Here’s James Surowiecki at the New Yorker with a viewpoint worth considering: Of the countless reasons that congressional Republicans hate the Affordable Care Act enough to shut down the government, the most politically potent is the claim that it will do untold damage to the economy and cripple small companies. Orrin Hatch has said that…

If the Fed needs a better reason than the below (via TheGloss.com) to begin preparing us for a tighter-money future, then I don’t know what that signal would be… If you’ve got a seven-figure bottle of nail polish lying around, and I know you do, there’s no better celebrity to sign on to help you…

The Shutdown happened because the media made it happen and the media made it happen because it’s what the viewers demanded. That’s one view, courtesy of The Last Psychiatrist: The shut down was the inevitable consequence of a government not permitted to compromise, smothered by the oppressive gaze of a kamikaze media that will kill itself…

Congress is polling lower than Casey Anthony, the Federal government – which manufactures its own money – is somehow running out of money, and the wealth divide between rich and poor, corporations and civilians, hasn’t been wider since the robber-barrons’ Gilded Age. What the fuck do we do now? Is America too divided to function?…

Source: CNBC

Here were the most read posts on TRB this week, in case you missed them: Highlights and Impressions from The Big Picture Conference 2013 Why Markets Trend A Tale of Two Dows (or why we invest globally) Rallies End When “Good News” is Sold 3 ways Twitter’s IPO won’t be like Facebook’s (Fortune)    

My partner Barry went over our basic market views in a new interview with Wally Forbes the other day which has just been published at Forbes. Here’s a bit on how we think about potential scenarios for equities: Here’s the thing I think most people have a hard time understanding and putting into context. To…

In theaters next month, the glitzy, audacious blockbuster is based on real-life rogue trader Jordan Belfort memoir of his 1990s pump-and-dump flameout, during which he launched the infamous Stratton Oakmont “boiler room” brokerage, inflicted over $200 million of losses on investors and sunk a 167-foot yacht—all on his way to a federal indictment for securities…

File this under Noteworthy Anecdotes… Bill Fleckenstein, skeptical hedge fund manager, noted short-seller and the author of Greenspan’s Bubbles is getting the band back together. According to Herb Greenberg at TheStreet.com. Flecksein is relaunching his short fund: “For four years and counting, there was no reason to think about shorting,” he told me. “I survived…

Video.