Headlines

Half of Sanders backers WON'T back Clinton

Brain eating amoeba kills teen

Rangel: Americans don't need guns, but I 'deserve' armed guards

California exodus increases as costs, taxes skyrocket

Aging monkeys become more selective regarding their social circle

Kremlin program: Teleportation by 2035

ANOTHER: Baltimore cop not guilty of murder in [Freddie] Gray case

NYC orders businesses to make gender-neutral bathroom signs

Pope, flanked by migrants, says 'let everyone come'

Clinton IT specialist invokes the 5th more than 125 times in deposition

Listening to Mozart lowers blood pressure

CA to close last nuclear power plant

Afterward: I spoke to one of my blog readers tonight and he thought that I was making up these headlines. No! No.! No! These headlines are those which I have selected from numerous Internet news sites and which have struck my fancy ... be they weird, funny, scary, ironic, etc. None are made up. If you wish to see the story behind any headline, just copy and paste it into Google or another search engine and you will likely get the details. If I put them in as links, I would be a news aggregator which I choose not to be. Have fun with just this little capsule of our strange world!

Off Balance

The current sovereign-debt crisis in Greece is apparently caused by unfunded off-balance sheet transactions (reportedly aided and abetted by Goldman Sachs ... so what else is new?) I am over seventy years old and I can't remember a single financial crisis, either private or public, which was not caused in whole or in part by off-balance-sheet shenanigans -- last year's banking crisis, Mexico's near collapse in 1994, the Enron scandal, AIG, Tyco, etc. ... the sliminess goes on and on. How can the accounting community, which has created such a beautiful mechanism for faithfully representing the fiscal health of corporations, charities, and public trusts, continue to allow these entities to subvert this process with off-balance-sheet transactions of any type? It is as though the Swan Lake ballet was being danced in a garbage dump ... or Mozart was being played with kazoos.

Until such time as veracity is returned to the accounting profession, we will continue to enjoy a conga-line of financial crises into the forever future. And this, unfortunately, includes how we, as a nation, keep our own books.