Sean Corrigan on liars

All the best liars - from Satan down to his earthly legate, Tony Blair - are convincing because they first lie most successfully to themselves and thus affect an almost impenetrable air of sincerity when they spread their falsehoods.

~ Sean Corrigan

Sean Corrigan on what ails employers

After 25 years of green ideology, 10 years of ESG indulgence peddling, 3 years of biohazard totalitarianism, 8 months of totally avoidable warfare and increasingly self-destructive sanctions, who thinks the Fed’s rate rises are the main cause of the travails of employers?

~ Sean Corrigan, tweet, October 5, 2022

Sean Corrigan on BOE's Mervyn King wanting to subsidize unemployment in response to the coronavirus shutdowns

The three-way contest between Epidemiologists, Climate crazies and central bankers to wreak the most havoc upon humanity has tipped in favour of the lattermost.  Mervyn King wants people doing no - or only part-time - work to go on receiving 80% of salary from government until GDP is restored.

~ Sean Corrigan, Cantillon Consulting, twitter post, May 12, 2020

Sean Corrigan on business cycles and the futility of engineering a soft landing

As Austrians, we firmly believe that the credit cycle IS the business cycle and that - to draw upon Hayek - crises start out as monetary ones and later morph into real ones.  We frequently tell anyone who will listed that there are NO soft landings - sometimes adding Mises' pragmatical advice that to try to remedy any sizeable inflation through a deliberate act of contraction (rather than by simply desisting from making matters worse and allowing the system to repair itself) is to 'reverse the car back over the pedestrian one has just knocked down.'

~ Sean Corrigan, "Ring out the old, bring in the new," January 2019

Sean Corrigan: Dot-com speculators should look in the mirror

What never ceases to amaze, is people’s prodigious ability to indulge in a little cognitive dissonance when they think it will make them rich.

For several years past a coterie of solid, sceptical writers and contrarian investors have been cogently pulling apart matters like GM’s wild pension fund assumptions, GE’s earnings smoothing from its unregulated, quasi-banking arm at GE Capital, Cisco’s aggressive use of pooling, Intel’s Dot.Com ‘investment’ gains, Microsoft’s stock options scheme, Dell’s aggressive use of put options to pad the income statement, a host of senior Execs’ avoidance of full regulatory filing by the use of total return swaps and non-recourse loans to cash in their options grants, IBM’s ability to achieve double digit earnings growth with barely changed revenues – and more besides.

But ain’t it funny how nobody listened to any of this when stocks were going up 5% a day just 'cos Battapaglia & Blodgett, Abbey & Acampora, and Glassman & Greenspan were egging the mug punters on to believe in the New Paradigm?

Oh, those bandits in the boardrooms, those shyster lawyers, those crooked accountants and devious wildcat bankers, that energy regulation-killing Rubin, that options-expense scotching Liebermann, that money-pumping, cheerleading Fed Chairman – why could they not just continue with the game just a little longer so I could have got mine out before the House of Cards came tumbling down!

I’m sorry, people! Most of you were warned, you just chose not to heed it, so, when you start moralizing about ‘Infectious Greed’, just remember to look in the mirror when you mouth the words.

~ Sean Corrigan, "Take It Like a Man," LewRockwell.com, July 24, 2002