpha — defined in the easy bed-time reading of finance MBAs as the “generation of excess return over a benchmark ...read more