Quote of the Day: Spending like Drunken Sailors
From the London Review of Books, comes this brilliant slice of analysis:
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"My friend Tony, however, is sanguine. 'Sorting out who's in the shit is going to be a nightmare, but when it all shakes out, all it'll mean is that credit is a little bit more expensive. That's a good thing. It had got crazy. It was cheaper for companies to borrow money from other companies than it was for governments. That's nuts. These things are cyclical, it had all just gone too far and we needed a correction.'
'So we'll have to stop running around spending money like drunken sailors,' I said.
'Well, drunk sailors tend to be spending their own money,' Tony said. 'By contemporary standards they're quite prudent.'- John Lanchester, writing about the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the London Review of Books.
I guess I owe an apology to drunken sailors, a metaphor I have used repeatedly.
This take on that phrase may very well become the classic line that sums up the era from 2003 - 2008: Drunken sailors: By contemporary standards, they're quite prudent.
Classic.
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via New Economist
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | 03:00 PM | Permalink
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Ive used a trite old phrase repeatedly when talking about government spending ... like a drunken [Read More]
Tracked on Mar 27, 2008 9:49:05 AM
Comments
Next to sociopathic a$$holes on Wall Street...many classically evil characters look like kittens.
Posted by: Kp | Mar 26, 2008 3:32:51 PM
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