Skilled shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. [Visa quotas] have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process we have created [a] privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of the income inequality.

Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.

Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.

I believe that the general growth in large [financial] institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically -- I should say, fully -- hedged.

The tub helps me relax, and it's a great place to read.

I'm a plain soap kind of guy.