Fantastic blog post by Roger Ehrenberg, managing partner of IA Capital Partners, discussing the problems with short-term thinking of the US government:

Providing financing to failing businesses and broken portfolios without dealing with the problems will only result in one outcome: more taxpayer dollars being thrown at the problem when the initial amounts are burned through due to "unexpected" losses. There is nothing unexpected about how it will end up; it will end up badly because we didn't do what was necessary upfront. Just like Social Security. "Why deal with it now when it is so politically costly and when it can be dealt with in the future?" This appears to be the stance of successive Administrations; pass the hot potato onto some other sucker, far, far in the future. Even our corporate compensation regimes are cast in the same light. Managing quarterly earnings to Wall Street expectations, large cash bonuses based on annual performance metrics, etc. This is not the way to promote long-term value creation. Yet this is what our society expects. We are sadly mistaken.

So true.

The Plague of Short-termism [InformationArbitrage]