Keith Hazelton
Keith Hazelton is a wealth manager and economic adviser living the American Dream in Oklahoma City with wife Suellen and three dogs, all of whom closely supervised by a flame-tip Persian cat.
Two quotes from many years ago seem apropos to the themes discussed in my essays.
The first, from English author Robert Hardy (1840-1928): "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a look at the worst."
The second, attributed to many who came later but the original idea of French writer Paul Valery (1871-1945): "The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."
Anecdotal Economics is devoted to commentary about current economic events, of which there are many...
It's title derives from the eventual failure of many, if not most, mathematical models devised by economists, market strategists, futurists, astrologers and other prognosticators to predict an unknowable future. The models always work beautifully, until they don't. Then we start over and build new models...
My other website's title, Keith Hazelton's Provisional Truth, is derived from my belief all truth is provisional, that is, "conditional, provided for a temporary need but subject to change," according to Webster's.
Like an earth-centric universe, yesterday's "truth" has become today's fables, superstitions and discarded dogmas and doctrines. Today's "heresy" may become tomorrow's truth. As such - like tax law - truth is provisional and always subject to change.
Everything we "know" yet may be altered, refined, perhaps someday proven wrong, so it's advantageous to keep an open mind.
But what do I know? Send me an email, I welcome your version of the truth.
Two quotes from many years ago seem apropos to the themes discussed in my essays.
The first, from English author Robert Hardy (1840-1928): "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a look at the worst."
The second, attributed to many who came later but the original idea of French writer Paul Valery (1871-1945): "The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."
Anecdotal Economics is devoted to commentary about current economic events, of which there are many...
It's title derives from the eventual failure of many, if not most, mathematical models devised by economists, market strategists, futurists, astrologers and other prognosticators to predict an unknowable future. The models always work beautifully, until they don't. Then we start over and build new models...
My other website's title, Keith Hazelton's Provisional Truth, is derived from my belief all truth is provisional, that is, "conditional, provided for a temporary need but subject to change," according to Webster's.
Like an earth-centric universe, yesterday's "truth" has become today's fables, superstitions and discarded dogmas and doctrines. Today's "heresy" may become tomorrow's truth. As such - like tax law - truth is provisional and always subject to change.
Everything we "know" yet may be altered, refined, perhaps someday proven wrong, so it's advantageous to keep an open mind.
But what do I know? Send me an email, I welcome your version of the truth.
Articles by Keith Hazelton
September 30, 2008
1 There was a Rich Country who had a Secretary of the Treasury, and charges were brought to the Nation's Elected Representatives that this Man was squandering the Nation's property.
2 So the Elected Representatives summoned the Secretary of the Treasury and said to Him, "What is this that We hear...
May 24, 2008
It's not over 'til it's over - the current economic situation, that is, but is there light at the end of the tunnel or are we merely in the eye of the storm?
February 02, 2008
Chicken Soup for the U.S. Economy? We need Dr. Volcker's patented cold-turkey economic shock therapy.
August 23, 2007
Clean-burning natural gas or abundant, less-expensive coal? Oklahoma's Corporation Commission has been asked to approve a new power plant to be built in Red Rock, a joint venture between OG+E and Public Service of Oklahoma.
As submitted, plans for the $1.8 billion, 950-megawatt generating facilit...
August 06, 2007
Pop. That would be the sound of a bubble bursting. From gushing liquidity to credit crunch in two weeks.
Thursday, July 19th, Wall Street celebrated a closing Dow Jones Industrial Average above 14,000, concluding a four-month, 2,000 point run-up.
Private equity fund and hedge fund managers were...
August 01, 2007
A quarter-century ago, Penn Square Bank failed spectacularly in Oklahoma City, ushering in the untimely end of a previous oil boom, indelibly changing the landscape of banking throughout the state and hastening the emergence of national mega-banks.
And yet, after a generation of national consolid...
July 23, 2007
Those of us ensconced in "reality-based" communities, relegated to watching the actors on the stage of this administration create and define history for us and the world, often wonder who makes up that core of support for the current occupiers of the White House, and what, exactly, are they thinking...
June 30, 2007
The American Empire retreated a step yesterday, if only temporarily, when the President's sweeping immigration bill failed to garner sufficient votes in the U.S. Senate. The bill, which would have provided amnesty and a path to U.S. citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, evidently offered ...
June 24, 2007
Red lights are blinking on inflation's early warning system control panel – fasten your seat belts. “Crude Foodstuffs and Feedstuffs,” commodities such as grains, raw milk, sugar and slaughter animals making up the raw materials that eventually become the finished products we call “food,” registere...
June 15, 2007
This article was published in the Oklahoma Gazette on June 13, 2007. Link to Published Version.
Oklahoma's economy is bright and sunny but taxpayers should note the balance of the interest-free loan we have made to the state in the form of our rainy day fund.
For the third consecutive year Okl...
June 06, 2007
Dan Gardiner is a Canadian writer whose work often appears in the
Ottawa Citizen, the largest circulation newspaper of Canada's capital. This essay was his response to an April 28, 2007 editorial published in the Ottawa Citizen by Robert Sibley entitled, “The Dangers of Militant Atheism.”
...
June 02, 2007
This story by Mark Gilbert of Bloomberg News appeared in the May 18, 2007 edition of The International Herald Tribune (Read complete story here).
LONDON: Calling the turn in the cycle of the credit markets has been a losing strategy in recent years. War, pestilence, leveraged buyouts and the...
May 23, 2007
More than anecdotal evidence now points to an economic tsunami forming from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown “ripples” which began to register on financial seismometers 18 months ago.
It's an instructive image, how a seemingly small, inconsequential thing can later, unexpectedly manifest itself i...
May 11, 2007
Spend a worthwhile hour and view this video courtesy of Oil, Smoke & Mirrors which may help "connect the dots" between the emerging reality of America's oil addiction, the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing global war on terror now so devastatingly manifesting itself in the killing ...
May 09, 2007
A recent study funded by the Pentagon concluded the U.S. Army was stretched to its limit, a “thin green line” as the media have taken to calling the controversial conclusions of this report, referring to James Jones's 1962 novel The Thin Red Line. The novel's title is derived from an old Midwestern ...
May 02, 2007
Addiction, it is said, often blinds those so afflicted to the moral and ethical considerations of behaviors intent on satisfying their habits.
In our present oil addiction we so fervently have embraced corn ethanol as one solution to our petroleum dependency we have neglected to question the ethi...
May 01, 2007
As we remember on May 1st the fourth anniversary of what then was proclaimed the end of major combat operations in Iraq, many rightly have re-examined, as should all Americans, our opinions of a war now lingering far longer and exacting an American and Iraqi human and financial toll far greater and ...
April 29, 2007
Like many, I received ample childhood religious instruction, raised to follow the faith of my parents, but I never encountered that sense of peace others professed and I never outgrew my doubt and concern about the conflicting doctrines proclaimed by myriad religions.
Over the years I sampled sev...
April 28, 2007
It's likely that America's military spending has surpassed $12 Trillion since the end of World War II. Add another $4 Trillion for interest on the national debt that has resulted from that military spending.
In 2006 (fiscal year), the total cost of America's military spending exceeded $885 Billio...
April 24, 2007
To say we have been shortsighted about nuclear power would be an insult to people with poor vision. Frankly we have been morons, which one day we likely will regret, and our love-affair with petroleum has blinded us to the disastrous ramifications of our energy policies in the last quarter-century.
...
April 19, 2007
“Plan B is to make Plan A work,” in Iraq according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, as detailed in a recent TomDispatch.com post, twistedly reminiscent of comedian George Carlin's two-step plan to become a millionaire: “First, get a million dollars...”
No doubt Plans C t...
April 16, 2007
A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking some real money, as it often is inaccurately attributed to late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen.
The cost of our unilateral global war on terror since 9/11 is approaching a very real $500 billion, all financed “off budget, off balanc...
April 12, 2007
As if we didn't have anything else to worry about, here comes some dandy news from outer space. Asteroid 99942 Apophis, a thousand-foot diameter chunk of rock discovered in 2004, will rendezvous with Earth again on April 13, 2029 (a Friday, of course), hopefully slipping by us at a near-miss distan...
April 02, 2007
After nearly two decades of perfecting the art of language obfuscation, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, with his usual sparks of sanguinity and elan, suddenly is speaking very clearly.
In comments to conference attendees in Hong Kong in late February, Greenspan boldly suggested ec...
March 23, 2007
Well, there you have it - again. Fed chief Bernanke admitted in Congressional testimony - again - that "deficits do matter" and that changes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will have to be made or dire economic circumstances will result. (See transcript of AP wire story dated 01/18/2007 b...
March 19, 2007
An illegal immigration issue now absorbing more of our national attention than necessary has its roots in all prior migratory waves: the search for a better life. We now are told, however, the United States, peopled mostly by descendants of European immigrants searching for a better life since the e...
March 19, 2007
American essayist Agnes Repplier said humor brings insight and tolerance but “irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.”
As our collective grief and anger slowly dissipate in the years since 9/11, an inescapable irony emerges in the aftermath which must be confronted, and which, with...