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Category Archives: course-UNrelated

Deflating

02-Sep-10

Narayana Kocherlakota, the Minneapolis Fed President, gave a speech on August 17th in which he said: But over the long run, money is, as we economists like to say, neutral…. [I]f the FOMC maintains the fed funds rate at its current level of 0-25 basis points for too long, both anticipated and actual inflation have [...]

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Harassment is an Art, Not a Science

08-Jun-10

The TSA continues to find new and innovative ways of harassing airline passengers: TSA screeners trained to pick out suspicious or anomalous behaviour in passengers. There are about 3,000 of these officers working at some 161 airports across the United States, all part of a four-year-old programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT), which [...]

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An Interesting Debate

08-Jun-10

I found this on Capital Gains and Games, but really, it is a debate (mostly) between Paul Krugman and Raghuram Rajan. Here is a brief synopsis: Of all the canards that have been offered about the financial crisis, few are more repellant than the claim that the “real cause’’ of the mortgage meltdown was blacks [...]

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Back To The Futures

11-May-10

In March, we read that Cantor Fitzgerald was about to monetize the moviegoing industry by taking what the website HSX.com had done with play money, and bringing it to the real world. For those of you who have not heard of HSX (short for Hollywood Stock Exchange), it is a site where you can bet play [...]

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Clear-Mindedness About Goldman

27-Apr-10

I agree with Fareed Zakaria. The Goldman scandal is nothing more than an emotionally clouded, knee-jerk reaction. In other words, more motivated by politics than by a long-term, well-thought-out plan to reform finance. But, then again, what else is new? Let the cycle take its course… Let’s be clear: all the facts are not publicly [...]

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Bay Bridge Opening? (Updated twice)

02-Nov-09

Like we haven’t heard that before. But yet, the Bay Bridge Blog reports: 511.org: “The bridge is expected to open sometime this morning.” SF Chron: “Things have gone very well overnight,” Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney told reporters at a briefing early today. “We completed a lot of the work that we needed to do. It [...]

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Choose the Side You Start With

02-Nov-09

A study finds that coin-tossing is actually not so random: We analyze the natural process of flipping a coin which is caught in the hand. We prove that vigorously-flipped coins are biased to come up the same way they started. The amount of bias depends on a single parameter, the angle between the normal to [...]

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We’re Number Two! We’re Number Two!

14-Oct-09

The World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual rankings of global economic competitiveness last month, and it turns out that the USA is no longer the most competitive global economy. The World Economic Forum today released its annual rankings of global economic competitiveness, and Switzerland knocked the United States out of its No. 1 spot. [...]

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Collateral You Can Eat

18-Aug-09

Now this is a prize currency.  From Bloomberg: The vaults of Credito Emiliano SpA hold the pungent gold prized by gourmands around the world — 17,000 tons of parmesan cheese. The regional bank accepts parmesan as collateral for loans, helping it to keep financing cheesemakers in northern Italy amid the worst recession since World War [...]

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Rational, Irrational or Something Inbetween?

14-Aug-09

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at MIT, talks at TED in 2008. The talk, according to the official bio, is about the following: Despite our best efforts, bad or inexplicable decisions are as inevitable as death and taxes and the grocery store running out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. They’re also just as [...]

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