Stilltitled

It may not be viable. But that’s the way the state structured it.

—Ed Stolzenberg, former CEO of Westchester Medical Center, a public benefit corporation, remarking on the plight of public pensions. Stolzenberg draws $222,143 a year in pension benefits, among the biggest annual payouts from the NY State pension fund: via NYT

I concede, I have a very good pension, but what’s that pension going to be worth when I’m 70 years old?…I don’t understand how the working guy that held up their end of the bargain became the problem

—Hugo Tassone, a Yonkers Police officer who retired at 44 with a pension of $101,333 a year: via NYT

Is there any poetry to the fact that Dow 36,000 was not only published in 1999, but it was written by a fellow and a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute? The central argument claimed that the “conventional model for valuing stocks has been rendered obsolete,” and the authors used their soap-box to outline a radically new way to determine what stocks are really worth. Like Lenny “Nails” Dykstra, events proved otherwise of acumen of their claims and showered them in embarrassment and humiliation. Unlike Nails, however, AEI is still in the business of providing economic advice.

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The following Part of the Paragraph is so much to my Advantage, and beyond any thing I can pretend to, that I hope my Reader will excuse me for not inserting it.

—Mr. Spectator: The Spectator, No. 101, Tuesday, June 26, 1711

They add even less to the underlying abstract principle than the invention held patent ineligible in Flook.

—SCOTUS on the underlying claims of Bilski in Bilski v Kappos. Did the Supreme Court just get catty?

Piracy/copying isn’t the real problem; the problem is that people don’t want to pay for most of what newspapers want to sell.

—Rebecca Tushnet on Newspapers: via 43(b)log.

RCA Victor created the lateral cut disc for music; decided jazz was not music. Little company sued for the right to make lateral cut discs. Learned Hand said plaintiff deserved a license; result: first two albums were Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong.

–Jim Griffin

You’re going to be taking out of the banks areas of investing that every 10 years or so, at certain points in the cycle, tend to have dramatic losses. Effectively you’re telling the system: We have to take the casino out of the utility…it won’t satisfy anybody who wanted really strict additional regulation of banks.

—James Ellman, president of Seacliff Capital: via Bloomberg

Yesterday’s passage of financial regulatory reform introduced the vaunted 3% rule, which limits an insured bank’s ability to invest in hedge funds. Sadly, the reporting has been so deficient on this that it is unclear what the 3% ultimately refers to.

The rule appears to comprise two dimensions: the size of their stake in the hedge fund; the amount relative to their overall balance sheet. But it’s hard to decipher how this will be measured. Is it 3% of the equity or 3% of the invested capital on the one side, or 3% of their tier one capital or 3% of their tangible common equity, on the other? Multiple articles on the same subject have come across the wire at Bloomberg, for example, and none of them are consistent with one another.

Traditional media seem to us to still be among the best ways of building brands. One-to-one communication seems to us to be a more promotional device – less strategic and more tactical.

—Sir Martin Sorrell, speaking at Cannes: via FT/Yahoo

I think the capability of pulling together vast amounts of people and spreading messages among vast amounts of people is something different and unique. These guys are running businesses. They will and they must [monetise them] … How they do it, they have to be careful and they have to be clever.

—Keith Weed, Unilever: via FT

is there room for impact factors, such as those from Thomson ISI, in the general press?

Credit conditions overall, which dragged our economy into a deep recession in 2007, no longer pose an obstacle to growth. [Corporations are raising money in capital markets] and have built up record cash reserves, which will eventually be reinvested and fuel growth.

—Tim Geithner, testimony to the Congressional Oversight Panel: via Bloomberg

Long-term, the trend will be for the yuan to appreciate, but what we saw in the markets today is that it’s not simply a case of one-way moves. The market will have to learn to get used to the fact that Beijing has its own timeline to work to and not anyone else’s.

—Rob Reilly, Société Générale in Hong Kong, remarking in the context in the surprising decline in the value of the RMB in yesterday’s trading, following China’s stated relaxation of the dollar-peg: via NYTimes

The underlying message they are trying to convey is that any moves will be very gradual. They are saying to the markets: don’t get too excited, don’t get ahead of yourselves

—Wai Ho Leong, regional economist at Barclays Capital in Singapore: via NYTimes