The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), a market regulator, has dropped civil charges against former technology investment banker Frank Quattrone. The NASD had accused him of improperly awarding shares in initial public offerings. It appears that all of the charges leveled against Quattrone were baseless and that he was being scapegoated for the collapse of the internet bubble.

A very nice oped in the Houston Chroncle, by Robert Bradley, concerning the global warming question. I’m glad he is fighting this fight. I thought that this issue would have died long ago, but It seems like nearly everyone on the left (broadly speaking) is convinced that this is the issue that they can use to crush all that they hate about modern life.

Dear Mr. Reisman— I enjoyed reading your blog just now, but if you go back and read what I wrote, you’ll note that I specifically set a parameter: to qualify a book had to be published in the last two decades. Atlas Shrugged was published, I believe, in 1959.

Mike Shedlock gives a rather Austrian-flavored explanation of inflation, noting that it is “best described as a net expansion of money supply and credit” through fractional reserve banking; that it cannot accurately be measured; that it can not accurately be measured with a fixed index; and that it generates a boom and bust cycle.

In his New York Times column of June 3, Joseph Nocera asks:

Choice phrases from NY Times op-ed columnist John Tierney on Nora Ephron and the rent-control crowd: “Like European nobles in crumbling castles, rentocrats are above money grubbing. They deserve their homes because of their longevity and their virtues. They compare rent control to Fulbright scholarships — a stipend wisely provided to worthy intellectuals and artists.

One of of the most underreported repercussions of the ill-advised SarbOx legislation is the flight of publicly traded foreign companies as they de-list from the Security and Exchange Commission in order to avoid burdensome compliance.

Congressmen no longer read the bills they vote on and thus do not require them to make sense. (The latest example is the passage of a bill by the House of Representatives making “price gouging” illegal while leaving it undefined.) They leave it to the President and the Supreme Court to sort things out.

Unfortunately, the present President sometimes gives the impression of being unable to read.

I loved my cat. Probably as much as my cousin, Malcolm, who owed me fifty bucks. So when she died — my cat, not Malcolm — I was unhappy. I remembered the words of Genesis. “Dust thou art and to dust returneth.” How depressing. But I cheered up a little when I reread that big, black book and noticed that the author didn’t specifically mention my cat, Queenie.

I’m trying to order a hamburger, medium well, but the cook was involved in heated argument with the customer who was insisting that DSL is better and faster than cable for a home internet connection.

‘Man, DSL rocks!’

‘You are crazy. DSL ain’t nothing. Cable’s bandwidth rocks!’

‘You are paying for nothing. You can’t download nothing on cable!’

And so on.