My afternoon train reading, filled with WTF headlines:
• WTF! Apple Eyeing $960, May Settle For Six-Handle (For Today, At Least) (WSJ) see also Apple Drives Record $1.24T of Company Cash (Bloomberg)
• WTF? Germany Fails To Meet Its Own Austerity Goals (Spiegel Online)
• 10 reasons Wall Street will hit bottom, (WTF!) crash (Market Watch) see also An interesting model of asset bubbles (Noahpinion)
• US Federal Tax Receipts (Dr. Ed’s Blog)
• MBIA cries discovery abuse; BofA counters with grandstanding claim (Reuters) see also BofA Makes a Deal on Side (WSJ)
• Generation Stuck: Why Don’t Young People Move, Anymore? (The Atlantic)
• Rent-Seeking: A Primer (Freeman Online)
• Over the rainbow: If there are better ways to split atoms, they will be a long time coming (Economist)
• Lost Leonardo da Vinci found (National Geographic)
• As told by Christopher Hitchens: Heaven can wait (Washington Monthly)
What are you reading?
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Scorecard for New Bank Stress Tests
Source: NYT
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
HFT, Computers, The Singularity, and Why we may already be there
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-07/the-reign-of-robots-may-be-closer-than-you-think-mark-buchanan.html
“Ray Kurzweil has famously predicted that humanity is approaching a “singularity,” a fateful moment when our technology becomes smarter than us and able to learn faster than we can, when it becomes the principal creator of new technologies and machines race far ahead of us. Humans may effectively fall out of the loop — a species demoted, if not eliminated.
For now, this world remains science fiction, at least at the level of humanity. But finance is flirting with a similar transition, as ever-faster computing and communications technology takes high-frequency trading into a regime of speed where human beings can no longer keep up. In fact, we may have already arrived.”
“We’re moving, as Johnson and colleagues put it, “from a mixed phase of humans and machines, in which humans have time to assess information and act, to an ultrafast all-machine phase in which machines dictate price changes.” We’re crossing a boundary into a trading twilight zone, and doing so without much thought or awareness of the potential dangers.”
Roger Lowenstein profile of Bernanke as everyone’s villain
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/the-villain/8901/
Andy Haldane – the wonky regulator who is actually trying to get to the bottom of financial instability
http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/03/the-regulator-who-explained-th.html
Hilarious send up of the Goldman Sachs op-ed by Alexandra Petri of the WaPo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/why-i-am-joining-goldman-sachs/2012/03/14/gIQAygtGCS_blog.html?hpid=z3
Stocks hit all-time high.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57396250/us-stocks-hit-all-time-high/
Apple, with almost $100b in cash is looking for a $8m subsidy from the city of Austin to expand it’s research center here. I am an avowed capitalist and ready to bargain for anything. But. Really???
Re BAC/MBIA
No Surprise. This is what happens when parties lawyer up. If we were talking tainted beef or kiddie strollers the case would be more obvious. It should not be that hard.
Excellent article discussing the mythology of the “too few engineering graduates” mantra that large US businesses espouse at every opportunity.
http://www.todaysengineer.org/2012/Mar/STEM-Careers.asp
BR, regarding Hitchens, who I read for years, here is an obit from one who debated him.
I think, in this case, you’ll find the faithful opposition to be informed, respectful, generous, hopeful–and maybe even rational. The background on Hitchens’ pains to circumvent any deathbed conversion stories is sort of poignant. Hitchens may have tried too hard by half (as the WM article might be interpreted).
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/decemberweb-only/christopher-hitchens-obituary.html
It is getting much harder now to distinguish the real from the fake news stories: http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/03/01/in-possible-gaffe-romney-says-poor-people-taste-like-chicken/
Also, Lloyd Blankfein from GS responds: http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/03/14/a-response-from-goldman-sachs/
ephone1:
As an engineer myself, I can assure you that my pay and the pay of my co-workers does not indicate a “shortage” of engineers. Neither does it indicate a significant surplus. In my field anyway, we appear to be roughly in balance and have been for several decades.
rd,
with..”…In my field anyway…”
if you don’t mind, Which field would that be?