"I.O.U." [.]

[fiefoe]

The more random bits:

• I wondered why a particular entrepreneur had gone into the restaurant and club business.. His reply was instant: "It'll have a good cash stream, and he'll just leverage it up. Say he's losing a million a year but has ten million in cash coming it. He leverages it twenty times, suddenly he's got two hundred million to play with."
• In France, .. the critical figure is not the value of your property but the size of your income (that determines the size of the mortgage.)
• It's precisely the most free-market, go-go countries which show this overpowering appetite for people to own their own homes.
• ... an idea which is both noble in its motivations and devastatingly, dazzlingly, breathtakingly cynical. This is the idea: how do you drive changes in America? Real, noncosmetic change? Answer: by finding ways for lawyers to make money. "We do litigation that no one else will do, we try to teach the private bar how to do it once we've figured out how to do it successfully."
• "Celtic Tiger".. it was a bad sign that the Irish economic miracle was named after an animal which doesn't exist.
• In Iceland: .. the "pots and pans revolution,", in which people banged kitchenware outside the Parliament building until the government quit and called an election.
• The derivatives lobby .. managed to get Congress to pass a law actually banning legislation (in 2000's the Commodity Futures Modernization Act).
• When Margaret Thatcher came to power, you couldn't take more than GBP500 out of the country at any one time - a restriction which now seems as distant as that of whalebone corsetry.  {C.f. "The Trustee from the Toolroom".}
• ... the fundamental assumptions based on the primacy of money and the nonreality of other schemes of value.
• The cumulative weight of this rightness-or-wrongness is one of the things that make financial types psychologically distinctive. .. if you go to work with money and make money, you can be proved right in the most inhumanly pure way.
• The end result was that almost 90 percent of the mortgage-backed CDOs were assessed as AAA grade. Very little corporate debt is rated AAA...

Keynes being misty-eyed: "We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession .. will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disorder."

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