French Quarter

Looking for Liberty in All the Right Places
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  • Douglas French

Great Vegas Stories Never Told Oct 2, 2016

Anyone who fills three hours every weekday on the radio must have a lot to say. And if the radio personality was once a lounge singer and a Las Vegas cocktail waitress, imagine the stories she could tell? A reader would expect Heidi Harris’s “Cocktail Waitress Wisdom” to be chalk full of her lessons learned via juicy stories of her days toting drinks to celebrities and high rollers. And Vegas being Vegas maybe there would be some chronicling of after hours hijinks with said celebrities and high rollers. No such luck for buyers of the “Las Vegas’ Radio Showgirl’s” first...

By Douglas French Vote3 0

Living On The Edge Jun 17, 2016

Writing for Forbes, Bryan Rich, claims the economy is better than you think and credits the central bank. “The Fed has manufactured a recovery by promoting stability, writes Rich.  “And they’ve relied on two key asset prices to do it: stocks and housing.” Like any good Keynesian, Rich is happy the deleveraging that occurred after 2007 is nearly over, claiming “paying down debt has weighed on economic growth.” He concludes with the old saw, “Consumption makes up more than 2/3 of the U.S. economy.  And you can see..., the consumer is in a solid position.” But has the consumer really...

By Douglas French Vote7 19

Economics and Classical Music: It’s a Jungle May 18, 2016

Amazon’s quirky, sexy “Mozart in the Jungle” has been greenlighted for a third season, a testament to the need for many platforms serving the unique viewing palates of TV viewers.  It’s safe to say “Mozart” would never make it to network TV.  The subject--the lifestyle of classical musicians--is a bit too esoteric for the taste of Americans not living in symphony cities. The series won two Golden Globes for Season 2, and, as Variety reports, “conductor character Rodrigo and the show’s other musicians will head to Europe in the new (3rd) season, which begins production later this year.” The charismatic...

By Douglas French Vote6 0

Boring Belle Apr 9, 2016

If The Big Short, Margin Call, or 99 Homes didn’t satisfy your cinematic financial crash craving, coming soon will be a depiction of the collapse from the female perspective, courtesy of Reese Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard by way of Warner Brothers--”Opening Belle.” A junkie for crash stories, I eagerly loaded Maureen Sherry’s novel into my Kindle. Loosely based on Sherry’s experience as a managing director at Bear Stearns, her personal website calls the book “Working Girl meets The Wolf of Wall Street.”  That’s not even half right. It’s more like “9 to 5” meets “Primates of Park Avenue.” “In a good...

By Douglas French Vote5 0

Modern Finance: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone Feb 4, 2016

In his book Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance, author John Kay quotes Lord Keynes’s idiom, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are generally distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” The men and women with authority over monetary matters are indeed mad. Mad enough to see interest rates, not as pricing the present versus the future, after all, the idea that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future is axiomatic. No, the Fed’s crystal ball sees lenders paying for the privilege of going without...

By Douglas French Vote6 0

The Fed’s Bloody Hands Nov 19, 2015

So while Alan Greenspan was being knighted and Ben Bernanke was named Time’s Person of the Year, “After 1998, other rich countries’ mortality rates continued to decline by 2 percent a year. In contrast, U.S. white non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich country saw a similar turnaround,” conclude Angus Denton and his co-author and wife Anne Case.   “Drugs and alcohol, and suicide . . . are clearly the proximate cause,” says Deaton, “Half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” he added. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there...

By Douglas French Vote5 1

The Education of a Speechwriter Aug 29, 2015

The summer’s Trumpalooza tour looks to extend into fall, with “Make America Great Again” now under trademark protection. The Donald says he has no speechwriters, doesn’t read from a teleprompter, and changes his speeches because the news media carries every word he says live everyday. Well, anyone who has watched more than one of his talks knows he spews the same nonsense every time.  Even the laugh lines are the same. “You know the Saudis are making a billion dollars a day? Well, maybe not quite that much at $40 oil.   But, half a billion a day ain’t so bad.”...

By Douglas French Vote8 1

Dancing for Hundreds, Suing for Minimum Wage Aug 27, 2015

Talk of raising the minimum wage has been all the buzz this year, with picketers marching in front of McDonald’s chanting “15 in 15,” as in dollars per hour this calendar year. But there is another minimum wage fight involving women like Sarah Brey. Ms. Brey is an author, English professor, yoga instructor, and exotic dancer. Her first book, The Go-Go Professor, was a how-to-be-successful guide to what’s known as go-go dancing in New Jersey. It’s a pithy read offering good advice (learn to speak English, don’t chew gum, shower) for the mostly foreign woman who dance in places like...

By Douglas French Vote10 1

Trump: The Art of the Bureaucrat Aug 17, 2015

Hello world!

By Douglas French Vote13 3

Making Markets Straight to Hell Aug 10, 2015

Individual investors hold the pros on Wall Street in high esteem.  The people who work in the financial markets must be smart and serious. That’s where all of the graduates from the top schools end up. The big money draws the biggest brains and discipline.  That’s why the “Wolf of Wall Street” seemed so outlandish. Sure, those guys working the pump and dump outfits might have drank and drugged themselves blind, but not those working at the big name firms. Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama tells us the markets are efficient, that all information is known by all market participants...

By Douglas French Vote4 1

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