A Tale of Two Tunnels April 17, 2014April 16, 2014 Paul Krugman nails it (as usual), here: Four years ago Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, abruptly canceled America’s biggest and arguably most important infrastructure project, a desperately needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Count me among those who blame his presidential ambitions, and believe that he was trying to curry favor with the government- and public-transit-hating Republican base. Even as one tunnel was being canceled, however, another was nearing completion, as Spread Networks finished boring its way through the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. Spread’s tunnel was not, however, intended to carry passengers, or even freight; it was for a fiber-optic cable that would shave three milliseconds — three-thousandths of a second — off communication time between the futures markets of Chicago and the stock markets of New York. And the fact that this tunnel was built while the rail tunnel wasn’t tells you a lot about what’s wrong with America today. . . . An important column worth reading in full. # John Connors: “I loved the video of the Big L.C. and the big payday he got at the auction. I just hope someone told him to put off buying a house and to invest in a well diversified portfolio of [equally- or fundamentally-weighted] equity index funds along with an appropriate allocation of US government bonds. I’d hate to see him end up like some lottery winners have down the road.” ☞ I hope so, too. Though with $1 million or so (after the auction house share and taxes), it would not be crazy to buy a $150,000 house.