Aladdin's Lamp

Yes! Ready money is Aladdin's lamp.

-- Lord George Gordon (Noel) Byron, 6th Baron Byron 22 January 1788 - 19 April 1824), Anglo-Scottish poet and leading figure in Romanticism, Don Juan (canto XII, st. 12), 1823

No Bonus

$500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus.

-- Wall Street compensation consultant James Reda on Feb. 3, 2009, giving the New York Times a good example of just how totally out of touch the super-rich really are, Salon.com, "The decade's top 10 quotations", 1 January 2010

2009 Mileage

For the year 2009, driving my 1999 Saturn which now has >217,000 miles, with past years' stats for comparison:

                  2009      2008      2007      2006    2009 delta  % delta
Total miles     : 27,307    24,346    25,847    25,111    +2957     +12.1%
Total cost      : $1,809.71 $2,188.79 $2,231.76 $1,942.72 -$379.08  -17.3%
Total gallons   : 793.73    686.27    812.14    776.47    +107.46   +15.6%
Avg gallons/day : 2.174     1.875     2.225     2.127     +0.299    +15.9%
Avg days/fillup : 4.9       5.3       4.7       4.9       -0.4      - 7.5%
Avg miles/day   : 74.81     66.52     70.81     68.80     +8.29     +12.4%
Avg cost/day    : $4.90     $5.92     $6.00     $5.27     -$1.02    -17.3%
Avg cost/gal    : $2.28     $3.14     $2.75     $2.50     -$0.86    -27.3%
Avg miles/gal   : 34.95     35.48     32.24     32.77     -0.53     - 1.5%

The stats are starting to look a little cramped. I'll hafta work on that.

MPG dropped by a fraction, but not by much; I can still claim my car gets 35mpg. The drop in cost for a gallon of gas surprises me -- cheapest year so far, despite the high miles. I ran up the most miles for a year, but not the most gallons of gas. Now I need to cut mileage to <25,000 again.

Normal

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for -- in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

-- Ellen Goodman (1941-), American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist

Until The Day

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville

We Cannot Have Both

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

-- Abraham Flexner, educator (1866-1959)

A Village Of 100 People

If the world were a village of 100 people ....

6 people (all in the USA) would own 59% of all the village's wealth,
74 people would share another 39%, and
20 people would share the remaining 2%.

-- David Copeland, in Value Earth

Recession Over

Anyone who thinks the recession is over just because the economy grew in the 3rd quarter is an economist.

-- Ron Elving, NPR's "It's All Politics" podcast, 29 October 2009

That Great Fiction

The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

-- Frederic Bastiat, French economist of the 19th Century

Paid For Taking Too Much Risk

The simple proposition should be that you don't want people being paid for taking too much risk, and you want to make sure that their compensation is tied to long-term performance.

-- Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, New York Times, 19 September 2009

On All The Time

We have entered this new era where essentially everything is on all the time.

-- Alan Meier, an expert on energy efficiency, on the proliferation of gadgets in American homes, New York Times, 20 September 2009

Less Fun

It's simply less fun pulling up to the stoplight in a Hummer than it used to be. It's a change in norms.

-- Robert Barbera, chief economist at research and trading firm ITG, on the shift in consumer tastes created by the recession, New York Times, 29 August 2009

Bottom

We've found the bottom.

-- Mark Fleming, chief economist for data firm First American CoreLogic, on housing prices, New York Times, 29 July 2009

The Cost Of A Thing

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), naturalist and author

Still Got Food

If you lose your job tomorrow, you've still got food.

-- Lloyd Romriell, of Annis, Idaho, who has begun raising chickens, New York Times, 4 August 2009

Guns And Money

When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

-- P. J. O'Rourke (1947-), American political satirist, journalist, and writer

Banking Should Not Be Exciting

Banking should not be exciting. If banking is exciting there is something wrong with it.

-- Clay Ewing, president of German American Bancorp., a community bank in Jasper, IN, New York Times, 12 May 2009

Furlough

All of my Thursdays are Fridays.

Unfortunate

It is unfortunate that trees had to die for this story.

-- Dean Baker (13 July 1958-), American macroeconomist, co-founder and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, on an article on the economy in the New York Times, "Beat the Press" blog, 1 May 2009

Not Having To

The only thing that hurts more than paying an income tax is not having to pay an income tax.

-- Lord Thomas R. Dewar (1864-1930), Scottish peer, whiskey distiller, and aphorist.

Tears

I guess I'm not really used to people with tears in their eyes.

-- Rosalie Bork, Arlington Heights, IL reference librarian, on newly unemployed or homeless patrons, New York Times, 2 April 2009

Wife, Kids, And A Mortgage

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.

-- Marvin Kitman (1929-), author and media critic

Killer Economy

For over 30 years, Dr. Harvey Brenner, a sociologist and public health expert at Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Texas Health Science Center, has been carefully studying the link between economic fluctuations and the nation's physical and mental health. Based on the experience of the last half century, he has even estimated how many more deaths, suicides, heart attacks, homicides, and admissions to mental hospitals we can expect when unemployment rises.

After crunching the numbers, Brenner calculated that for every one percent increase in the unemployment rate (an additional 1.5 million people out of work), we can expect an additional 47,000 deaths, including 26,000 deaths from heart attacks, about 1,200 from suicide, 831 murders, and 635 deaths related to alcohol consumption.

-- Peter Dreier, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College, "This Economy is a Real Killer," Huffington Post, 10 March 2009

Devil's Corporation

Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), The Devil's Dictionary

Corporate Conscience

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

-- Henry David Thoreau (12 July 1817 - 6 May 1862), American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, historian, philosopher, "Civil Disobedience" (1849)

Even Trash

Even trash has become worthless.

-- Tian Wengui, who collects refuse for recycling in Beijing, New York Times, 12 March 2009

A Little Worried

We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.

-- Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, New York Times, 14 March 2009

Madoff

As the years went by I realized this day, and my arrest, would inevitably come.

-- Bernard L. Madoff, pleading guilty to a Ponzi scheme allegedly involving $64 Billion, New York Times, 13 March 2009

Public Opinion

Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. ... I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities -- politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent.

-- George F. Kennan (16 February 1904 - 17 March 2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist, and historian

Captain Asphalt

I'm Captain Asphalt.

-- Timothy J. Gilchrist, newly appointed stimulus czar for New York State, NY Times, 5 March 2009

Money Talks

That money talks
  I'll not deny,
I heard it once:
  It said, "Goodbye."

-- Richard Armour (1906-1988), American poet and author

True Value

Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.

-- Bob Wells, American editor for Windows and .NET Magazine

Panic

This is a panic in the way of the fine 19th-century panics, where we all run around like headless chickens.

-- R. Jeremy Grantham, chairman of a Boston investment firm, New York Times, 25 October 2008

Irrational

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

-- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), British economist, quoted in The Politics of Public Fund Investing: How to Modify Wall Street to Fit Main Street (2006) by Ben Finkelstein

Nationalize

It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring. I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do.

-- Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, Financial Times, February 2009

Bad Apples

To date, the banks have stuck their heads in the sand and demanded that they be paid the price of good apples for bad apples.

-- Lynn E. Turner, former chief accountant for the Securities and Exchange Commission, on setting a value on assets the United States might buy in its banking rescue plan, New York Times, 2 February 2009

Natural Proclivity

The natural proclivity of democratic governments is to pursue public policies which concentrate benefits on the well-organized and well-informed, and disperse the costs on the unorganized and ill-informed.

-- Peter Boettke (1960-), American economist

Honesty In Government

We will have to try things we've never tried before. We will make mistakes.

-- Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, outlining a sweeping overhaul and expansion of the bank rescue program, New York Times, 11 February 2009

Pages For All Ages

Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down.

-- Salman Rushdie, From The Quotable Book Lover (Lyons Press), Quote-of-the-Day on the website of Pages For All Ages bookstore, where today begins a liquidation sale after over 20 years in business

Settle The Quarrel

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel.

-- Abraham Lincoln (12 February 1809 - 15 April 1865), 16th President of the United States, speech to Illinois legislature, January 1837

Not Units But Fractions

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions; with their individuality and independence of choice in matters of business they have lost all their individual choice within the field of morals.

-- Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (12/28/1856 - 2/3/1924), 28th President of the United States, annual address, American Bar Association, Chattanooga (31 August 1910)

Crisis

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.

-- Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's Chief of Staff, Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, November 2008

Like It Or Not

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

-- Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), British Biologist, Educator

Modern Conservative

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)

Debtor Mentality

Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power -- governments, employers -- exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient -- not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you're doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you've persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you've indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who -- either because they're heroically brave, or because they're insane, or because they know themselves to be safe -- are free from fear.

-- Tana French in "The Likeness", a novel set in Ireland, cited in Bruce Schneier's blog, 15 January 2009

Power Versus Knowledge

We got into this crisis because power was overly concentrated relative to knowledge. What has been going on for the past several months is more consolidation of power. This is bound to make things worse. Just as Nixon's bureaucrats did not have the knowledge to go along with the power they took when they instituted wage and price controls, the Fed and the Treasury cannot possibly have knowledge that is proportional to the power they currently exercise in financial markets.

-- Arnold Kling, The Political Economy of the Bailout, econlog.econlib.org, 15 October 2008

Standup Economist

Paul Solman: An economist comedian, who better to analyze our plight, at the micro level, individual consumers, and at the macro, the economy as a whole? Yoram Bauman asked us to feed him the following straight line.

If the U.S. economy were an animal, what animal would it be?

Yoram Bauman: I would have -- I would have to go with a hamster right now. And it's a hamster that's been running around its cage, you know, for maybe seven years. And it's tired. So, as a microeconomist, I look at it, and I think that the hamster needs some rest. Macroeconomists look at the hamster and think that the hamster needs some methamphetamines.

And I'm sure that they're right. But, after two years, it's going to be one ugly hamster. I mean, it's going to have rotten teeth. It's going to have like bloodshot eyes. It's going to be scratching itself all the time. You know, there's going to be a price to pay.

-- Yoram Bauman, Ph.D., the "Standup Economist", PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 14 January 2009

Train Wreck

This thing started when people with no money and lots of debt, having little or no way of paying back money, were given loans so others could profit. Now we have businesses with no money and lots of debt, having little or no way of paying the money back, asking for loans so a few can profit. Maybe I'm being too simplistic but is seems like a train wreck in slow motion.

-- JimPh [lightly edited for readability], The Dilbert Blog comments, 12 December 2008

2008 Mileage

For the year 2008, driving my 1999 Saturn which now has >189,000 miles, with past years' stats for comparison:

                  2008        2007        2006          2008 delta  % delta
Total miles     : 24,346      25,847      25,111          -1501     - 5.8%
Total cost      : $2,188.79   $2,231.76   $1,942.72       -$42.97   - 1.9%
Total gallons   : 686.27      812.14      776.47          -125.87   -15.4%
Avg gallons/day : 1.875       2.225       2.127           -0.350    -15.7%
Avg days/fillup : 5.3         4.7         4.9             +0.6      +12.7%
Avg miles/day   : 66.52       70.81       68.80           -4.29     - 6.0%
Avg cost/day    : $5.92       $6.00       $5.27           -$0.08    - 1.3%
Avg cost/gal    : $3.14       $2.75       $2.50           +$0.39    +14.1%
Avg miles/gal   : 35.48       32.24       32.77           +3.24     +10.0%

Last year when comparing stats, I resigned myself to losing a chunk of mpg each year as the car ages. However, this year two changes came into play: first, in March I replaced my clutch, and mpg appeared to immediately jump about 5%. Second, the price of gas became ridiculous; I replaced my already fairly sedate driving habits with new ones, and mpg again appeared to immediately jump about 5%.

Madman

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

-- Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993), economist, educator, peace activist, and poet