I was at the start of my vacation when Bernanke was reappointed. In terms of newsworthiness, then, the story is a tad dated. But this is not a news site, and there are important points about the reappointment that I would like to write about. Ben Shalom Bernanke secured a second term as the chairman …
Had I not mentioned Godard a few weeks back in this blog, I would have ignored the comments of A. O. Scott, the chief film critic of the New York Times, about John Hughes being “our Godard”. But I had, and there he was, writing a posthumous review about a director that he said was …
Paul Krugman is hot under the collar. He has just discovered that speculators – of “bad” variety, to be sure, or as he calls them, “bad actors” – have been making money off the markets. It is good to be out of coma, Mr. Krugman. The liberal columnist’s beef is with high frequency trading – …
I want to work on Vol. 4, but they pull me back! So, the woman who made the 911 call which led to the arrest of Skip Gates – this is the neighbor at Harvard Magazine I wrote about – is denying she is a racist on account of her color. Her lawyer – no …
This past Friday, the New York Times had a front page article on “high frequency trading”. Under the heading “Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, In Milliseconds”, it said that “powerful computers, some housed next to the machines that drive marketplaces like New York Stock Exchange, enable high frequency traders to transmit millions of orders at …
The Way Markets Work (in the age of speculative capital) Read More »
If you are not familiar with Jean Luc Godard and his approach to film making, chances are that you will not “get” his movies. Godard believes that the “bourgeois society”, as he calls it, is so corrupt that no matter how serious and worthy a message may be, it will be corrupted by the fact …
The European Commission’s recently issued report on member states says that “the crisis is the equivalent of capital destruction, reducing – at least for a time –the productive potential of the economy.” Capital is a social thing. It has no equivalent any more than art or religion has equivalents. Its destruction, likewise, is a very …
It was the main business news of the day that “Ex-Worker Said to Steal Goldman Code”, as the New York Times put it. The story involved one Sergey Aleynikov, an ex-Goldman employee, who allegedly downloaded the firm’s proprietary trading software to his computer before leaving for greener pastures. The story was jazzed up for maximum …
You have heard all the talk about correlation not being causation. About the perils of research: researchers finding what they (unconsciously) planted in the evidence; about being factually accurate about the observations and yet totally wrong on the conclusion; about the epistemology of science. Etc. All those abstract issues were beautifully rendered in a real …
A Rather Egregious Case of Confusing Cause and Effect Read More »
For the past 30 odd years, derivatives have acted as the barometer of popular sentiment toward markets. In good times, they are praised as ingenious inventions that allow companies to save money in their finances. In bad times, they are scorned as the mysterious devices created to game the system. At all times, they are …
Pray Tell Me, Are Derivatives Good or Are They Bad? Read More »