Doug Bandow on America's foreign policy of "defense welfare"

Although international cooperation makes sense, doing for other nations what they can and should do themselves does not.  For instance, the Europeans have roughly 11 times the economic strength and three times the population of Russia, their most plausible adversary.  Why aren’t they defending themselves?  Because the US is willing to do it for them, of course.  Similarly, if Japan fears Chinese or North Korean aggression, why does it spend barely one percent of GDP on the military?  Because America is committed to doing the job.  Unfortunately, Washington has turned alliances into defense welfare for populous and prosperous friends.  Biden & Co. seem determined to make this problem even worse.

~ Doug Bandow, "After Two Months, President Joe Biden has Become Donald Trump Lite on Foreign Policy," Anti-War.com, March 29, 2021

Warren Buffett on integrity

Look for three things in a person: intelligence, energy and integrity.  If they don't have the last one, don't ever bother with the first two.

~ Warren Buffett

Kevin Duffy: Do politics and friendship mix?

The quantity and quality of friendships will be limited by scarcity: our time, resources and emotional energy.  E.g. narcissists are high maintenance and crowd out other friendships.  Friendships grow deeper and stronger, moving up the ladder, or weaker and more superficial, sometimes to the point of falling off the ladder completely and being displaced by new friendships. 

For an activist libertarian (as opposed to a retreatist), deep relationships require a strong philosophical bond.  At times like today, where society is hurtling towards authoritarianism and "friends" are joining the crowd and revealing their true colors, friendships are being put to the test and in much greater flux.

~ Kevin Duffy, comment on The Tom Woods Show, March 30, 2021

Warren Buffett on investing and intelligence

You don't need to be a rocket scientist.  Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ.

~ Warren Buffett

Tim Price on mask wearning and freedom

If you're still wearing a mask, you almost deserve everything you are shortly going to get by way of permanent loss of freedoms.

~ Tim Price, tweet, March 30, 2021

Howard Zinn on American history

American history is nothing to be proud of; on the contrary, it is nothing more than one long, disgraceful record of oppression, genocide and exploitation.

~ Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)

Donna Hearne on the roots of federally-funded education

These revolutionary educational movers, movements, and ideas coalesced in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson created and passed, as a part of the "war on poverty," the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).  For the first time, education became an official federal program, even though it was not one of the legal areas for federal involvement specified in the Constitution.  This law cleverly authorized federally-funded education programs, administered by the states, effectively shifting decision-making from the local to the federal.  In 2002, Congress amended ESEA and reauthorized it as the No Child Left Behind Act.  Social justice planners were delighted and went to work.

~ Donna H. Hearne, The Long War & Common Core, p. 4

Benjamin Graham on emotion and investing

Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.

~ Benjamin Graham

Judy Mikovits on Covid vaccines

I showed solutions, which is what we're always trying to do and show a technology called “breakthrough genomics,” which this company used machine learning to look at full-length, full-genome sequences, not just proteins but looking at introns where you can see who's going to be most susceptible in the entire type one interferon pathway, who's going to be most susceptible with certain single nucleotide polymorphism in ACE2 receptors.  We can, we do have the technology to see who's susceptible from severe effects.  It will be a huge part of the population, and again, one size clearly doesn't fit all in any vaccine strategy.  But forcing a chemotherapy and a gene therapy on an entire population where millions of Americans, millions of people worldwide will die and will get these deadly diseases like ITP.  We know this.  The scientific community knows this, and not only is it being censored but our careers or our lives are being destroyed if we dare talk about this.

~ Judy Mikovits, Ph.D, "COVID-19 Vaccination: Experimental Gene Therapy Underthe Guise of Immunity?A Special Interview With Judy Mikovits by Dr. Joseph Mercola," p. 8

Mike Whitney on the silencing of Covid vaccine critics

Why is the media preventing these experts from articulating their reservations to the American people directly? 

It’s obvious, isn’t it?  It’s because the people that are managing this campaign don’t want anything that veers from the “official narrative.”  They don’t want people thinking for themselves, they don’t want people searching alternate websites that challenge the new prevailing doctrine on vaccines, they don’t want people who read the details about the trials or the medical journals or the research papers.  They don’t want you to question their motives, or weigh the risks and benefits of getting vaccinated.  They don’t want you to notice that their vaccine never completed long-term trials or met the normal standards for product safety.  They don’t want you to consider the fact that mRNA is a relatively new technology with a checkered past that includes some very disturbing animal trials in which all the animals died.  They don’t want you to think about any of this.  They want you to shut up, stand in line, turn off your brain, and roll up your sleeve.

~ Mike Whitney, "You Refuse to Get Vaccinated, But Are You Ready to be an Outcast?," The Unz Review, March 27, 2021

Bill Bonner on GDP and government spending

Included in GDP is government spending. But the services offered by the government are not the kind that you are usually looking for. 

Few people wake up in the morning and say, “Today, I’m going shopping for an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.” Instead, they want the things the government doesn’t make. 

Government spending is almost completely focused on the consumption of wealth, not the creation of it. In other words, it doesn’t add to the supply side of the supply/demand teeter totter. It subtracts from it. 

So, when government spending increases as a percentage of GDP, that too should be cause for higher consumer prices. 

After WWII, total government spending – state, local, and federal – shrank to a bit more than 25% of GDP. Last year, it was over 40%.

~ Bill Bonner, "The Federal Reserve is Wasting Tons of Money," Rogue Economics, March 22, 2021

Henry Hazlitt on economics

The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence.  The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

~ Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 1: "The Lesson," p. 17

Henry Hazlitt on the differences between the good and bad economist

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist looks beyond.  The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences.  The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

~ Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 1: "The Lesson," p. 16

Brian Schartz on the retail investor and parallels to 2000

We have also taken note of the significant spike in retail trading activities.  In our mid-year letter last summer, we referenced a friend who had gone from asking for help rebalancing his retirement funds to opening a Robinhood account to day trade option contracts in a matter of months.  The financial press has been littered with similar anecdotes, and retail trading account openings have been extraordinarily strong over the course of 2020.  We are reminded of the E-Trade and Ameritrade account openings of the late 1990’s by scores of unsophisticated traders who thought that they knew how to invest, simply by virtue of making a lot of money trading in the run up to the dot-com bubble.  Of course, when that bubble popped, their trading accounts suffered mightily and most found themselves in new careers.  These new market participants CANNOT determine valuation simply because they lack the experience and training necessary to make those determinations.

~ Brian Schartz, Downtown Associates 2020 Year End Letter, January 26, 2021

Ameritrade online trading commercial
Circa 1999-2000

Barry Ritholtz dismisses talk of a bubble (2021)

I think we have to be careful about painting with too broad a brush when we talk about sentiment.  I can't ever recall in history where market bubbles were called so fervently and frequently in real time by participants, but we've been hearing people saying "this is a bubble" now since - I don't know, is it five years?  Certainly off the lows last year the bubble drumbeat started.  It's kind of hard to see markets being overly optimistic when there's so much fear on valuation and bubbles.  I know it's very counterintuitive, but it's just not what you typically see when everybody throws caution to the wind and they're all in.

~ Barry Ritholtz, Bloomberg interview, March 23, 2021

Drew Voros on the launch of the latest speculative ETF

This month, the VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment ETF (BUZZ) was launched, and did so with a bang.  The fund has gathered $500 million in assets in two weeks, thanks to circuslike environment the fund was launched under. 

David Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports and the newest market gadfly, is one of the financial backers of BUZZ and its index created by Buzz Holdings.  And he took to Twitter to pitch BUZZ’s launch in car-salesman style to the delight of his followers and the public, and to the horror of the Wall Street “suits.”

~ Drew Voros, "‘BUZZ’ ETF: White Noise Or Right Noise?," ETF.com, March 23, 2021

Lauren Kashmanian on social bonds

Green bonds, which are bond issues with an underlying environmental or sustainable purpose, have been issued in the municipal bond market since 2013, when Massachusetts issued the first green-labeled municipal bond. Social bonds, which are newer to the municipal bond market, are defined as “bonds with a use of proceeds for new and existing projects with positive social outcomes.” Some of the issue types within the municipal market that are eligible for this label include bonds for affordable basic infrastructure, such as clean drinking water, clean transportation, and clean energy projects; bonds for essential service access, such as health care and education; bonds for socioeconomic advancement and empowerment; and bonds for affordable housing projects. 

Social bonds have also allowed nonprofit foundations to access the public bond market and continue their philanthropic work during a time when charitable donations from corporations and individuals might be less reliable. The Ford Foundation issued the first social bond by a nonprofit foundation earlier this year, and the issue was designated as such by Sustainalytics, a second-party verifier, under the category of socioeconomic advancement and empowerment. The net proceeds will be used toward “building resilience in the nonprofit sector and stabilizing and strengthening key nonprofit organizations essential to reducing inequality, so that they are in a position to advance just, inclusive, and equitable recovery efforts following the COVID-19 pandemic.”

~  Lauren Kashmanian, Senior Portfolio Manager, Parametric, "Muni Investors Can Prioritize the 'S' in ESG with Social Bonds: Municipal bond investors have a new way to support positive social change.," WealthManagement.com, March 10, 2021

Tim Price on parallels to the French Revolution

Some suggest that the most appropriate analogue for the current global crisis – the spread of a pandemic that has resulted in some catastrophic mis-steps by multiple governments – is the Great Depression of the 1930s...  But perhaps an altogether darker and more substantial comparative reset is that of the French Revolution itself. 

Some historians, perhaps most notably those of a Marxist bent, regard the French Revolution as the most significant event in the history of the modern world. The Revolution replaced a monarchy with a republic, reshaped the social order and the role of the aristocracy and the Church, ushered in a period of extraordinary outbursts of violence, and ultimately led to a dictatorship under Napoleon – who would then export many of its principles, by force, to much of western Europe. 

Like so many revolutions, this one was in large part triggered by finance.

~ Tim Price, "Children of the Revolution," Price Value Partners, March 22, 2021

Matt Gaetz on the $1.9 trillion Biden stimulus package

It is a Trojan horse for socialism, it is everything Democrats have wanted wrapped and branded in coronavirus so that people are scared into voting for it...  This is only the beginning.  And we are about to see massive inflation in this country as a consequence of no real pressure against the printing of money.

~ Matt Gaetz, Florida Representative, March 9, 2021

Bernie Sanders on the American Rescue Plan

As Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, I am proud that we passed the American Rescue Plan, which, in my view, is the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country.  This package, among many other things, increases direct payments by $1400, extends unemployment benefits, reduces child poverty by half, ensures we are vaccinating as many people as possible, and puts us on a path to safely reopen schools.

~ Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator, March 6, 2021

Jen Psaki on the $1.9 trillion Biden stimulus package

I will note that the plan that the Senate passed this weekend puts us one huge step closer to passing one of the most consequential and most progressive pieces of legislation in American history.

~ Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, March 8, 2021

Daniel Webster on fiat money

Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.

~ Daniel Webster, as quoted by Andrew Dickson White, first president of Cornell University, in Fiat Money Inflation in France, p. 69

Daniel Webster,
1902-1903

Kevin Duffy on humor

The role of humor isn't just to bring levity, but to reveal reality, absurdity, stupidity, hypocrisy and irony.

~ Kevin Duffy

Jason Hsu on China, competitiveness and ESG

To outcompete globally, to generate profits - this animal spirit of responding to monetary incentives is stronger in China than any other country I ever visited. Whereas, if you look at the U.S. and Europe and Japan today: ESG investing, purpose investing, impact investing, where investors are saying, "Hey, I'm willing to make less money, lower return for other reasons," right? "My investing, my work isn't merely profit-driven." And that ethos almost points to anti-capitalism. Capitalism requires you to be entirely selfish and profit-motivated. So that's the dichotomy in China. On the one hand you have extreme profit-motivated behaviors that's led to phenomenal growth. That's led to everyone acquiring a tremendous amount of education and working tremendously hard and producing prosperity and growth, but with a backdrop of a society that's also very distrustful of a market mechanism. 

~ Jason Hsu, "Quantamental Investing Lessons with Jason Hsu," 27:30 mark, Stansberry Investor Hour, March 18, 2021

Jason Hsu on securities regulation

In the short run maybe it's very efficient to have a tiger mom or tiger dad to come in and dictate how things ought to work, but really, in the long run, there is something to be said about the market mechanism and really having the participants learn and sort it out instead of the regulators playing judge and jury all the time. 

~ Jason Hsu, "Quantamental Investing Lessons with Jason Hsu," 25:20 mark, Stansberry Investor Hour, March 18, 2021

Paul Krugman doesn't see a return of 1970s inflation

Inflation expectations, it took them a long time to become unanchored in the past. It took not just excessively expansionary policy under Lyndon Johnson, it took two oil shocks that sent inflation temporarily into double digits. It took seriously, seriously irresponsible monetary policy under Arthur Burns. It took a long time to get us to where we were in 1980. It took really more than a decade of screwing things up year after year to get to that past, and I don't think we're going to do that again.

~ Paul Krugman, "Krugman Doesn't See Return of 1970's Inflation," Bloomberg interview, March 19, 2021

Vasko Kohlmayer on the coronavirus vaccines

Here is the truth: It is not possible to devise an effective vaccine for the type of virus that causes COVID-19. Why? For the very reason that AstraZeneca’s vaccine has failed in South Africa and will fail elsewhere as well. 

Coronavirus is a type of virus that mutates widely and because of that it is impossible to come up with a vaccination protocol that would stop its spread. 

Every bona fide virologist knows this. And yet the public has not been advised of this. Quite to the contrary, this crucial information has been actively suppressed. 

Rather than being told the truth, we were commanded to hunker down in lengthy lockdowns and ordered to wait until the vaccine was found. Once that happened, they told us, we would be able to prevail over the virus and get our lives back. Until quite recently, this was the official narrative propagated by the governing elites around the world.

~ Vasko Kohlmayer, "The Great Vaccine Scam," LewRockwell.com, February 13, 2021

Vasko Kohlmayer on the Covid vaccine scam

Given that it was never possible to stop a highly mutating virus by vaccination – which was something that has been well known – the whole COVID vaccine enterprise was fraud from the beginning and a dangerous one at that.  The best we can hope for is that that these fake vaccines being peddled by the unscrupulous governments and greedy pharma companies are ineffective.  Being administered on the order of millions of doses a day, we can only pray that the potential side effects of these untested concoctions hastily cobbled together by ruthless profiteers will not produce the greatest man-made medical calamity in history.

~ Vasko Kohlmayer, "The Great Vaccine Scam," LewRockwell.com, February 13, 2021

Travel + Leisure on the remote workplace in travel destinations

Nayara Tented Camp in northwestern Costa Rica is joining idyllic locations around the world - Barbados, Bermuda, and Aruba, to name a few - in rolling out the welcome mat for digital nomads. 

~ Travel + Leisure, "You Can Work From a Dreamy Luxury Tent With a Private Pool in the Costa Rican Rain Forest," March 17, 2021

Warren Buffett 3 rules for investing

Invest in yourself first. 

Invest in things you understand. 

Learn from your mistakes and move on.

~ Warren Buffett

Benjamin Graham on risk

Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.

~ Benjamin Graham

Ray Dalio: "Investing in bonds has become stupid"

The economics of investing in bonds (and most financial assets) has become stupid...  Rather than get paid less than inflation why not instead buy stuff — any stuff — that will equal inflation or better?

~ Ray Dalio, "Investing in bonds has ‘become stupid,’ Ray Dalio says. Here’s what he recommends instead," MarketWatch, March 17, 2021

Lew Rockwell on the battle of ideas

Our ideas are unpopular.  We are in the minority.  Our views are not welcome by the regime.  They often fall on deaf ears of an indifferent public.  Big newspapers don't often care what we think.  In fact, they want to keep us out of their pages.  Politicians will always find us impractical at best, and threatening at worst. 

In short, we fight an uphill battle.  We must recognize this at the outset.  We are what Albert Jay Nock called the remnant, a small band of brothers who have special knowledge of theory and history and a concern for the well-being of civilization.  What we do with that knowledge and concern is up to us.  We can retreat or sell out, or we can use it as our battle cry and go forward through history to face the enemy.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Path to Victory," The Austrian, November-December 2020

Will McGough on the rise of SPACs and cryptocurrencies

There is so much $$ sloshing around now which will have its own impact.  You could argue the rise of crypto and SPACs are just vehicles to absorb all the new money.

~ Will McGough, Stadion Money Management, "One year ago stocks dropped 12% in a single day. What investors have learned since then," CNBC.com, March 16, 2021

Ben Shapiro on the new puritanism (cancel culture)

The new puritans are great with porn and very bad with political dissidence.  If you disagree with them, then you must be burned at the stake.  But if you want to simulate lesbian sex acts on stage in front of millions of people, not only is that good, that is wonderful for our culture.

~ Ben Shapiro, "Leftists OUTRAGED Over Bill Burr Jokes at 2021 Grammys," YouTube, 1:20 mark, March 15, 2021

Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR test, critical of Dr. Fauci

Guys like Fauci get up there and start talking, you know, he doesn’t know anything really about anything and I’d say that to his face.  Nothing.  The man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there you’ll know it.  He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine and he should not be in a position like he’s in. 

Most of those people at the top are just total administrative people and they don't know anything about what's going on in the body.  Those guys have got an agenda, which is not what we would like them to have, being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way.  They've got a personal kind of agenda, they make up their own rules as they go, they change them when they want to... Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.

~ Kary Mullis, PhD in biochemistry from the University of California and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1993, interview with date unknown.  Mullis invented the PCR test the government is using to detect Covid and passed away in 2019.

Bart Borsky on getting good career advice

The University of Pittsburgh was home to the largest liver transplant program in the world at the time, due in large part to the leadership of Dr. Thomas Starzl, the great pioneer in that field. During my residency in anesthesia, I did additional training in liver transplant anesthesia, taking advice from Dr. John Sassano, who told me that if I wanted to be successful, I needed to figure out what people in my field didn't like to do, learn to love it, and make myself available. 

~ Bart J. Borsky, M.D., Passing Gas and Getting Paid For It: The Musings of a Comic Anesthesiologist, pp. 14-15

Thomas Jefferson on education and newspapers

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Philip Grant on how Wall Street thinks the $1.9 stimulus bill is bullish for the economy and stocks

Owing to last week’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, economists at Goldman Sachs now pencil in a heady 8% year-over-year growth in fourth quarter GDP.  That would be the highest rate since 1951, when nominal annual output footed to about $350 billion, compared to about $21 trillion last year. 

Then, too, already-buoyant asset markets can expect another jolt, as suddenly flush retail hordes prepare to deploy their $1,400 check.  According to a late February survey from Deutsche Bank, respondents reported that they plan to allocate 37% of their stimulus payout into the market.  “Retail sentiment remains positive across the board, regardless of age, income or when the investor began trading,” wrote Deutsche Bank strategist Parag Thatte.  “Retail investors say they expect to maintain or add to their stock holdings even as the economy re-opens.”

~ Philip Grant, Almost Daily Grant's, March 15, 2021

Warren Buffett on saving

Do not save what is left after spending. Spend what is left after saving.

~ Warren Buffett

Andy Price on remote work: "Covid unleased the beast, and we're not going back"

Not one of my clients requires an HQ-based executive anymore.  If they do, I won't take the project, because that means the company is too stupid to see the handwriting on the wall.  Covid unleased the beast, and we're not going back. 

~ Andy Price, founder of tech recruiter Artisanal Talent Group, "Tech's Latest Perk: Never See the Office," Bloomberg Businessweek, March 8, 2021

Doug Casey on speaking out and how H.L. Mencken avoided persecution during WWI and the Roosevelt years

If you believe in thinking for yourself, or if you believe in free minds and free markets, you’re in the minority.  You better be careful. 

H.L. Mencken, undoubtedly one of the greatest public intellectuals in American history and the best journalist in our history, is a cautionary example.  During World War I and throughout the Roosevelt years, he basically stopped writing or saying anything controversial because he might’ve been singled out and persecuted.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on the Dangers of the Growing “Snitch Culture” in the US," International Man, March 10, 2021

Doug Casey on mask wearing and divisiveness

The masks everybody self-righteously wears have become the equivalent of Nazi armbands, or the red scarfs of the old Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers. 

They want people to unite against the enemy, namely people that protest against or don’t wear masks.  The non-PC have become the enemy in large parts of the US.  People in the rural heartland states don’t generally wear masks or take COVID nearly as seriously as the liberal elites on the coast do.  As a consequence, the virus is accentuating the cultural divide between the red people and the blue people.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on the Dangers of the Growing “Snitch Culture” in the US," International Man, March 10, 2021

Lao Tzu on scarcity

To understand the limitation of things, desire them.

~ Lao Tzu

Robby Soave on anti-racism

Nonracism—the idea that skin color should be overlooked—has lost popularity among progressive activists, and anti-racism—the idea that skin color matters a great deal—is in vogue.

~ Robby Soave, "Why Dr. Seuss is Worth Defending," Reason.com, March 8, 2021

Kevin Duffy on how a progressive sees taxation

This is how a progressive sees taxation: 

1) Taxes are a benefit to the common good. 

2) Taxes are the price of freedom. 

3) The rich hire accountants to avoid paying their fair share. 

4) The rich have nearly all of the wealth (an unfair distribution). 

5) Those at the bottom pay all the taxes (even though the rich have all the money); very unfair. 

6) The government is constantly starved for "revenue" so those at the bottom suffer even more. 

Ok, admittedly, this is an exaggeration, but there is a lot of truth to this, don't you think?

~ Kevin Duffy, Facebook post, March 12, 2021

Paul Craig Roberts on the tragedy of American education

What we are dealing with is not only the brainwashing of white students as to the evil origin of their country and their inherited guilt, but also their inability to think rationally and to make an objective conclusion from evidence. This was once the purpose of education, but no more. Today students are taught that their emotions are what is true, and their emotions are manipulated by the lies that they are taught. 

This perversity of education spells the end of the United States. The kind of people American education is producing are not capable of scientific thinking. The kind of education Americans receive today cannot produce scientists or engineers. We have the emotive generation, people trained to be guided by emotion. 

The inability of American education to produce people capable of thought is already our reality. We see it in the huge number of work visas in which foreigners, largely from Asia, are brought into the US to do the jobs American educated youth cannot do.

~ Paul Craig Roberts, "What is a Fatal Dose of Fentanly?," LewRockwell.com, July 10, 2020

Ed Hyman sees a 5 year expansion due to economic stimulus (2021)

Massive, unprecedented stimulus is already in place and increasing!  It’s firing on all cylinders, ie, QE, rates, and fiscal.  So even though inflation and bond yields are moving up, equities are supported.  We believe we’re at the start of a new expansion that will last five years or more.

~ Ed Hyman, Evercore ISI's Weekly Economic Report, March 7, 2021

Anthony Harris on why the vaccinated should wear masks in public

We don’t want a subsegment of the population walking around without masks in a setting that requires masks to be worn.  That’s just such an awkward precedent for the remainder of individuals who don’t have access to vaccinations at this point in time.

~ Anthony Harris, M.D., medical director at WorkCare, "Will You Need the COVID-19 Vaccine to Travel?," AARP.org, February 25, 2021

Warren Buffett on investing and quality

Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it's marked down.

~ Warren Buffett