One of the important financial economists writing today is Mohamed El-Erian, who grew up as the son of an Egyptian diplomat and was the deputy director of the IMF for three years in the 1990s. He is quite well known to folks like me, who look to his analyses to guide our work reporting day to day events. But he is not well known at all to the "general public," where that term is taken to mean the sort of people who know that Paul Krugman or Robert Shiller are important economists. I'm old enough to remember when Friedman and Galbraith were the economists whose name came to the tongue of many non-economists. They both passed away in the first decade of the new millennium, and the public attention has done what it does ... it has passed on. I may say more about El-Erian's non-celebrity work soon. For now, I will only lay down that he has recently said that on June 24, "The most notable price action in US markets" was the fall by 9 basis points of US gover...
I just had a revelation about Gilligan's Island . Regular fans will remember that Gilligan would from time to time mention his favorite rock group The Mosquitoes. Eventually, the group itself visited the island, looking for a relaxing getaway after a difficult tour. Like all guest stars, the band left in a manner that didn't help the core seven castaways at all. Anyway, it is obvious that the group was conceived as a Beatles parody. The insectile name, to start with, The fact that the group appears to have had a single with the lyrics "don't go in there, yeah yeah yeah." It was not subtle parody. But what only recently occurred to me was the clever way that the names of the members of the fictional group mirror the real-world names of the Fab Four. The Mosquitoes had four members (of course): Bingo, Bango, Bongo, and Irving. Note that three of those names would be quite unusual for any of the men one meets on the street in any city in the Anglophonic world. ...