DISQUS

You make a huge error that is similar to the errors that caused the housing bubble: "Investors and traders need only worry about one thing: profitability. Are you generating requisite profits from your portfolio for the risks assumed?"
You say investors need only worry about one thing, then list two things - profits and RISKS. By your own sentence, investors need only worry about at least TWO things - profit and RISK. RISK was ignored until it couldn't be anymore.

Many of the loans written and then bought by Wall St. to securitize were not risky, they were duds. Jumping out of an airplane without a parachute isn't taking a risk, it's committing suicide.

Armed robbers are greedy. We don't prosecute them for being greedy, but for the armed robbery part. I wonder how Adam Smith would describe the greed of English kings who took Scottish lands? Bill Gates is greedy, especially when acting as an agent of Microsoft. Where people took umbrage was with anti-competitive practices - against the law.

This points to financial regulation. The market system cannot allow unchecked greed and theft. Madoff wasn't even that greedy, but he wasn't following the law. We weakened our laws and markets to the point that we made the obscene transfers possible, and possibly legal.

As for AS & the invisible hand, there is 'make the pie bigger' greed which you might see at a tech company or in a physician, and there's 'make my piece of the pie bigger, whether the pie gets smaller or not' greed that tends more towards finance and law. It is the government's role to shift effort towards the first and away from the second.

I agree that it was di Santo and not Ballack, and David's question is exactly what I thought watching live. I don't think Vidic would have been able to pick Ballack off quite so easily.

I've done that same move to 'catch' a falling object and only played 3 years of soccer growing up, vs 25 years and counting playing baseball. And for the record, a large portion of Latin America plus Japan are rabid baseball areas - just look at a major league roster.

There is a misconception about the popularity of sports and only looking at TV popularity and not at actual participation. If you look at adult amateur sports I'd wager there's a lot more soccer & baseball than football, and virtually no full-pad football, mostly flag.

One of my preferences of soccer over football on tv is the continuous action. Football is 5-10 seconds of action out of each minute, while to stay with a soccer match, you need to pay more attention. Football lends itself more to the 'tailgating is more important than the game' much more so than soccer does.

I caught a highlight of the Battery/Dynamo game on the FSC review show, and it was the online video scaled to TV size!

Why wasn't the Houston/Charleston game over the weekend? Houston might have sprinkled more starters in. Did Houston play over the weekend? Charleston played, but I imagine their game could have been rescheduled. Barnsley's games against Liverpool and Chelsea were fun to watch and seemed to add a lot of energy to the FA cup.

Were the most recent US Open cup games televised - http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/jul/02/clou...

One huge difference for me between FSC & the worldwide leader is I can get espn channels in HD, and FSC is still standard def. I like their mix of US Soccer - MLS & USL games. I can't imagine regular season minor league baseball games getting on TV. But I'd much rather watch ESPN's Thursday night MLS, or HDNET's games than an MLS game on FSC.

Are EPL games in the UK & other places overseas broadcast in HD?

I was surprised when Derek Rae said Turkey would play the boring, defensive style Italy employed. Turkey attacked, and successfully at that, and I was happy to hear Rae admit he had them pegged incorrectly.

I was disappointed that the Spanish so often would pass back instead of using quicker forward attacks. They let the Italians pack their side making it nearly impossible to get a good shot. Maybe that was a tactical order from the coach. The Russians seemed to charge hard all game, and should have plenty of motivation to reverse the group stage game. Spain will have to play a lot better to make the finals.

The two games that make an argument for a playoff are yesterday's Chelsea and ManU games. Americans are used to titles being decided in a game where the best team is playing the 2nd best (at the time). We loved the Giants knocking off the Patriots, and people would have been appalled had a team like Ohio St. not needed to play LSU or Florida the prior year. How many more people will be watchign the champions league game than the last EPL weekend? Playoffs give each team control over their destiny - just keep winning. They also make for monster final game matchups. I'd like to see a 6 team playoff, top 2 with byes first round, first 2 rounds 2 legged. It would feel redundant this season if you had an EPL championship game and then the next week, a replay in the CL final.

Watching games mostly on Fox Soccer, this is one big difference I've noticed between EPL and Serie A. The closest sport I see in the US to English Football is college football, especially in the southern US.