Democracy - the American way

If half of this is true, then George O. was off probably by a few decades, not centuries.
Or, as The Simpons put it: "Will anybody think of children?".

Big Bubbles

It is always a disaster when a bubble bursts. After what happen today, I'm really scared. I'm afraid that the next bubble is close and this time, it will be huge.
[Yes, I think that FED might be able to prevent the burst of this bubble from lasting long and from being too painful, but at a significant costs. These could be either much bigger next bubble, or as Paul Krugman thinks, inflation, or both. Be scared, be prepared.]

US. Election

Everybody talks about it, everybody thinks about it, so am I. Anyway, just for future record, my prediction is that Democrats will loose (yeah, again) and the new president will be Republican.

Presidential Economics

Our current and probably also future president considers himself a professor of economics. Yet, he does not really have any significant publication. His first attempt in recent issue of "Politicka ekonomie (Policial Economics)" gives you some idea how a presidential economics looks like.
P.S.I do not mean to criticize the fact that our president is not a good economists - many presidents are not. I'm making fun of the difference between his self-perception and reality.

Why Czech Blogs suck 2 - an answer

I asked the question why so many well-known Czech Blogs suck (IMHO), especially in contrast to English language blogs.I did not have an answer that time, but I think I might now. It came to me while reading this post.
Some background first. The author is one of the IT businessman in Czech Republic. He did not create anything really interesting, but he was first to enter the market with IT literature, created couple of magazines (see, for example Zive.cz ) and probably made a fortune on that. It does not matter that the quality of products is not appalling (I was working in his firm for a short time, so I have pretty much good idea why). Anyway, the point is that he is a guy who knows IT and made some money.
So he thinks he is smart and understands everything. And he is arrogant (maybe this is necessary for the success, who knows?). In some cases, he is right, his posts are informed (and informative) - when he write about IT. Since he worked in that area for long time, he is likely to know much more than his readers. This is the good part.
The bad part is that he (and other Czech bloggers) think that they understand much more than just IT. Take the post I referred to above. For example, he claims that the governmental revenues are fixed. He clearly has no idea how volatile governmental revenues are, he most likely never saw any statistics. Probably from the fact that taxes are known and fixed, it somewhat magically follows that revenues are fixed, while in fact, they are not. I'm not sure how recent losses at Citi and other banks fit into his mental model - they probably were expected (haha).
Moreover, he criticizes contract he never read. He confuses one-shot bonus for a mutli-year contract with yearly bonuses. I could go on...
The point is not that he makes mistakes - we all do. The point is that he writes arrogantly about something he has no idea about. The reason probably is that most Czech bloggers are coming from IT field. Their advantage is probable longer presence on the "market", which allowed them to establish reputation others have yet to reach (see, for example, usually much better informed blog from Pavel Kohout, unfortunately not working anymore). I hope that in the future, one will have a choice from blogs written by experts (or at least informed enthusiasts in the field), not by random guys who offer interesting insight into their field mixed with pure nonsense.