Tag Archives: Idiotic quotes

He Said That? 8/6/15

Posted on September 6, 2015 | 3 comments

From Todd Clark, chairman of the Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund, on the pension fund return assumptions his fund is using:

We strongly believe, and past history shows, we can continue to achieve the 8.5 percent long term.

The Wall Street Journal, “Pensions Brace for Lower Returns,” September 8-9, 2015

The 30-year US government bond is yielding 2.88 percent, and most measures of valuation for the US stock market, even after its recent slide, are still close to historic highs. Many pension funds are lowering their return assumptions to 7 or 7.5 percent. SLL thinks even those assumptions are high. The higher the assumption, the less that must be contributed to the fund. It looks like Houston firefighters may end up getting stiffed on their relief and retirement.

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Posted in Financial markets

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They Said That? 7/24/15

Posted on July 24, 2015 | 1 comment

From SLL’s email:

How do these people survive?

ONE
Recently, when I went to McDonald’s I saw on the menu that you could have an order of 6, 9 or 12 Chicken McNuggets.
I asked for a half dozen nuggets.
‘We don’t have half dozen nuggets,’ said the teenager at the counter.
‘You don’t?’ I replied.
‘We only have six, nine, or twelve,’ was the reply.
‘So I can’t order half dozen nuggets, but I can order six?’
‘That’s right.’
So I shook my head and ordered six McNuggets
(Unbelievable but sadly true…)

TWO
I was checking out at the local Wal-Mart with just a few items and the lady behind me put her things on the belt close to mine. I picked up one of those ‘dividers’ that they keep by the cash register and placed it between our things so they wouldn’t get mixed.
After the girl had scanned all of my items, she picked up the ‘divider’, looking it all over for the bar code so she could scan it.
Not finding the bar code, she said to me, ‘Do you know how much this is?’
I said to her ‘I’ve changed my mind; I don’t think I’ll buy that today.’
She said ‘OK,’ and I paid her for the things and left.
She had no clue to what had just happened.

THREE
A woman at work was seen putting a credit card into her floppy drive and pulling it out very quickly.
When I inquired as to what she was doing, she said she was shopping on the Internet and they kept asking for a credit card number, so she was using the ATM ‘thingy’
(keep shuddering!!)

FOUR
I recently saw a distraught young lady weeping beside her car. ‘Do you need some help?’ I asked.
She replied, ‘I knew I should have replaced the battery to this remote door unlocker. Now I can’t get into my car. Do you think they (pointing to a distant convenience store) would have a battery to fit this?’
‘Hmmm, I don’t know. Do you have an alarm, too?’ I asked.
‘No, just this remote thingy,’ she answered, handing it and the car keys to me. As I took the key and manually unlocked the door, I replied, ‘Why don’t you drive over there and check about the batteries. It’s a long walk…’
PLEASE just lay down before you hurt yourself!!!
FIVE
Several years ago, we had an Intern who was none too swift. One day she was typing and turned to a secretary and said, ‘I’m almost out of typing paper. What do I do?’ ‘Just use paper from the photocopier’, the secretary told her. With that, the intern took her last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five ‘blank’ copies.
SIX
A mother calls 911 very worried asking the dispatcher if she needs to take her kid to the emergency room, the kid had eaten ants. The dispatcher tells her to give the kid some Benadryl and he should be fine, the mother says, ‘I just gave him some ant killer……’
Dispatcher: ‘Rush him in to emergency!’
Life is tough. It’s even tougher if you’re stupid!!!!

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They Said That? 7/18/15

Posted on July 18, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Benjamin Netanyahu in 2002:

If you take out Saddam, I guarantee it will have enormous positive reverberations.

Yes, those positive reverberations are still reverberating over Iraq and the Middle East.

From Defense Secretary Donal Runsfield and deputy Paul Wolfowitz in 2003 about the Iraq war:

“The war could be done on the cheap and would largely pay for itself.”

Yes $2 to $3 trillion, not counting the costs of ISIS, is pocket change. But other than that, the war is paying for itself.

And from farther back, a real howler that is now being echoed in Washington, from Newt Gingrich, concerning a meeting between notorious appeaser Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev:

“The most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

Yes, that certainly was a dangerous summit, and just like after the Hitler-Chamberlain apeasement-fest, if the US hadn’t jumped into another world war with the USSR, we’d all be speaking Russian today.

All quotes are from “The GOP Warmongers Are Wrong” by Mike Mish Shedlock

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Military

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He Said That? 6/30/15

Posted on June 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Ian Winer, director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities, referring to Monday’s financial turmoil:

People are getting nervous, as what seems like—all of a sudden, out of the blue—you have multiple hot spots. They’re just trying to protect their gains on the year and position themselves in the even that this becomes a more dramatic selloff.

The Wall Street Journal, “Turmoil in Europe Shakes Markets,” 6/30/15

Out of the blue? The world has been on a debt, debt monetization, central bank balance sheet expansion and interest rate suppression binge for six years, and the inevitable consequences are somehow out of the blue? Too much debt means eventually somebody has to cut back (China) or cannot pay (Greece and Puerto Rico). Once debt starts imploding, debt and fiat liquidity supported asset prices fall. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. Remember 2007-2009? This one started in earnest at the end of last year, and if Mr. Winer is surprised then Wedbush Securities should look around for another director of equity trading. If he wants to hold on to his job, Mr. Winer might want to put down whatever mainstream media rags he reads and check out SLL and the sites on its blog roll.

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Posted in Debt, Financial markets

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She Said That? 5/1/15

Posted on May 1, 2015 | 1 comment

The following gets tagged as an idiotic quote and as such, needs no further elaboration. From Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Mayor of Baltimore:

It’s a very delicate balancing act, because while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/05/01/quote-of-the-day-189/

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Posted in Government

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He Said That? 3/6/15

Posted on April 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

From President Obama, from Hill Air Force Base in Utah:

These are good-paying jobs that are helping folks enter the middle-class.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-05/here-comes-solyndra-20-obama-hire-75000-solar-workers

The president was referring to a new program with the goal of training 75,000 people by 2020 for the solar industry. An economically viable industry doesn’t need the government to train its workers.  Obama and other renewable energy advocates insist that they can be competitive—some day—but right now they need subsidies, tax breaks, and other government goodies. If Obama has his way one of those goodies will be training, but those “folks,” including veterans (now a target of Obama solicitude), will probably end up on the same scrap heap as Solyndra. That’s what happens when governments substitute their judgments for the market’s.

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Posted in Business, Economics

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He Said That? 3/31/15

Posted on March 31, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Jeb Bush, on the “Hugh Hewitt Show,” as reported on breitbart.com:

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush stated that he is “nervous” about criticism of the NSA and that he wished the president would do a better job defending government surveillance systems on Monday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show.”

Bush said that lone wolf terrorism “is a serious threat in a world where we’re so connected with the rest of the world. We have people moving in and people moving out. People get their information now, not everybody gets to listen to your show to get all their information. People get their information in different ways. They get disaffected, disillusioned, preyed upon, and so yeah, I think that this is an ongoing threat, and I hope that our counterintelligence capabilities are always vigilant. I’ve always been nervous about the attacks on the NSA, and somehow that we’re losing our freedoms by keeping the homeland safe. I think we need to be really vigilant about that.”

He added, “I think the President has to lead, has to explain to people. He’s actually enhanced the intelligence capabilities, in many ways, because technology has gotten better. But he never defends it. He never explains it. He never tries to persuade people that their civil liberties are being protected by the systems we have in place. If people knew that, I don’t think there’d be any doubt that they would want to have the ability to identify people from the outside that may be trying to coordinate with some people in the inside.”

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/03/30/jeb-im-nervous-about-nsa-criticism-obama-should-defend-nsa/

Not that he had much of chance, but this probably dooms Mr. Bush with libertarians and the libertarian wing of the Republican party. It should doom him with everyone else as well, but there are a lot of people who will gladly exchange their freedom for a government promise of “security,” and who wouldn’t recognize the Fourth Amendment if it was read to them.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Surveillance

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He Said That? 2/11/15

Posted on February 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Jack Lew, US Secretary of the Treasury, from a meeting of G-20 finance ministers and central bankers in Istanbul, Turkey:

In Europe, there’s a need for more fiscal policy. There’s a demand shortfall.

The Wall Street Journal, “Currency Warriors Get Boost From Finance Leaders,” 2/11/15

It’s a wondrous thing when two sentences can capture virtually everything that is wrong with contemporary economics, as practiced by developed countries’ finance ministers and central bankers.

Start with the notion of demand shortfall. What does that phrase even mean? That there are too much goods and services relative to the demand for them? In free markets, prices fall until markets clear at a price where supply and demand meet. Falling prices have been forbidden in modern economics, although it stands to reason than technological advances and other productivity enhancements would exert continuous downward pressure on prices (which is what happened during the span of the Industrial Revolution, the freest the US economy has ever been).

So yes, if prices can’t fall you’ll get a “demand shortfall.” The only way to remedy it would then be by some means other than the price mechanism. If you guessed those means would involve some sort of government action, compliments on your perspicacity. According to Mr. Lew, that means “fiscal policy.” Now fiscal policy can mean the government takes less in taxes, putting more money in people’s pockets, which would increase demand. However, in modern economics, fiscal policy means more government spending, funded by debt, which is then bought by the central bank (debt monetization), to achieve a desired inflation rate and level of demand.

In the last 6 years, governments have issued, and central banks have monetized, more debt than ever before in the whole history of mankind, probably more than all the prior millennia put together. The recovery from the financial crisis has been one of the weakest on record, but the attendees at the Istanbul confab agreed that was needed was still more debt, monetization, and currency depreciation. There were no announcements as to if, when, or how the world is supposed to get off this merry-go-round. SLL is, of course, betting that the it comes to an abrupt stop and the riders on their horsies get thrown off, hopefully sustaining massive injuries in the process. There has to be some consequences for rampant idiocy.

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Posted in Economics

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He Said That? 1/13/15

Posted on January 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:

If we walk away from responsibility as a country—if we make our national education responsibilities somehow optional—we would turn back the clock on educational progress, 15 years or more.

The Wall Street Journal, “Education Secretary Presses Central Federal Policy Role,” 1/13/15

What educational progress? We should be so lucky as to turn the clock back 15 years or more. Although the US is one of the world’s leaders in per capita education spending we are not one of the world’s leaders in educational attainment and student proficiency, and standardized test scores have essentially flat-lined for years, with statistically insignificant variations year-to-year. The latest federal “involvement” is Common Core: centralized one-size-fits-all education standards; mandated teaching methods that discard time-tested and successful teaching techniques in favor of faddish theories that confuse more than elucidate; all served up with a side dish of governmentally approved propaganda. In a better world, local administrators, teachers, and parents would control the public educational agenda and the federal government would stay out. It did for most of US history to no visible detriment to students, who once knew their multiplication tables cold by the end of first grade and graduated high school knowing how to diagram sentences (if you don’t know what diagraming a sentence means you’re proving my point) and write an essay. In a perfect world, education would be fully privatized and parents and students would enjoy the same diversity of educational choices and costs that are available for millions of goods and services on the internet, their local malls, and grocery stores.

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He Said That? 12/15/14

Posted on December 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

From a speech by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro this weekend:

There is no possibility of default, unless we would decide to not pay anymore as part of an economic strategy for development, and that’s not the strategy that has been constructed in these years of economic thought laid out by Hugo Chavez.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-15/venezuelan-bonds-fall-to-16-year-low-as-maduro-affirms-subsidies.html

It’s good to know that Venezuela will not default, unless it decides not to pay anymore “as part of an economic strategy development.” You can certainly hasten development, at least in the short term, by not paying your creditors. Markets are  skeptical of the Venezuelan government’s resolve. Its benchmark bonds, according to the article in Bloomberg, are trading at 37.835 cents on the dollar, and the pricing on credit default swaps implies a 97 percent chance of default in the next 12 months. Venezuela will be the first sovereign casuality of the oil price drop; the betting here is that it won’t be the last. Even at 37.835 cents on the dollar, anyone who wants to speculate on Venezuela’s bonds had better have strong nerves, infinite patience, and top-flight lawyers; sovereign defaults tend to get very messy.

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Posted in Business, Debt, Economics, Financial markets

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