'Behind every great fortune is a great crime,' said French novelist Honoré de Balzac. What crime lies behind Booz Allen Hamilton?

Fraud, mostly.

More on that in a moment...

Still no clarity in the markets. Still no resolution. The unstoppable force of more and more credit is still bearing down on the immoveable object of excess debt.

Ben Bernanke is pushing for higher stock prices... higher consumer prices... and higher bond prices. Mr. Market still hasn't expressed himself clearly.

Mr. Market will have the last say. He always does. But he can hold his tongue for a very long time.

In the meantime, investors, planners and ordinary households can make big mistakes. And sometimes, they have a keener interest in seeing those mistakes continue than in correcting them. From The Economist:

'How serious is the terrorist threat that justifies the National Security Agency's surveillance of Americans? Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, doesn't address this question; his point is that the American people should have the information they need to decide whether the threat merits the surveillance.

'Matthew Yglesias thinks the threat isn't very serious, and that counterterrorism efforts, including surveillance and airport security systems, should be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis. ("Approximately zero lives per year are saved by airport security measures," he writes, though he admits he could be wrong about this.)

'Stephen Walt is a bit less hyperbolic, but he agrees that terrorism simply isn't the kind of danger that could merit the level of response America devotes to it. Unless terrorists get nuclear weapons, he says, they really can't do much damage in America:

'Conventional terrorism - even of the sort suffered on 9/11 - is not a serious threat to the U.S. economy, the American way of life, or even the personal security of the overwhelming majority of Americans, because al Qaeda and its cousins are neither powerful nor skillful enough to do as much damage as they might like.

'He adds that "post-9/11 terrorist plots have been mostly lame and inept, and Americans are at far greater risk from car accidents, bathtub mishaps, and a host of other undramatic dangers than they are from 'jihadi terrorism.'"

'He uses the Boston bombing in April as a case in point, describing it as tragic but less lethal than the factory explosion that took place that same week down in Texas.

'Mr. Yglesias and Mr. Walt are right: conventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that's not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy. [...]

'In a perfect world, as Mr Walt argues, we in the public wouldn't let terrorist strikes dictate our politics. But we're not likely to get calmer about terrorism, because too many people are trying to keep us frantic.

'At least three parties stand to gain from exaggerating, rather than minimizing, our reactions to terrorist strikes. The first is the media, which wins viewership by whipping up anxiety over terrorist strikes. The second is politicians seeking partisan advantage, since panic over foreign-backed terrorism tends to increase voter turnout. [...]

'Finally, the third party trying to exacerbate our responses to terrorist attacks are the terrorists themselves, who have generally proven quite effective at choosing targets that provoke widespread media coverage.'

The Economist is forgetting consultancy firm Booz Allen! Yes, dear reader, he left out the main supporters of the terrorist fantasy: the zombies. The New York Times reports....

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