'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work.

The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too.

I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.