The Economist's obit of Alfred Kahn

....Breezily, too, he winged his way in government. He was an academic, after all; he had nothing to lose, so he would speak his mind. Asked once by a reporter if he could defend the defence budget, he said “No”. Told off for using the word “depression” in public, he replaced it with “banana”, and announced that the country was heading for its worst banana in 45 years. Told off by the head of United Fruit for using “banana”, he made it “kumquat”. As the oil price continued to soar he called the Arab producers “schnooks”, earning yet another rebuke; but he didn’t care. He could always go back to being dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, as he did in 1980, even though “dean is to faculty as a hydrant is to a dog.”

Zizek on The Dark Knight as a parallel to Wikileaks

The district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his friend, police commissioner Gordon realise that the city's morale would suffer if Dent's murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film's take home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. He makes it clear that his attacks on Gotham City will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and to protect Batman, Dent tells the press he is Batman - another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon fakes his own death - yet another lie.

The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? Civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie.

Zizek on Wikileaks

There has been, from the outset, something about its (Wikileaks) actions that goes beyond liberal conceptions of the free flow of information. We shouldn't look for this excess at the level of content. The only surprising thing about the Wikileaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn't we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don't know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

Keynes on Lloyd-George at Versailles

"How can I convey any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this siren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?....that flavour of purposelessness, inner irresponsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power."

Beatrice Webb on David Lloyd-George

"He is a blatant intriguer - and every word he says is of the nature of an offer "to do a deal". He neither likes nor dislikes you; you are a mere instrument, one among many - sometimes of value, sometimes not worth picking up."

David Beckwith on why rising USTs aren't a sign that QE2 has failed

If QE2 is successful, then we would expect treasury yields to rise! A successful QE will first raise inflation expectations. This alone will put upward pressure on nominal yields. However, expectations of higher inflation are in effect expectations of higher nominal spending. And higher expected nominal spending in an economy with sticky prices and excess capacity will lead to increases in expected real economic growth. The expected real economic growth should in turn increase the real yields. It is that simple.