With the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill to repeal Obamacare flaming out, not even getting a vote, one might wonder whether it was a lousy bill or if something else were amiss. As the bill seemed like pretty decent legislation, its failure to get a vote may be due to what the U.S. Senate has become. Today’s…
"'The only value of bitcoin is what the other guy'll pay for it,' Dimon said. On Thursday, Dimon said during a post-earnings conference call with media that he's 'not going to talk about bitcoin anymore.' The executive called bitcoin a 'fraud' in September and said it 'won't end well.'"
"While a court might be able to nullify a law by striking it down, I can also nullify the positive effects of exercise by eating too much pie."
Even though the CNN article focused on an event TAC organized in 2010, the "reporters" never even contacted us for the story.
On Monday, I appeared on the Mike Siegel Show. It turned out to be one of the more frustrating and contentious interviews I’ve done in a while. Siegel is totally on board with limiting the power of the federal government, and he understands that the Constitution delegated very few powers to the feds. But we are worlds…
"Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein delivered a speech on Tuesday about what he calls 'responsible encryption' today. It misses the mark, by far."
"The Spanish government has come under increasing criticism for raiding the offices of the .cat internet registry in the lead-up to a referendum on Catalans' independence. On Wednesday morning, police entered the registry's headquarters in Barcelona and seized all of its computers. The cops also arrested six members of staff, and held four of them for two days. Its CTO has been accused of sedition. The raid and arrest has sparked protests from the .cat company, as well as the Internet Society and the EFF."
"Rajoy said Catalan authorities broke the law by holding the referendum and incited street protests to give an appearance of legitimacy to the vote. He did not refer to the violence with which police cracked down on voting day but said 'nobody can be proud of the image' Spain projected, adding the only ones to blame were the Catalan leaders."
"The two financial giants are now offering trades in derivatives that enable investors to bet on or against high-risk bank bonds that financial regulators can wipe out if a lender runs into trouble. Others are also planning to start making markets in the contracts, known as total-return swaps, in the coming weeks, according to Max Ruscher, the London-based director of credit indexes at IHS Markit Ltd., which administers the benchmarks that the swaps are linked to."
"Investors placed almost 11 billion euros of orders for Austria’s first century bond, which had a yield of 2.1 percent. That’s less than the current yield earned on Treasuries coming due in just 10 years. The 'quite peculiar' bond market reflects expectations of a subdued investor response to when the European Central Bank decides to rein in its super accommodative monetary policy, according to Kim Liu, senior fixed-income strategist at ABN Amro Group NV."