The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has overturned investment banker Frank Quattrone’s lifetime ban from the securities industry. This comes on the heels of a federal appeals court decision overturning his 2004 conviction on obstruction of justice charges. The SEC ruled that the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), a separate market regulator, had violated its own rules by barring Quattrone from the industry in November 2004.

I just posted a review of the De Soto book here:

This is a book for the ambitious layman. It explains how banking practices play into economic fluctuations, and vice-versa, virtually from the invention of banking to modern times. At over 800 pages, it is capable of handling its imposing brief very thoroughly, and it does — not one page is wasted.

In his speech on March 20 the new Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted that he is not so sure whether the Fed should be tightening its stance further or whether the central bank should pause. The reason, according to Bernanke, is the unusual behavior of long-term interest rates.

AEI libertarian Charles Murray has a new book advocating Milton Friedman’s bad old idea of a “negative income tax.” The feds should hand out the cash, Murray says, because “we” are so rich.

In a recent survey of the ideological persuasion of 1,643 full-time professors at 183 colleges and universities, three eminent scholars, Professors Robert Lichter of George Mason University and Stanley Rothman and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, found that nearly three-quarters of college faculty call themselves liberal. In the study of classical languages and literature, the humanities, they counted 81 percent and in the social sciences 75 percent. Even among engineering faculty they found 51 percent and in business faculty 49 percent.

In the last of a series of three posts on a blog for conservative philosophers called Right Reason, Professor Edward Feser has raised disturbing charges against Murray Rothbard’s libertarianism. The “Rothbardian view of the world,” he claims, “is radically subversive and paranoid.” Rothbard’s worldview “parallels Marxism” and is incompatible with natural law and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic supporters of Rothbard are “acolytes of St.

I quote the following from Mark Steyn’s column in today’s (March 26, 2006) Orange County Register (his column dealt with the threatened death penalty for a Moslem convert to Christianity):

In a manner reminiscent of witch doctors urging primitive people to sacrifice their sheep and goats in order to mollify the wrath of the gods, today’s environmentalists and their shills in the media and academe repeatedly urge the people of the United States and the rest of the modern world to sacrifice their use of energy and their standard of living in order to avoid the wrath of the Earth and its atmosphere.