Ben Walsh

On Tuesday morning, the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTs) data showed that the rate of hiring, turnover, and the number of open jobs was basically flat.

A little explanation: The hiring rate is the number of peopled hired as a percent of total employment. The JOLTs report also tracks the quits rate, which is the number of people who have voluntarily quit as a percent of total employment. Taken together, the quit rate and the hire rate represent a good proxy for the level of choice workers, particularly the already employed, have in the job market.

This chart shows that the level of choice in the job market within the workforce plummeted during the Great Recession. It has gradually improved over the last four years, but is still at right around 2008 levels. And this is likely still not fully representative of the job market: because it tracks quits, and there is a bias to hire the already employed, this chart more accurately reflects job choice among the employed than the unemployed.

Job growth is showing much the same pattern. Looking at the data since late 2011, the NYT's Neil Irwin concluded that the "jobs recovery in the United States is astonishingly consistent, astonishingly resilient, and astonishingly underwhelming", holding steady at an annual rate of just over 2 million:

Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.

“In their capital city, the English are no longer calling the shots. They are hirelings”. That’s Ben Judah’s description of present day-London, in a NYT op-ed which went viral over the weekend. To Judah, London is a place filled almost exclusively with Russian oligarchs, Qatari princes, tottering post-colonial diplomats, Eastern European laborers, skyscrapers, and slums. Its mission is to placate Russians and their money, most recently in the form of Ukraine policy. Judah sees the Shard -- which is Europe’s tallest building and will be filled with offices, Michelin-starred restaurants, and mega-residences -- as an emblem of London’s decline. As it seems he intended, Judah elicited strong feelings by lacing his piece with hyperbole and caricature.

The Telegraph’s Sean Thomas skewers Judah’s Shard-as-symbol thesis:

What did you do over the sunny weekend? If you are a Londoner, you probably drank a crate of champagne with your best friend Ivan and several nude escorts, in your flat on top of the Shard. Or so the New York Times would have us believe, according to a rhapsodically stupid article published on Friday.

Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.

Satoshi Nakamoto invented bitcoin in 2008.

Who is he? In the past few years, there have been no shortage of theories:

Tatsuaki Okamoto, a researcher at NTT, the Japanese telecom company.

Micheal Clear, a 23-year old graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin.

Vili Lehdonvirta, a Finnish programmer.

Shinichi Mochizuki, a math professor at Kyoto University.

Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, and/or Charles Bry, whose names were on a 2008 patent application for “updating and distributing encryption keys”.

Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of now defunct bitcoin exchange Mt Gox.

Dustin Trammell, a security researcher.

Or, Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year old, LA-area, Prius-driving model-train enthusiast, who Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman tracked down with the help of forensic researchers.

Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.

Mt Gox is filing for bankruptcy. CEO Mark Karpeles says that the nearly $500 million in bitcoin held by the company are gone. The four-year-old Mt Gox, which was the oldest and largest bitcoin exchange, has $63.7 million in liabilities, $37.6 million in assets and 127,000 creditors, Reuters reports.

The problem appears to be in part because of something called transaction malleability attacks. Those attacks work like this: each bitcoin transaction has a unique, individual -- and theoretically impossible to fake -- ID code. The problem is that the user digital signature (the part of the transaction code that shows which user the transaction came from) was vulnerable. That signature could be altered and still potentially accepted. As a result, the same transaction could be sent into the system multiple times: once as a valid transaction from a valid user, and other times as an invalid transaction that looked like a valid transaction.

Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.

Harvard, a $33 billion hedge fund with a university attached, has received the largest donation in its history. Citadel founder Ken Griffin has pledged to give the university $150 million.

The donation will support 800 eponymous scholarships, and a new business professor. The office of financial aid, along with its director, will also be renamed in his honor. Harvard already employs need-blind admissions, and has made no indications that it is under any financial pressure to end that policy. 60% of its students receive financial aid.

Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.

President Obama has made increasing the minimum wage a centerpiece of his push to address income inequality. The Congressional Budget Office has now weighed in on the economic consequences of that proposal.

The CBO estimates that raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 (a level the President reportedly supports) would increase wages for 16 million Americans, lift 900,000 people out of poverty -- and cost the economy 500,000 jobs.

There's been a spate of suicides among current and former finance workers recently. Earlier today, a 33 year-old committed suicide by jumping from the roof of JP Morgan's Asia headquarters in Hong Kong.

January 26: William Broeksmit, a former Deutsche Bank executive, was found hanging in his London home. Broeksmit joined Deutsche from Merrill Lynch in the 1990's and helped start the German firm's investment banking business. After the financial crisis, he worked to shrink the company's balance sheet and reduce risk. January 28: Gabriel Magee fell to his death from JP Morgan's London Canary Wharf offices. Magee was a vice president in the banks corporate and investment bank technology group. Magee's death is being treated by London law enforcement as non-suspicious. January 31: Mike Dueker, the chief economist at Russell Investments, was found dead of an apparent suicide next to a Washington State highway. He had been reported missing by his family two days earlier. Dueker worked at the Saint Louis Fed from 1991 to 2008. February 4: Richard Talley, the founder and CEO of American Title Services killed himself in his Colorado home, reportedly shooting himself seven to eight times with a nail gun. American Title Services was under investigation by Colorado's insurance regulator.

In September, Steven Stack, a West Virginia University professor who studies suicide, told the International Business Times that "we know very little about the degree of suicide risk for this small occupational group". Cause of death is recorded by at the state level; states, Stack said, don't necessarily record the occupation of the deceased. The result is haphazard, incomplete, and unreliable data.

Occupational stress, the trigger so often associated with banker suicides, is only one of four main risk suicide factors, according to Stack. The other three major risk factor Stack identifies are: demographics (the white, the middle-aged, and men have higher a higher risk of killing themselves); "pre-existing psychiatric morbidity"; and ease of access to a means of death. The latter may explain why what data is available shows healthcare workers with ready access to lethal drugs have higher suicide rates.

Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.

Is the European Central Bank behaving in a constitutional manner? On Friday, the German Constitutional Court said no -- but declared that the European Court of Justice should have the final say in the matter. At issue is a key weapon in the ECB’s crisis-fighting arsenal.

In the midst of the European sovereign-debt crisis, the ECB announced it would buy unlimited amounts of member states’ bonds, if needed. ECB chief Mario Draghi famously said he would do “whatever it takes”, and that promise has, so far, been enough: the ECB hasn’t needed to actually use the bond-buying program, called Outright Monetary Transactions.

Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.

After an emergency midnight meeting yesterday, Turkey's central bank acted in defiance of the country's prime minister and raised its overnight lending rate to 12% from 7.75%. The move came in the context of declines in the lira and other emerging market currencies. In the last year, the lira has fallen more than 20% against the dollar, and is down 4.25% in the last month.

The lira strengthened against the dollar after the announcement, but the gains proved transient and were gone just 16 hours after the announcement. The lira ended Wednesday essentially flat, down 0.22% against the dollar.

Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, no stranger to exotic insurance risks, is insuring Quicken’s $1 billion prize for picking a perfect NCAA tournament bracket. The odds of picking the winner of all 63 basketball games are absurdly low: somewhere in the realm of 1 in 128 billion to 1 in 772 billion. Those odds raise the question of why Quicken is even looking for insurance in the first place. Maybe, as David Merkel points out, “those seeking insurance on unlikely events think the events are more likely than they actually are”.

Warren Buffett is very good at both the insurance business and the publicity business. A combination of those talents is presumably why Quicken is probably paying more than the $0.01 fair value (the payout multiplied by the odds, or $1 billion times 1/128 billion) for the policy. How much more Quicken is paying, however, isn’t clear, and there just may not be enough data to accurately price the policy.