Wordbites

“Greece was a zit, Portugal is a boil, and Spain is a tumor”

7 April 2012: Bill Gross, Pimco

“It does, because I think they are pushing the wrong policies, but I’m not in a position to stop it. I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”

11 Oct 2010: George Soros, billionaire financier, asked if the prospect of Republican control of one or both houses of Congress concerned him.

“He can’t claim that the ideas of Keynes are eternal verities like the ideas of Newton; they’re not. Nothing in economics is that scientific. I’ve got history on my side, and he’s got an economic model from 1936. And we’ll see who was right.”

7 Oct 2010: Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, responding to remarks made by nemesis Paul Krugman on his LiveJournal, Conscience of a Liberal, in which Krugman declared victory in a skirmish between Keynesian economists such as himself and classical economists such as Ferguson.”

“Ben Bernanke’s tinkering with monetary policy has failed to generate a resurgence in demand for loans, yet he believes he can sell more loans if he gives the banks more reserves.  This is as insane as the apple salesman convincing himself that he can sell more apples if he puts more on the shelves.”

The Pragmatic Capitalist, 14 Sep 2010, on prospect of the Fed starting another round of quantitative easing.

“When the European Union countries met in May to deal with the Greek crisis, they proposed a €750 billion ($900 billion) rescue programme largely consisting of even more borrowed money.”

The Economist, 26 June 2010,  reporting on what the answer to a crisis caused by too much debt is.

“The central bank’s implementation of QE at a time of zero interest rates was similar to a shopkeeper who, unable to sell more than 100 apples a day at $100 each, tries stocking the shelves with 1,000 apples, and when that has no effect, adds another 1,000.  This is essentially the story of QE, which not only failed to bring about economic recovery, but also failed to stop asset prices from falling well into 2003.”

Richard Koo, ‘The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics’

“If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.”

Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, explaining how miniscule mankind’s CO2 emissions are in relation to the Earth’s atmosphere.

“A sumptuous smorgasbord of such flagrant hypocrisy has been laid before us that I feel a new category is in order: hypercrites, who combine the worst aspects of the hypocrite AND the phoney combined with some absolute lunatic conviction that NO ONE WILL NOTICE WHAT THEY’RE DOING. Hiding in full sight, if you like; it’s as though they believed those gimcrack ads about invisible capes in the back of the old-school comics.

Thus the high-flying poltroon Prince Charles lectures us about our carbon footprint while clocking up enough air miles to make a trolley-dolly dizzy. The Pope rails against the moral vacuum at the heart of modernity while presiding over the biggest paedophile ring in recorded history. Head honchos at the Government quango the Commonwealth Development Corporation live it up in Michelin-starred restaurants, kick back in five-star hotels and take £330 taxi rides from Brussels to Paris, out of the £2.5bn pot of public money set aside for fighting poverty in the world’s worst-off countries.”

Columnist Julie Burchill writing in The Independent: ‘You can’t part a phoney from his money in the age of the hypercrite‘