I’m sure everyone with a blog has funny search terms people use to find their site. Apparently, people find mine by searching for ‘goldman sachs is corrupt’, sometimes ‘housing cmos’, ‘art markets,’ every once in a while masculinity. And then there’s the person who is searching for ‘Asshole Levin’. I think I gotta start being …
Read More →
I found myself watching Jerry Maguire today, and I am struck again at just how brilliant this scene is, with Tom Cruise having just gotten fired and (seemingly) salvaging the one big client that will save him. On the way out, he’s searching the radio for something to sing to, and after a few miscues, …
Read More →
Yesterday, my partner emailed me with the odd question, “did you somehow “return” the book 1984? No, it turns out that Amazon re-appropriated the book they sold me. Thanks for the refund, go ahead and take the book back, apparently. Better than just taking it I guess. From the Amazon forums Here’s the response from …
Read More →
I’ve been sitting on this graphic, pulled from a hospital form I once received, or sign I once snagged. If you or someone you know has been through anything at all, you’ve seen this chart: I have always meant to write about the attempted power of medical hegemony captured in this sign, that the appropriate …
Read More →
Two ways to regulate futures markets are by regulating the organizations that comprise the financial markets, or by regulating the financial activities in which any organization participates. This is an attempt to think about these differences.
Read More →
How can it be that the NYT reports that JP Morgan is 110% awesome: “The strong showing may put to rest some worries that the bank was allowed to pay back its $25 billion taxpayer investment too early, after it passed the Treasury Department’s stress test in May.” But the Wall Street Journal can report …
Read More →
One of the best movies I’ve seen this year is The Hurt Locker (preview on the Youtubes), a fictional documentary-style film about a team of US bomb techs in Iraq. The premise is that a new leader of a 3-man tech team differs in style than his predecessor. The resulting tension among team members drives …
Read More →
I’m feeling a little like all I do is complain round here. This site on the impossible cool is 99% awesomeness. Does that help to offset some of my crotchety-ness?
Read More →
The Stranger reviews Twitter, 140-characters at a time, and I’m not terribly impressed: “We’re telling each other stories, 140 characters at a time, as they unfold. If you can’t see the value in that, you’re hopeless.” Life in the twitter-age: A glut of information and data, a poverty of knowledge.
Read More →
Oh Yes, it’s their ‘trading prowess’, their ability to “embrace risks that its rivals feared to take and, for the most part, manage those risks better than its rivals dreamed possible.” Don’t pay attention to those last few sentences, though. The $13 billion government subsidy via the bailout of AIG, and the $28 billion in …
Read More →
I complained last week that Duncan Watts’ editorial was an argument without much substance, effectively an argument based on deep knowledge of networks but shallow knowledge of markets. At the end of last week, James K. Galbraith testified for the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology. And it was pretty awesome. First, it was …
Read More →
One of the more interesting notions in the social studies of finance over the past decade has been the idea of performativity. Discussions about the concept abound, both online and off – (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)….and the list goes on. I’m only pointing at a very few of the pieces. In art, the …
Read More →
I’ve read a few times the editorial by my former colleague Duncan Watts, and despite some interesting discussion, I can’t help thinking that this is a guy who knows a lot about networks and not so much about financial markets. The article is about the problem of size and complexity in financial services organizations. Watts …
Read More →
Awards should definitely be given out those who are willing & able to connect Michael Jackson’s death to their own personal research perspective / business idea / hobby horse. Kudos.
Read More →
I suspect that most people read this thing through rss, so it won’t matter much, but I’ve redesigned the RM site. Nothing’s perfect, but I’m trying to make it interesting… e.g., the front page is pretty different, and the rest is hopefully more read-friendly.
Read More →
Can we just dispense once and for all the euphemism ‘take out’, with regard to military action? Armies don’t ‘take out’ people or infrastructure, they kill people and destroy infrastructure. If we or our allies are going to do things like this, let’s at least own up to what it actually is.
Read More →
I’m updating the template over the next few days, so if your feed does weird things, I apologize in advance. See ya on the other side of it.
Read More →
From the CBO’s June update on TARP funds (that’s a .pdf): The market value of outstanding warrants held by the Treasury is around $6 billion, CBO estimates.14 Of the total, about $1 billion is from warrants issued by the 10 banks that recently repaid their TARP funds. However, those calculations are sensitive to the assumptions …
Read More →
I’m not an expert on political change. But this article in the NYT claiming that “even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents” strikes me as insane, for two reason. First, that someone could be short-sighted enough to think that a decade of change, …
Read More →