The Weekly Winston: Global Finance Edition

With the Cyprus bailout and the continuing fragility of the Eurozone system tested on an almost daily basis, time to take in some of Sir Winston’s greatest hits about finance.  This first, from 1926, could be the opening of a daily memo to the European Central Bank (if not our own Federal Reserve):

In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound and everything that is sound is disagreeable.

About the provision of Dodd-Frank to provide independent revenue sources for the regulators (which is probably unconstitutional), Churchill would surely raise an eyebrow or two, as indicated by this comment in 1950:

Control over taxation and the revenues of the state has always been the foundation on which Parliamentary Government has rested, and indeed there is no other foundation upon which it can rest.  Once the state acquires sources of revenue independent of Parliament, then the power of Parliament to curb and check maladministration is seriously diminished.

Of course, eroding the power of elected officials to control the bureaucracy is the point of measures like Dodd-Frank and Obamacare.

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