October 2008
23 posts
Big Financiers Start Lobbying for Wider Aid →
¶ The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.
¶ Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those...
September 2008
23 posts
¶ Ratings are “a measure of risk on a buy-and-hold basis and say nothing about the pricing volatility of an investment,” said Gareth Levington, a senior analyst at Moody’s in London. “The market level isn’t hugely relevant for the rating.”
¶ The rating firms help borrowers structure debt securities in a way that will get the highest possible credit rankings...
Everybody tries to ‘game’ the system on their route to vast personal fortunes - whether short-selling, packaging up dud mortgages as prime mortgages or telling lies about their financial viability - and the result is that the system is getting wise. The best course today in any financial transaction is to presume zero integrity.
Will Hutton
Watch
The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.
Larry Ellison
They had become too complex for a site founded on simplicity, too restrictive and hostile to continue to innovate the way I wanted to. They’d already taken so much attention away from development that I started to question my own motivations. I didn’t get into this to build a big company as fast as I could no matter what the cost, I got into this to make something simple and beautiful for people...
[G]lobalization forces redundancy out of the system…Things are way too efficient, so the smallest mistake blows up.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The US needs to wean itself of unsustainable overconsumption, and since consumption has come to depend on growth in indebtedness, a reversal, however painful, is necessary. Our excesses have been so great that there is no way out of this that does not lead to a general fall in living standards (note that the officialdom in the UK is willing to say that, but since perpetual prosperity is a...
In the situation we have today, where people have made bad investment decisions, where people built houses they never should have built, there’s a misallocation of resources. The loss has already happened. The loss isn’t what happens on a balance sheet: the loss is what happens when someone cuts down a tree, makes cement, builds a 6,000-square-foot house in a place it should never be built. So the...
It appears that financial institutions earn money on transactions (say fees on your mother-in-law’s checking account) and lose everything taking risks they don’t understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
¶ [H]ow are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.
¶ But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the...
Destroy Everything You Touch - Sasha’s Invol2ver
FactCheck.org →
Shadow Government Statistics →
Pitchfork TV, One Week Only →
The Cure - A Forest (Edit)
3 voor 12 - luisterpaal →
Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
William Morris
tumbletape →
We would consider it a success if the next version of IE were built on Chrome, or even if it were just a lot better as a result of Chrome.
Sergey Brin