Shares of Take-Two Interactive surged 6 percent on Tuesday. But it had nothing to do with activist investor Carl Icahn, who owns a chunk of the company or any rumors about the company’s earnings on Nov. 8.

What happened is that investors looked at the website of Rockstar games, the Take-Two-owned studio behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Its website had been replaced by a large Grand Theft Auto logo and a Roman numeral V wrapped around a banner saying “five.”

Gamers have been salivating for GTA 5 since 2008, when the last game in the series came out, so much so that at least one analyst has said that the game could sell 25 million copies in its first year.

But the timing, price, features or any other details are not yet known. The only clue the company revealed is on its website: the trailer is coming out on Nov 2.

Dan Houser, one of its renown game developers, gave an extended interview to Gamespot last week to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the third version  but was mum on new details about the newest game.

When the last version came out in 2008, it made over $500 million in its first week of release. The game has been criticized for glorifying crime, street violence and drunk-driving.

With the global $64 billion global video game industry taking a beating in recent years, another gritty GTA might be just what Wall Street ordered.

(Photo: A screenshot of the Rockstar website)

Today Gilliams was arrested on charges of running a $4 million investment scam.

Time to re-read the original story, which detailed allegations by Ohio businessman David Parlin that Gilliams used some of Parlin’s money to sponsor a glitzy black-tie charitable event in Philadelphia attended by rappers and local politicians.

Federal authorities began investigating Gilliams soon after the Reuters story was published, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be identified.

Matt will be keeping track of the case as it plays out.

Reuters invited leading economists to reply to Mark Thoma’s Op-Ed on the “great divide” in economics and will be publishing the responses. Below is Roger Martin’s reply.  Here are Ashwin Parameswaran, James Hamilton’s, Dean Baker’s and a recap of Paul Krugman’s.

I have a great deal of sympathy with Mark Thoma’s thesis of the great divide between academic and practitioner economists, though I have a somewhat different perspective on the reasons why the great divide exists.  I am less convinced that the divide is spurred by a desire on the part of academic economists to look down their noses at practitioner economists. I think it has more to do with the strictures that they have slowly but surely placed on themselves.

Social scientists – economists included – have long bristled at the degree to which the hard scientists stare down their noses at them because they are not ‘rigorous’: their models aren’t specified precisely enough and their data aren’t pure enough to satisfy the physicists, chemists, biologists, etc. Over time, some social scientists – led by the economists – battled back by becoming more quantitatively rigorous, by making the methodologies they used more similar to those of the hard scientists, with more thoroughly specified models, more high-flying math, more precise data and bigger sample sizes.  That helped the economists in particular stand up to the scientists at say: my math is as big as your math; my data is as sound as your data.  This made them happy and helped them look down their noses at ‘softer’ social scientists – like psychologists and historians and anthropologists.  And as they felt that rush of satisfaction, they were inclined to continue to up the ante some more to move closer to the hard scientists and distance themselves more from the soft social scientists.

But it created a problem. If things are complicated in the hard sciences, they are even more complicated in the social sciences. People (not to be confused with human bodies) are really complicated, especially when they interact with other people.  And lots of things that they do are really difficult to model using the techniques approved by the union of hard scientists.  So economists have increasingly decided to model only what they can model using the required techniques.  If they don’t use the requisite techniques, they get lumped back with the softies – and given the emancipation they have felt by doing rigorous analysis, they would never go back.

Practitioner economists, on the other hand, live in and face the problems of that horribly complicated world filled with ambiguous data, small sample sizes – sometimes of one – and confounded causal relationships.  They need to make sense of their world and do the best they can to model the difficult-to-model world that confronts them.  They want to know: how fast will the US economy recover from 2008-9?  The highly quantitative macroeconomists predict the course of recovery using the exact same rigorous, quantitative models that, as late as the second quarter of 2008,  failed completely to predict the economic crash that happened a mere quarter later.  These are rigorous quantitative models that the practitioners look at and say: rigorous but irrelevant.

The academic economists don’t engage in these problems because they think the problems are unworthy or that the practitioners are beneath them.  Rather, many of them are like Snowy, our Bichon Frise, in the yard of our house back in Wellesley, Massachusetts.  Because like many Bichon Frises, Snowy was not a deep and careful thinker, we installed an invisible dog fence (with a collar that zapped her if she crossed the line) to make sure she didn’t run out into the street and get mowed down by a car.  Snowy got zapped by her collar a couple of times and that was it: she was never going to cross the barrier again.  And that even meant not crossing it to the side when she saw her favorite play partner, Oliver – another foofy little dog breed, the name of which I can’t remember – in the neighbor’s front lawn.

They don’t hate or mock their proverbial Oliver.  In fact, they look longingly and lovingly at Oliver. But they will be damned if they cross that line and get zapped by their collar.  The main difference between those academic economists and Snowy is that we put the zapping collar on Snowy and the economists put on their own collars.

British bankers are not threatening to head for the Swiss hills. But that doesn’t mean they won’t pack their bags. So says Angela Knight, the head of the British Bankers Association.
Knight told the Reuters Future Face of Finance Summit that if British-based banks such as HSBC, Barclays and Standard Chartered consider whether to keep headquarters in London – given the banker bashing, punitive taxation and pay restrictions imposed here — that is merely a fact.

Speaking one day after Europe’s largest bank HSBC cut profitability targets as tougher bank regulations eat into earnings, Knight conceded that she did not expect banks to move lock, stock and barrel to Geneva – and that images of jumbo jets laden with London bankers in pinstriped suits were mere “cartoons”.
But she said the simple truth was that the British economic growth lagged that of peers, while fixed costs were rising. Britain was not an obviously attractive place to be for bankers.
To remain an international financial centre, the country needed to be clever and get its regulation right. Banks, she said, were just telling it as it is. “Is there an expectation that employment in banking will be reduced? Yes … Is there an expectation that sentiment will turn around? No,” she said. “We are living in a country and a region where the costs of operation are high and (there is) a lot of personal condemnation (of the banking industry)… so I think that we cannot pretend that somehow that has no effect and no impact.

“Why anyone calls it sabre rattling, I do not know, other than the fact that they must themselves be in denial,” she said. “Because these are just facts. These are not threats, they are not sabre-rattling. They’re not pretence. They are straight forward facts.”

K S Bala, a businessman from Punjab

The planned merger of Deutsche Boerse and NYSE Euronext will create the world’s biggest bourse with 90 percent of on-exchange traded derivatives in Europe.
It has certainly focused minds and boosted CEO airmiles.
Speakers at the Reuters Future Face of Finance Summit were upbeat about their chances of winning a slice of this market which shows more promise for the bottom line than share trading, where competition is as ferocious as margins are thin.
Chi-X Europe, busy finalising its merger with BATS, took time out to explain how it too is targetting derivatives — believing that a heady brew of shares, futures, options and ETFs on one platform will turn trading heads their way.
Last week saw the London Stock Exchange unveiling plans to turn its Turquoise pan-European platform into a derivatives winner too. And LCH.Clearnet, the clearing house, also sees
derivatives as the future.

The only way is up, it seems.
“The important thing in these markets is it’s not about first mover advantge,” is how Chi-X Europe CEO Alasdair Haynes bravely puts it.
LCH must also be hoping that is true — it wants to clear credit default swap trades, a niche ICE has largely to itself in Europe so far.
And the clearer’s CEO Roger Liddell hopes there will be an opportunity to clear derivatives linked to the STOXX indices –which are currently cleared and partly owned by Deutsche Boerse’s Eurex.
So all well and good.
If you have a killer contract everyone wants to trade, that is.
Deutsche Boerse’s Eurex was able to bulk up its derivatives volume in the Bund contract. Euronext’s LIFFE has short term interst rate derivatives in the bag for now.
On-exchange derivatives contracts are proprietary, unlike shares which have no patent and can be traded by any platform.
Past efforts to create new derivatives contracts have often run into the sand as turnover failed to materialise.
It may be a case on being able to bring a horse to a new derivatives platform but it will be harder to persuade it to drink unless the liquidity is there.
So far, nobody has a compelling answer to that dilemma.
Huw Jones, Reuters London

Reuters Insider’s Lyndee Prickitt interviewed N K Singh, Member Of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, on expectations for Budget 2011.

But one yarn towers over them all on this miserable, wet
Tuesday.

David Cameron has got a new cat.

The Westminster bubble ran through the whole range of gags
when it was discovered that Cameron’s Downing Street residence
in central London was infested with rats.

Unsurprisingly, the recruitment of a stray cat called Larry
as the hard-nosed enforcer to deal with the problem has
triggered another wave of bad jokes and cast all other stories,
no matter how grave, into the shadows.

After all, the hard-working British taxpayer has a right to
know…

Had Larry been vetted? Was there enough money in the “kitty”
for a rat-catching expert in this age of austerity? Would the
tabby be employed as a political special advisor or as a neutral
civil servant? Is Larry just another “fat” cat from the city?

“It had a very strong predatory drive and enjoyed playing
with toy mice,” Cameron’s spokesman revealed during a tense and,
sometimes, heated 20-minute stand-off with Westminster’s finest
political hacks.

Yeah, yeah… We’ve heard all that kind of stuff before.

Larry was clearly just another “you scratch my back, I’ll
scratch yours” appointment.

The stakes are high. If Larry fails, some experts warn the
whole of Westminster could be over-run by rats.

So good luck, Larry, but never fear… Even if you come up
short, there is always a warm, sleepy seat in the House of Lords
to look forward to.

Australia took full advantage of the remarkable turnaround they manufactured on Friday to move to the brink of a famous Ashes victory over England on Saturday.

Once again it was Mike Hussey, under pressure before the series but sensational throughout it, who held the Australian innings together with a knock of 116, which enabled the hosts to set the tourists a winning target of 391. That would be the fourth highest fourth innings run chase ever if England achieved it.

Even given what has happened in the series so far, it would be a brave man or woman to back  them to do it. If you are feeling courageous, we may have the bookmaker for you.

Tim Wimbourne’s picture show Mike Hussey celebrating his century at the WACA.

– This story by Theodore May originally appeared in Global Post. Any opinions expressed are his own. –

In the small central Gaza town of Deir el Belah, one family has made a cottage industry out of green innovation.

“There was a period in Gaza when there was no gas or you had to wait for hours in line to get gas. So we made the oven according to our needs,” said Maher Youssef Abou Tawahina, who, along with his father, runs a hardware shop in town.

Abou Tawahina is referring to a solar-powered oven that he and his family invented two years ago. The oven, which sits in the family’s backyard, takes five minutes to heat up using electricity. Then, its glass ceiling uses the sun to continue the heating process. The oven is not quite hot enough for baking bread, he said, but it’s perfect for roasting chicken.

The idea of the solar-powered oven was so well received around Deir El Belah that orders poured in from around the neighborhood. Abou Tawahina said that he and his father built over 30 of them until the insulating glass became unavailable on the market.

A dozen miles up the road, in northern Gaza City, high energy costs also drove Waseem El Khazendar to innovate for his own survival.

When gasoline in Gaza reached $4 per liter, El Khazendar said, he could hardly afford to drive his car, even within the tight confines of Gaza.

As a result, El Khazendar, who was trained as an engineer in Cairo, created Gaza’s first-ever electric car.

His innovation made waves throughout Gaza. Palestinians flocked to his office to see the car. Local news outlets, too, were fascinated.

El Khazendar, however, eventually parked his little electric Peugeot in the wrong place — a factory his family owned in north Gaza, when the war between Hamas and Israel began. The Israeli air force bombed the factory, destroying the car.

These are Gaza’s green entrepreneurs.

In this isolated and war-torn territory, however, they are few and far between. Hamas, which effectively runs Gaza, is crushing green initiatives that might contradict the group’s message that Palestinians here are suffering because of an Israeli blockade of goods along its border.

“The policy of Hamas is to show we are not developing,” said Fouad El-Harazin, a Palestinian-American who founded the National Research Center, an organization in Gaza that is trying to find the funding and supplies to kick start a solar energy project here.

“We depend on Israel with everything,” he added. “We want to depend on ourselves.”

El-Harazin, among others, said that a green Gaza could mean an independent Gaza. But while Israeli border restrictions make importing solar energy equipment difficult, it is Hamas that is actively working against green energy projects here.

“Hamas will say, ‘Why did you do that? Do you want to show we have good development? Take it down!’” El-Harazin said.

Israel enacted its blockade on Gaza in 2007 after Hamas took control of the area in what amounted to a military coup. With Gaza’s other neighbor, Egypt, also participating in the blockade, few goods make it across the border, meaning that many products — including construction materials like cement — have become scarce here.

Much of the international community has condemned the blockade, saying it creates a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israel says the blockade is necessary to keep political pressure on Hamas, which lists the destruction of the Jewish state among its chief priorities.

Switching to green energy and building techniques, analysts said, could help Gaza thwart Israel’s obstruction.

A recent project by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza aimed to build houses using mud instead of cement and steel, which are on the list of items Israel prohibits from entering Gaza.

New houses are essential for Palestinians to keep up with their booming population. Palestinians have also, for the most part, been unable to rebuild houses damaged or destroyed in last January’s war with Israel.

So with a local company providing the design work, the United Nations’ relief agency began its project to build mud houses.

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