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Reuters, Former Exxon CEO Raymond to head JPMorgan ‘whale’ probe, here. Just get Bookstaber and an associate who knows Excel you will be done before the end of Sep., otherwise there are going to be lots of questions like “so the gaussian copula is a kind of VaR that runs on an FPGA?” Maybe there is an executive ed class in Verilog to help get the probe started.
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) has picked Lee Raymond, ex-chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N), to head an inquiry by company directors into losses in a credit derivative portfolio run by its London-based Chief Investment Office, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The company’s board also appointed fellow directors William Weldon, chairman of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N), and real estate developer Laban Jackson to the inquiry panel.
DeLong, DEBORAH PEARLSTEIN SAYS THAT I AM A “BLOGGER”! here.
As a blogger [that's me!] or two have noted, the joint dissenting opinion by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito refers repeatedly to Justice Ginsburg’s opinion (most of which was also joined by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer) as a “dissent.” In the official court syllabus, Ginsburg’s opinion is called an opinion “concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part.” Was this… evidence… that the joint dissent was itself initially a majority opinion, and that Chief Justice Roberts’ vote changed at the last minute, leaving the Court to scramble to revise and correct all of its opinions (corrections it wasn’t fully successful in making)?
Ryan Chittum, CJR, The Libor lie unravels, here. Have not followed CJR before, scans and reads relevant.
The next month, Mollenkamp and Mark Whitehouse (now at Reuters and Bloomberg, respectively) put out an excellent enterprise piece that used its own analysis to show that “Major banks are contributing to the erratic behavior of a crucial global lending benchmark” and were “reporting significantly lower borrowing costs for the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, than what another market measure suggests they should be.”
Michael Massing, CJR, The two David Carrs, here.
Since joining The New York Times in 2002, David Carr has become America’s most visible and influential writer on the media. His weekly “Media Equation” column is closely followed by people in the industry. Last year, he was featured in Interview magazine (interviewed by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, no less), and he was the star of the 2011 documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times, in which he comes across as a gruff and indefatigable truth-teller.
Curtis Brainard, CJR, How Creativity Works? Not like that, here. Self-plagiarism is a thing? This sounds like a slippery slope for journalists when all your output is digitized and practically begging to be fed into a statistical text comparison program.
Jonah Lehrer, one of science journalism’s brightest young stars, was accused of self-plagiarism on Tuesday after critics revealed that he had reused parts of old stories he wrote for other publications in blog posts for The New Yorker. So far, the magazine has appended an editors’ note to the top of six of Lehrer’s eight posts for its website, noting where else the copy had appeared and expressing “regret [for] the duplication of material.”
William S Burroughs, Inspiration. There was an old Burroughs movie, well before A Man Within, I remember him reciting this quote in the movie. The movie must have been Burroughs (1983), here is a review by Maslin. Got to watch A Man Within now. Maybe they got a part about self-plagarism.
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief… Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louver! A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol — pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
Of course the flip side of this is that this quote will be thrown back at you when some present day Burrroughs is making a iPhone movie with a Sonic Youth soundtrack about your surprised reaction on finding they are roasting your pet cat on the backyard hibachi.
Press and Dyson, pnas.org, Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent, here.
The two-player Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game is a model for both sentient and evolutionary behaviors, especially including the emergence of cooperation. It is generally assumed that there exists no simple ultimatum strategy whereby one player can en- force a unilateral claim to an unfair share of rewards. Here, we show that such strategies unexpectedly do exist. In particular, a player X who is witting of these strategies can (i) deterministi- cally set her opponent Y’s score, independently of his strategy or response, or (ii) enforce an extortionate linear relation between her and his scores. Against such a player, an evolutionary player’s best response is to accede to the extortion. Only a player with a theory of mind about his opponent can do better, in which case Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is an Ultimatum Game.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pnas.org, here. Never ran across this before. Check out the 50 Most read articles during May 2012, here. Look, Nash’s Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games from Nov. 1949, here.
Gideon Rose, How Wars End, here. WGBH podcast talk was pretty good.
Woodrow Wilson fought a war to make the world safe for democracy but never asked himself what democracy actually meant and then dithered as Germany slipped into chaos. Franklin Roosevelt resolved not to repeat Wilson’s mistakes but never considered what would happen to his own elaborate postwar arrangements should America’s wartime marriage of convenience with Stalin break up after the shooting stopped. The Truman administration casually established voluntary prisoner repatriation as a key American war aim in Korea without exploring whether it would block an armistice–which it did for almost a year and a half. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations dug themselves deeper and deeper into Vietnam without any plans for how to get out, making it impossible for Nixon and Ford to escape unscathed. And the list goes on.
Michael Lewis, Princeton University’s 2012 Baccalaureate Remarks,”Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie”, here. Step away from the Cookie!
I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.
Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.
This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.
NYT, Group Forms to Urge Strict Oversight of Wall Street, here.
The new group, which expects to begin issuing reports quickly, will include a long list of former regulators and officials from both parties, including former Senators Bill Bradley, Democrat of New Jersey; Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska; and Alan K. Simpson, Republican of Wyoming. It will also include Brooksley E. Born, a former chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, whose efforts to fight deregulation in the Clinton administration failed, and Paul H. O’Neill, the first Treasury secretary under George W. Bush.
Others include John S. Reed, the former head of Citicorp, and Hugh F. Johnston, the chief financial officer of Pepsico. Mr. Volcker is listed as a senior adviser. The organization is being formed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, where Ms. Bair now works, and the CFA Institute, an organization of financial analysts.
Expendables 2: Charles Bronson, Liam Neeson, Toshiro Mifune, Jason Statham, and Tupac realize the limitations of vigilante justice and form a regulatory oversight committee for TBTF Banks with Andy Serkis as the London Whale.
The Feature, A hand-picked selection of the finest articles and essays saved with Instapaper, here. Like the idea/layout/format.
McSweeney’s, PROSPECTUS FOR SILICON VALLEY’S NEXT HOT TECHIPO, WHERE NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG, here.
Users love our product because it’s something free. Venture Capitalists love it because they can imagine themselves talking about it at T.E.D. or on Charlie Rose. Trust us: Once you invest in Ponzify, you’ll have a difficult time investing your money anywhere else ever again.
programming in the twenty-first century, The Pace of Technology is Slower than You Think, here.
The
tarcommand appeared in Seventh Edition UNIX in 1979, the same year the vector-based Asteroids arcade game was released. Pick up any 2012 MacBook Air or Pro andtaris there.
BoingBoing, NYT: “MEN invented the internet”, here. NYT Editor must be on Vay – Kaye. Plus it doesn’t look like a troll; it looks like the Dude got a job at the Times.
Here’s the opening graf (bold-ing, mine):
MEN invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago.
You guys, ladies suck at technology and the New York Times is ON IT.
“The Dude abides. I don’t know about you but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. The Dude. Takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope he makes the finals.”
GeorgeSoros.com, Remarks at the Festival of Economics, Trento Italy, here. nice website.
ars technica, Stars aligning for June Ivy Bridge Mac launch alongside Mountain Lion (Updated), here. I tell ya, Lunchbox – this could be the one.
The one claiming to be the new MacBook Pro shows a 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7-3820QM processor, and its motherboard appears to correspond with a new Mac configuration found within the first developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. “In addition, the Geekbench result has the test machine as running OS X Mountain Lion build 10A211, which would be newer than the 12A193i build seeded to developers on May 2,”
Financial Information Forum, Market Share Reports, here. Lots of data: Short Sale Implementation, Reg NMS, Symbology, Oats, Stock Circuit Breaker
FIF monitors changes to market share as a result of structural, technological and regulatory changes. Collection of U.S. statistical data began in March 2007 when automated execution centers including NYSE Hybrid came into effect as a result of Regulation NMS. Starting in April 2009, FIF added coverage of the European equities market to analyze the impact of MiFID and MTFs on the European market. FIF generates monthly statistics covering Market Share in Tapes A,B and C, and European Equities Market Share based on Notional Value. Starting in January 2010, FIF added monthly statistics for Equity Options to analyze the market share of different exchanges in U.S. equity options. Market Dynamics statistics are shown on the FIF Market Dynamics webpage.
Pablo Triana, Wiley Book, The Number that Killed US: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and A Big Financial Crisis, here.
The Number That Killed Us finally tells the “greatest story never told”: how a mysterious financial risk measurement model has ruled the world for the past two decades and how it has repeatedly, and severely, caused market, economic, and social turmoil. This model was the key factor behind the unleashing of the cataclysmic credit crisis that erupted in 2007 and which the effects are still being felt around the world. The Number That Killed Us is the first and only book to thoroughly explain this hitherto-uncovered phenomenon, making it the key reference for truly understanding why the malaise took place.
Simon Johnson, NYT/Economix, Investigating JPMorgan Chase, here.
The company’s recent trading lossestherefore call for greater public scrutiny than would be the case for most private enterprise – and demand an independent investigation into exactly what happened. (Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets has already called for exactly this.)
The investigation begun by the F.B.I. is unlikely to be sufficiently public. Given the strong political connections between JPMorgan Chase and the Obama administration, it would also be better to have an investigation led by a completely independent counsel.
Ritholtz, Map of 2011 Imports and Exports, here. Nice graphics.
Jared Diamond, NYRB, What Makes Countries Rich or Poor? here. Book review of Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. lonelygirl15 said my demographic just reads everything Jared Diamond writes; who am I to rock the boat?
