Langkilde

En galning har gått ur tiden. Tyvärr är det nog liten risk att...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:32:44 +0100

En galning har gått ur tiden. Tyvärr är det nog liten risk att det leder till förbättring för det Nordkoreanska folket. Men man kan ju hoppas.

Rebel Chinese village of Wukan ‘has food for ten...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:57:28 +0100

Rebel Chinese village of Wukan ‘has food for ten days’

The rebel Chinese village of Wukan, which has driven out the Communist party, has resorted to smuggling in food past a police ring of steel which has cut off its population of more than 20,000.

—The Telegraph

Blir mer och mer orolig att den ekonomiska krisen på allvar skall slå till emot Kina. Då kommer vi få se fler och fler nyheter av det här slaget. Totalitära stater klarar sig så länge de kan finansiera korruptionen. Vad händer sedan?

The 2010 Flash Crash

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 11:33:32 +0100

Here’s a school project just finished giving some insight into events during the flash crash of May 6th 2010. Due to a collapse in the E-mini market the S&P500 index dropped more than 9% during the day, causing weird trading in the underlying stocks. The sequence of events described illustrate the dangers of high frequency trading. The report is a brief and hopefully easy read. Feedback is appreciated. Enjoy!

http://db.tt/syObAb05

It’s not a foreign concept to break out and go see the world....

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:55:00 +0100

It’s not a foreign concept to break out and go see the world. At the end of the day, people want to say that about themselves- they want to split. They want to live a better life somewhere. It’s idealism- escapism. It’s never attainable but the idea of it keeps people going.

Den senaste tiden har jag funderat mycket på hur man skapar en stark kultur i en organisation. Ett företag som verkar lyckats väldigt bra är The Island Company, ett företag som tillverka beachwear. Härlig slogan har de också; Escape.Travel.Live.

Amazing time lapse view from space!

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:02:25 +0100

Amazing time lapse view from space!

Meanwhile in China...

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:54:00 +0100

Mr Ai [WeiWei] says ordinary Chinese people have been tucking banknotes into paper aeroplanes and flying them over his garden wall, in order to contribute to the $2.4m tax bill that Chinese authorities say he owes them. He was detained in April and held for nearly three months for what the Communist Party later said was tax evasion. Mr Ai says that the charges are politically motivated, a response to his outspoken criticism of the party.

One Chinese supporter in the southern city of Guangzhou told the BBC he had sent a postal order [a money transfer] to Mr Ai because it was a “rare opportunity to support what I believe.” The supporter added, “I will keep my receipt of the postal order forever, because it is my first real vote.” The Chinese government, desperate to prevent such shows of support for a man it considers to be deeply subversive, has attempted to prevent the contributions.

Från Banyan.

Imagine that...

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 01:12:27 +0100

Från R.A på The Economist Free Exchange:

Doing a bit of background research for a piece on the euro zone, I stumbled across this:

Inspiration for the € symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon (Є) – a reference to the cradle of European civilisation – and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to ‘certify’ the stability of the euro.

Quite.

Recent Kauffman poll among economics bloggers.

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:19:00 +0100

Recent Kauffman poll among economics bloggers.

"We are but dust and shadows. And that’s ok."

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:26:00 +0200

“We are but dust and shadows. And that’s ok.”

- Quintus Horatius Flaccus. With a less gloomy addition by me.

1984 is right now

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:18:42 +0200

Vowing to promote the development of what it called a healthy
Internet culture, the Central Committee said it will supervise the world’s biggest online community more closely, promote “constructive” websites and punish the spread of “harmful information,”…

China’s leaders are grappling with the best way to manage Twitter-like social-media sites such as Sina Corp.’s Weibo service that are hard for government censors to control.

That coincided with an announcement last night that new limits would be imposed on the number of “overly entertaining and vulgar” reality and talent shows aired on television.

Starting next year, the nation’s 34 satellite channels must limit themselves to two such programs every week, according to a statement yesterday on China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television’s website.

The new rules are meant to “prevent the trend of overly entertaining and vulgar programs, and satisfy mass audience demand for various multi-level and high standard programs,’” the statement said. Channels should “start an ideology and morals-building program to promote Chinese traditional virtue and socialist core values,” it said.

Invandrarvänligt

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:26:00 +0200

The reeling [US] housing market has come to this: To shore it up, two Senators are preparing to introduce a bipartisan bill Thursday that would give residence visas to foreigners who spend at least $500,000 to buy houses in the U.S.

Chinese and Canadian buyers, among others, are taking advantage not only of big declines in U.S. home prices and reduced competition from Americans but also of favorable foreign exchange rates.

"Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and..."

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:02:06 +0200

““Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you
can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more
tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this
necessary?””

- – Marcus Aurelius. Or I suppose it could just as well have been Steve Jobs…

Bättre tider

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:33:00 +0200

Hämtat ur SEB:s Morning Alert:

POSITIVA DIREKTÖRER. Bara en av sju börs-vd:ar tror på sjunkande aktiekurser det kommande året och två tredjedelar tror att kurserna kommer att stiga. Viktigast för att få en varaktig uppgång är att skuldkrisen i Europa får en lösning. I linje med den positiva grundsynen planerar 40% att öka investeringstakten medan bara 10% planerar att minska investeringarna det kommande året. Allt enligt en undersökning bland 100 börs-vd:ar i framförallt små och medelstora företag beställd av Di.

Känns glädjande att allt makrostrul i Grekland inte verkar helt ha avskräckt investerarna. Om situationen löser sig, vilket allt fler tecken tyder på, så tror jag vi kommer vi få se en hejdundrandes rekyl uppåt.

"A theory that encapsulates human behavior[?]"

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:21:00 +0200

Years ago Economics was part of what was called PPE – the triple fields of Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Economics was grouped with the moral sciences.
Nowadays Economics is grouped with MPNE – Mathematics, Psychology, Neuroscience and Economics. Economics is put with the traditional value-free sciences.

There’s nothing wrong with these fields on their own. But, if economics is about what’s good and how to get it, it can’t be value-free. It’s mathematical models are poor metaphors that are obviously and vastly inadequate. Its papers read like Euclid, with axioms and theorems, their faux rigor is inversely proportional to their minimal efficacy.

No model yet invented can tell you whether anything at all will go up or down tomorrow. The invisible worm at the heart of economics has been its dark secret love of inappropriate scientific elegance and scientism.

Markets and prices are generated by human behavior. The greatest conceptual danger in modeling human behavior is idolatry, which is a kind of pragmamorphism, imagining that someone can write down a theory that encapsulates human behavior and relieves you of the difficulty of constant thinking. A model may be entrancing but no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to breath true life into it. To confuse a limited flawed model with a theory is to embrace a future disaster driven by the belief that humans obey mathematical rules. — Emanuel Derman

En hälsosam dos självrannsakan från en av grundarna av “quantitative finance” på 80-talet. Gott om eget tvivel rörande matematiska modellers predikativa förmåga. Och samhällsnytta. I grund och botten handlar våra finansiella marknader om att möjliggöra bra företagsidéer genom värdeeffektiv tillgång till kapital. Läser just nu Nassim Nicholas Talebs bok “Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable”. Den ger mer stöd till känslan av att det som verkligen spelar roll i världen inte låter sig fångas av en approximativ modell, vilket därmed invaliderar modellernas legitimitet i stort. Därmed inte sagt att fysikaliska modeller är värdelösa, de är bara inte tillämpbara på människor i någon större utsträckning.

Väderekonomen

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:39:51 +0200

[V]ad säger oss Anders Borgs noggrant utmejslade, finslipade och under lång tid konsekvent inhamrade väder-metaforer? Jo, att det inte går att styra ekonomin. Vädret finns oavsett människan. Det är kaotiskt och amoraliskt; på samma gång hänsynslöst och frikostigt. Det ger och det tar. Det följer en kosmisk logik vars hemligheter ligger långt utom räckhåll för dödliga. Men det går att göra hyfsat vederhäftiga femdygnsprognoser, eller åtminstone endygnsprognoser. En finansministers roll blir i den logiken att hålla utkik efter lågt flygande svalor och vid behov bygga skyddsvallar. Och sedan, när väderomslaget är nära, uppmana väljarna att klä sig rätt. Svenskarna har ju redan lärt sig på dagis att det inte finns dåliga väder, bara dåliga kläder. Som politiker gäller det att ta patent på rejäla regnställ. Då vinner man förtroende. Och val.

Torbjörn Nilsson i Fokus om Anders Borg. Via Ingerö.

Optimism is a curse

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:23:00 +0200

Many banks applied a haircut to all of their Greek bonds, including the long-term ones not covered by the proposed exchange. But some banks, including BNP Paribas and Société Générale in France and Intesa Sanpaolo in Italy, decided to carry the long-term bonds at full value, on the theory that it would all work out and that European governments had promised not to force exchanges of longer-dated bonds… On Thursday, the average trading price for such bonds was about 37 percent of par value. The market has good reason to be worried about the French banks. They own $57 billion in Greek sovereign and private debt — more than all German and British banks combined. And they have well over half a trillion euros in Spanish and Italian debt, most of which is trading at a substantial discount to par, if it trades at all.

Kul höst de kommer ha i Paris… Kan tilläggas att Lagarde slutat prata om att man måste kapitalsera europeiska banker. Förtroende är alltså nu så lågt att man slutat prata om uppenbara problem i hopp om att de skall försvinna.

Strategy = coherent action backed by an argument

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:27:00 +0200

Despite the roar of voices equating strategy with ambition, leadership, vision, or planning, strategy is none of these. Rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument. And the core of the strategist’s work is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.

— The Perils of Bad Strategy, McKinsey

Jag är så trött på strategi-, vision- och måldokument som säger allt och ingenting. Varför kan folk inte lära sig att styrdokument bara är meningsfulla om de säger något konkret.

Bra artikel Alex, tack för tipset.

Bra och pedagogiskt. Tack för tipset Viktor.

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 13:46:46 +0200

Bra och pedagogiskt. Tack för tipset Viktor.

Tim Cook, the most powerful gay man in the world

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 14:00:00 +0200

Tim Cook is now the most powerful gay man in the world. This is newsworthy, no? But you won’t find it reported in any legacy/mainstream outlet. And when the FT‘s Tim Bradshaw did no more than broach the subject in a single tweet, he instantly found himself fielding a barrage of responses criticizing him from so much as mentioning the subject. Similarly, when Gawker first reported Cook’s sexuality in January, MacDailyNews called their actions “petty, vindictive, and just plain sad.”

But surely this is something we can and should be celebrating, if only in the name of diversity — that a company [Apple] which by some measures is the largest and most important in the world is now being run by a gay man.

- “Don’t ignore Tim Cook’s sexuality”, Felix Salmon

Kan inte hålla med mer. Visst, det är inte relevant för Cooks förmåga att leda Apple. Men, och det är ett stort men, jag tycker det är viktigt att visa upp förebilder.

castic: Bilder den 5 augusti. Xilamuren, drygt två timmar...

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:06:38 +0200

Vanlig syn på stepperna

Ghengis Khan och senig gubbe

Vanlig syn på stepperna

Mongolian King brännvin och diverse mat

castic:

Bilder den 5 augusti. Xilamuren, drygt två timmar bussresa nordöst om Hohhot, Inre Mongoliet.