John Templeton: A few of his least favorite things

• Being too optimistic about business ventures
• Relying on any one idea or concept in your investments
• Relying on borrowed money you use for your ventures and assuming that you won’t have to pay it back

~ John Templeton, investor, mutual fund pioneer, and philanthropist, "John Templeton: A Few of His Least Favorite Things," LilaRajiva.com, July 8, 2008, by Lila Rajiva

Lila Rajiva on the Bush stimulus bill

After a wild orgy of spending, rate-cutting, war-’n-waste, what’s the responsible thing to do?

Why, more of the same!

Yep. Seems what the American people need is more stimulation…not less.

And to think all along, we’ve been laboring under the delusion that the population was already as overstimulated as a cage of parakeets on speed. We thought they needed haldol, not stimulation. There was too much lending… too much spending… too many houses… too many mortgages… too much debt… too much speculation… too much war… too much waste… too much consumption… too many deals…too many Goldman Sachs bankers on the fed payroll… too many orange alerts…too much patting down at airports… too much fear-mongering…too many Trump mansions…too much celebrity blather…too many Brittany Spears court appearances…

But now we know better.

There weren’t enough.

~ Lila Rajiva, "Goldman Sachs Watch: Bush's $168 Billion Morning-After Pill," LilaRajiva.com, February 9, 2008

Lila Rajiva on the political Rolodex of Goldman Sachs

Some grouse that Goldman is not just one of the biggest players on Wall Street – it also sets the rules of the game with the zillion-watt manpower it routinely shunts to Washington. Since the days when CEO Sidney Weinberg played éminence grise to Roosevelt and Truman, it’s given the US three treasury secretaries (Henry Fowler, Robert Rubin and now Hank Paulson), an undersecretary and several deputy secretaries of state (Robert Hormats, John Whitehead, Robert Zoellick), two chairmen of the National Economic Council (Rubin and Stephen Friedman), a chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (Stephen Friedman), a chief of staff (Joshua Bolten), a CEO of the New York Stock Exchange (John Thain), a president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (Gerald Corrigan and Whitehead).

Then there’s also a New Jersey governor, a US senator, a chairman of the BBC, several major hedge-fund managers, the chairmen of the Port Authorities of New York and New Jersey, a governor of the Bank of Italy, the head of the US Export-Import Bank, two US trade representatives – a veritable Burke’s peerage of national and international finance. To all this, add Goldman’s investment banking business, which – though it accounts for only 5% of revenues – has a Rolodex crammed with the financial elite.

~ Lila Rajiva, "Why it's time to sell Goldman," Money Week, June 30, 2006

Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva on crowd behavior

It doesn't matter how untrue a thing is. If enough people (especially people we look up to) repeat it often enough, it soon becomes conventional wisdom.

A hundred years ago, Gustave Le Bon understood this when he wrote his classic work on crowds. He realized that the popular mind wanted most of all to simplify things.

Le Bon called the process - by which an idea gets simplified, repeated, imitated, and spread by the crowd - contagion.

~ Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets (2007)

Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva on the outcome of 9/11

The attacks of September 11 produced exactly the results the terrorists desired - the Bush administration panicked, got out the duct tape, and created what Leif Wenar at the University of Sheffield cleverly calls "a false sense of insecurity."

In short, they created panic - even terror - in the American people, which, of course, is precisely the aim of terrorists. In the language of the Marxist terrorists of the late 1960s, their real aim is to radicalize onlookers, moving them to join the cause. That is just what the Bush administration seems to have done. Rather than calmly and quietly proceeding to track down the perpetrators, it blundered right into Iraq and stirred up terrorist ambitions all over the Middle East. Where previously there had been only a handful of fanatics to worry about, now there are thousands of them.

~ Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets, p. 57