A Devil's Dictionary for Wall Street

They're in the news lately due to Mrs. Clinton's love affair with them, which is probably why this came across my desk this morning. It's pretty funny, where "funny" is an adjective that means "accurate."

Thrift (n.)
The obsolete practice of spending less money than you earn; once believed to be a virtue, now regarded as a disturbing form of deviant behavior.

Central bank (n.)
A group of economists who believe that their current forecasts will turn out to be accurate even though their past forecasts have been unreliable, that their present policies will succeed even though their past policies have failed, that they can prevent inflation from occurring next time even though they didn't prevent it last time, that they can foster lower unemployment in the future even though their practices worsened it in the past, and so forth.

You should be able to answer this riddle: What's the difference between a central banker and a weather vane? They both turn in the wind, but only the central banker thinks he or she determines which way the wind blows.