Nick Baumann

"

That’s right, my increasingly pudgy-fingered players, you used to want to be irons—ready to strike. Now you want to be cats—playing with toys until your overindulgence in organic treats catches up with you and you fall asleep belly-up.

Now I will go to my penthouse, to retire, and sit on my terrace overlooking Park Avenue and feel the sun on my triangular face. I will be the last generation of Americans able to do that. Enjoy your cat.

"

"We are being lectured to for running an excessive 1.4% inflation rate by the central banker of a country that not too long ago averaged 70 percent annual inflation for three decades."

"For Romney to be truly off the hook politically for the stuff Bain was doing, he’d have to claim not lack of control, but lack of knowledge."

"Corporate profits now account for significantly more than 10% of GDP: that’s never happened before."

"The reason austerity doesn’t work to quickly fix the problem is that, when the economy is already struggling, and you cut government spending, you also further damage the economy. And when you further damage the economy, you further reduce tax revenue, which has already been clobbered by the stumbling economy. And when you further reduce tax revenue, you increase the deficit and create the need for more austerity. And that even further clobbers the economy and tax revenue. And so on."

"Richmond is the capital of a medium-sized state. D.C. is the capital of the mightiest empire in human history. In no universe should Richmond have more tall buildings than the District of Columbia."

"The GDP of the United States is $15 trillion. So 5.5% of GDP would be $820 billion. This means that Spain’s two-year target would be the equivalent of the United States cutting its annual budget by $410 billion. No one — literally no one, not even Paul Ryan — has suggested budget cuts anywhere remotely near those levels. Even though the U.S. economy is in much better shape than Spain’s, everyone believes that budget cuts of that magnitude would wreck our fragile recovery."