Stilltitled

we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.

—Dick Costolo, Twitter, updating its relationship with its partners, though “we imagine there will be all sorts of other third-party monetization engines that crop up in the vicinity of the timeline”: via blog. Twitter would go on to observe, “We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money,” but they are moving quickly to deliver Annotations, “so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform.” This will likely impact Tweetup, Ad.ly, Magpie.

When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.

—Opinion of the Majority, Citizens United vs. FEC

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majorityof this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

—Justice Stevens, dissenting in Citizens United vs. FEC, he suggested it was a strange time to repudiate common sense.

I am not of the view that we’re going to go into a 20 percent downdraft. We are buying to take advantage of this weakness…Emotion and political circumstances are dictating the short-term move, and understandably,” Birinyi said. “But ultimately it comes down to good companies and proper valuations, and I don’t think there’s a big issue.

—Laszlo Birinyi: via Bloomberg. He would go on to observe, “For all the fear and concern, gold is coming in pretty significantly.”

It is unlikely that the U.S. economy can shrug off the troubling developments in the euro zone. The manufacturing rebound may be cooling a little bit from the torrid pace we’ve seen. There may also be disappointments on the retail side.

—John Herrmann, senior macro strategist at State Street Global Markets: via Bloomberg

While they feel better about the recovery, there are still question marks. The Fed is on hold into 2011 and waiting for a window of time before we see a pivot in policy.

—Paul Ballew, a former Chicago Fed economist, senior vice president at Nationwide Mutual Insurance: via Bloomberg.

Since this meeting you’ve had a crisis unfolding in Europe which forced the Fed to have an emergency meeting in early May to reopen swap lines they had only just mothballed. That means the Fed will be more dovish now than they were before.

—Paul Ashworth, senior economist at Capital Economics, Toronto: via Bloomberg.

There have been rumors of intervention by central banks. Most of the movement you’ve seen has been weaker commodities, weaker emerging market currencies and weaker commodity currencies, all correlated with the belief that the recovery may not be as strong as previously expected.

—David Rolley, Loomis Sayles & Co, overseeing $106b in fixed income: via Bloomberg. Though not mentioned in the quote, the Fed did re-open up its swap agreements with the ECB, which would explain some of the stability to strength in the Euro.

The only way that Europe does not break up (have members leave) is by accelerating the deflation that was always potentially coming (or at least should be in active discussion) in our deleveraging theme.

–The normally mild-mannered RBS European Rates Strategy Team: via FT Alphaville

and at the center, Ron Conway – a solid post by ben horowitz

Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.

—Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: via NYT. He continues with the claim that economic growth has increased with society’s ability to mix and remix ideas: “The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating. And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before.”

Brian Cowan and the whole group at Mcgill frame the Modern Public

economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner, who find a striking correlation between economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations: in both America and Europe, periods of low economic growth tend to be associated with a rising vote for right-wing and nationalist political parties. The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis.

—Paul Krugman: via NYT

and in separate news…who can resist

This bailout wasn’t done to help the Greeks; it was done to help the French and German banks. They’ve poured some water on the fire, but the fire has not gone out.

—Niall Ferguson: via NYT. Followed by a PIIE bonus

the public finances in the majority of advanced industrial countries are in a worse state today than at any time since the industrial revolution. Restoring fiscal balance will be a drag on growth for years to come.

—Willem Buiter, Citigroup’s top economist: via NYT

This is 60 years of history in the making, so the idea that the euro simply falls apart at first test of its credibility, I think it highly unlikely. It might well be in 20 years time it doesn’t exist but the idea that it’s not going to exist in the next year because the market is worried about Spain and Portugal’s funding requirements is ridiculous.

—Jim O’Neill: via Bloomberg. He would go on to observe that there are “lots of weaknesses of EMU and this crisis is demonstrating what they are…At the core of it, the inability to have a central fiscal authority is a major problem and that they are going to have to deal with,” but he refused to foreclose on the prospect of continued cooperation in the form of the EMU.

You just had the flash-crash on Thursday. Here we are at Cannes. It’s almost like Rupert Murdoch made it happen

—Shia LaBeouf, offering his own take on the economic and market tumult of the past two weeks: via Dealbreaker