http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3481/britain-nhs-ramadan-tv Britain’s nationalized health service has been funding a television station whose presenters preach hatred against Jews, women and the West. There will always be groups out there trying to destroy us, but does that mean we should be financially supporting their work? Ramadan TV, a platform for Islamist hate-preachers, refers to NHS North East […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3484/egypt-morsi-train-wreck While Egypt was unable to supply medicine to the victims of the crash at Assiut, it has sent millions of dollars worth of medicine to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. How about making sure the hospitals in Egypt have enough medicine to treat Egyptians? Morsi is not governing the country for the benefit of its […]
U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ HandsBy JAMES RISEN, MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to […]
http://www4.thedailybell.com/28314/Anthony-Wile-David-Goldman-on-Wall-Street-the-Middle-East-and-the-Judeo-Christian-PerspectiveDavid Goldman on Wall Street, the Middle East and the ‘Judeo-Christian Perspective’
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with David P. Goldman.
Introduction: David P. Goldman writes the “Spengler” column for Asia Times Online and the “Spengler” blog at PJ Media. He is also a columnist at Tablet, and contributes frequently to numerous other publications. Goldman was global head of debt research forBank of America (2002-05), global head of credit strategy for Credit Suisse (1998-2002) and also held senior positions at Bear Stearns and Cantor Fitzgerald. In 2001 he was elected to Institutional Investor Magazine’s All-American Fixed Income Research Team. Goldman was a senior editor at First Things (2009-11) and Forbes magazine columnist (1994-2001). His books, How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) and It’s Not the End of the World – It’s Just the End of You were published by Regnery in September 2011. He is a regular guest on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report” and has appeared on Fox News and other national news venues.
Daily Bell: Give us some background on yourself. Where did you grow up?
David P. Goldman: In and around New York City. When an infant, my bedroom looked out on Ebbets Field, the old home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. There began and ended my exposure to spectator sports. I spent the longest time in Great Neck, then the most liberal community in the United States, and graduated high school there. My family was left-wing and secular, and I looked to classical music for spiritual sustenance. It was my passion. I played and composed but was never very good at either.
Daily Bell: Where did you go to school and what career did you embark upon?
David P. Goldman: My B.A. is from Columbia, and from there I went directly to a doctoral program at the London School of Economics. I suppose my idea was to become an academic but two years of London wearied me. I was a radical and a hothead, and had no patience for academic economics. Instead, I stumbled into freelance journalism. My first piece was published by the London Spectator − on the plight of East African Asians – but I gravitated towards the fever-swamps of the political left.
In 1977 I became economics editor of a dreadful publication controlled by the odious Lyndon LaRouche. He fired me five years later. By that time I had gotten to know Dr. Norman A. Bailey, then head of plans at the Reagan National Security Council, who recruited me as a consultant. When he left NSC I worked for his consulting firm, and then for the supply-side firm Polyconomics, where I became chief economist, mainly because no one else would take the job. I was a bit like Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus.
In 1986 I tried to make a career change back to music and did all but the dissertation for a doctorate in music theory. I might be teaching music theory at some small college today except for the birth of my first child, who wanted to eat almost every day. That forced me into more remunerative work.
Daily Bell: You held senior jobs on Wall Street, including a gig as global head of bond research at Bank of America with 140 professionals reporting to you.
David P. Goldman: I didn’t take the usual route to Wall Street. When at Polyconomics I had ample opportunity to speak to Prof. Robert Mundell, who was then out of favor with time to waste on me. Mundell was the grandfather ofsupply-side economics; in 1999 he won a Nobel. He had deep insights into the nature of capital markets, and I learned enough from him to look for the cracks in markets before they showed. I learned a tiny fraction of what Mundell knew, but it gave me an advantage on Wall Street.
My partner at Polyconomics, the supply-sider Jude Wanniski, pushed me out in 1992, and Larry Kudlow opened a door for me at Bear Stearns. Bear gave me a chance to learn the business. I left Bear in 1996 to start a small hedge fund; just before the Long-Term Capital failure in 1998, I closed it and paid out my investors with a modest profit and took a job at Credit Suisse. Credit markets then were in turmoil, and I built quantitative models to value corporate bonds and bond portfolios that became quite popular. On the strength of that success, Bank of America hired me away in 2002 to create a new fixed income research division, and I had a big staff to supervise.
Daily Bell: Give us some background on Wall Street and what you think of it. Has your thinking changed?
David P. Goldman: In the 1990s and early 2000s I believed that the financial industry had a major contribution to make to economic efficiency. In fact, it had made such a contribution. Mortgage-backed securities helped to mobilize capital locked up in homes and made capital available to entrepreneurs. So did so-called junk bonds, which made credit available to emerging companies. Credit derivatives initially helped banks to diversify their risks.
Take Bear Stearns, where I started my Wall Street career 20 years ago. They were upstarts and outsiders. They didn’t have the country-club investment banking relationships to underwrite corporate debt. But the advent of mortgage-backed securities allowed them to become the top dealer in that market because they didn’t need the country-club connections to do so. Bear was a solidly Republican shop; Steve Forbes got a lot of support from the partners before the 1996 presidential election. The firm failed, in large part due to its own complacency, in 2008.
Can America Survive Four More Years of Obama? — on The Glazov Gang
by Jamie Glazov
Paul Crowshaw, Mike Finch and Dwight Schultz glimpse into the heart of darkness — and ponder how we’ll emerge from it.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-power-of-prager-on-the-glazov-gang/
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/sandy-katrina-and-the-phonies For two weeks I lived in a cramped hotel room happy to have a place other than my home. An office I have had for a decade was off-limits. And a neighborhood I have come to love was damaged beyond recognition. Sandy invaded lower Manhattan. Residents north of Chamber Street don’t have the foggiest […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-sanity-of-islamophobia November was “Islamophobia Awareness” Month. Pat Condell, the indomitable critic of all things mystical and murky, especially of that paragon of tolerance and peaceful coexistence, has recommended that the West designate December as “Hatred and Violence in the Koran” month. In a Gatestone article on the ubiquity of blasphemy laws in Europe, Soeren Kern, […]
http://politicalmavens.com/ While Major Nidal Hasan served as army psychiatrist at Fort Hood, he was a clean-shaven American Muslim. After he was imprisoned, awaiting trial for murdering 13 people and maiming 32 others for the glory of Allah, he decided to redouble his religious identification by growing a thick beard and mustache Though army regulations specifically […]
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/12/judge-removed-in-fort-hood-jihad-shooting-case-not-impartial.html Judge refused to submit to Islamic law so ….. he’s off the case. He wasn’t impartial enough. Got that? “Breaking news: Judge removed in Fort Hood shooting rampage case” Dallas News (thanks to Van) FORT HOOD — A military appeals court has thrown out a judge’s order to forcibly shave the Fort Hood shooting […]
http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article/2012/11/28/why-hamas-forced-me-leave-amherst-college
Former Member of the Class of 2014
Amherst College is a small community, so I am sure that many of my fellow classmates already know that I left Amherst to join the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). I am sharing my experiences with you from this past week to illustrate two things to the Amherst community: why I took a leave of absence to serve in the Israeli Army and why Israel deserves an apology from her many critics on and off of our campus.
I have spent the last three days in Netivot, a small city of 30,000 people located less than 12 kilometers away from the Gaza Strip. I was volunteering there with a small non-profit. We were operating day care centers, teaching children in bomb-shelter-turned-classrooms and trying to restore a sense of normality to the children’s lives. For the over one million Israelis living within 40 kilometers of Gaza (the typical range of Hamas’s Qassam and Grad rockets), their children experienced the Israeli equivalent of a snow day there was no school here for over a week as the blizzard of rockets continued. It was too dangerous to travel to school and too dangerous to congregate under one roof, so the Israeli government spread out children in bomb shelters across southern Israel to minimize the likelihood of mass casualties. The young, old, sick and disabled must remain in these bomb shelters day and night because they cannot run to safety in time. The
residents of Netivot have less than 12 seconds between siren and impact.
As I attempted to entertain the frightened children of Netivot, reading stories and playing games, I could hear the deep booms of rockets slamming into nearby cities and towns. Over 1,000 rockets were sent screaming toward Israel in the past week. If the rocket was within five kilometers, we could feel the vibrations of the impacts, watch books fall off of shelves, see windows shiver and sit helplessly wondering who was injured. If the predicted trajectory of the rocket was towards us in Netivot, an air-raid siren would alarm, and the 30,000 residents scrambled towards shelter. When the siren began to howl, the feeling was one of absolute panic. As I sprinted toward safety and grabbed any straggling children nearby, the idea of terror became a reality to me; it dawned on me that there are actually people, just a car-ride away, who are trying to kill me and those around me. On the night of November 20th a rocket leveled a house a block away from my bunker.
However terrorized we may feel in southern Israel, I realize the people of Gaza have it worse. Tragically, the people of Gaza have no shelters to run to and no sirens to warn them when Israel strikes back. Their government (since 2006 controlled by the internationally categorized terrorist group, Hamas) has chosen not to invest in these public safety measures despite waging a continuous war on Israel. This negligence is no accident. Hamas has decidedly tried (and succeeded) to take advantage of Western disdain for civilian casualties, choosing to play off of our sympathy for the pain and suffering of innocents. Hamas’s leaders know that by repeatedly firing rockets towards Israeli civilian areas from their civilian areas, Israel’s response will be one of impossible choices.
