Law professor Ann Althouse has an appreciation for words and imagery—one of the reasons I read every post at her site—but I wonder about this derivation. There is no doubt that soak does derive from a word originally meaning suck, but I don’t think that the following necessarily holds true:

There is no mention of when the word soak completely lost its sucky sense, but the first use in the sense of overcharge was in 1895. It seems likely to me that the proto-Germanic sense was completely lost by 1895, so I expect there is a different explanation for this idiom.

The original post, by the way, is about the profanities used in the Senate hearings on Goldman Sachs. I saw excerpts of this hearing on the news. I think that there is plenty of room for argument about how to design and impose rules to prevent over-leveraged investment firms from wiping out the global economy, but I am amazed (truly amazed, not in the sarcastic sense) that the members of the pertinent rule making body, the Senate of the United States, appeared to comprehend banking, savings and investing at a junior high school home economics level. Truly disturbing. So it’s hard not to enjoy the irony of the lead inquisitor being unmasked as voting for the very bill deregulating the firms he wishes to hoist.

In the end, I don’t think that the regulations will matter, in the sense of achieving their designers’ desired effect. Thanks to advances in mathematical modeling, assisted by computerized trades and global financial markets, the smart money is getting exponentially smarter. The demons have jumped out the box, and they’re not going to be persuaded back in by a few rules. I think we end up in a world with some unimaginably strange currencies being swapped trillions of times a day by ghosts.

(From “Althouse: “In an angry hearing peppered with shouts and potty talk, Goldman Sachs brass doggedly insisted Tuesday they have no regrets about dubious mortgage deals that soaked investors.”)

From Megan McArdle, links to a couple of articles on the sovereign debt crisis, and how it all played out last time around. It’s worthwhile to read as many of these as you can stomach—the Yves Smith article is especially good.

I’ve felt since the stock market started to rebound in the middle of last year that we were just passing through the eye of the storm. If I were a more active investor I might have taken some medium-to-long term short positions on… everything.

(From “Greece and the Euro: Going, Going . . . “, via Instapundit.)