Monday links get taken for a ride
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Why you don’t actually get compensated for taking on extra equity risk:
In the world’s 12 most valuable companies there are 3 banks. Two are Chinese; the other is Hongkong and Shanghai.
“There are several things I love to do on the Vineyard. The first is ride my tricycle. I have two adult tricycles…”
Harvard goes trademark-bonkers
Lots of geektastic detail on “latency arbitrage” — which is a much better name than “high-frequency trading”
TED spread now <30bp for the first time since March 2007
“Big Wall Street firms view SEC fines the way UPS and FedEx view parking tickets in Manhattan“
Bloomberg’s MTA wishlist is full of goodies. Pity none of it is going to happen.
Hugo Lindgren invents the Hot Waitress Index — no sympathy for the fembots!
Sarah Wildman on how insurers never pay for pregnancy (and please, WPNI, give me a single-page option!)
Charlie Rose hypocrisy alert: he says GE doesn’t control NBC content, while brokering deals to do just that
Cognitive dissonance, Temasek edition
Andrew Hall is back in the news, so I might as well disinter an April blog entry: Citigroup can’t keep Phibro
NYT tries and fails to work out how on earth Annie Leibovitz ended up $24m in the hole
Cute interactive how-people-spend-their-day chart
Anil Dash delivers 2,271 words on how Apple should give up its culture of secrecy
Two early bids for the Boston Globe, one would turn it into a nonprofit.
Hubristic datapoint of the day: Trader Monthly thinks it’s worth more than $0
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The HFT article highlights the points that really bothered me when the issue came out – other than the allegations of cancelled orders. Co-locating, etc. requires the collusion of the markets themselves to allow the very large houses an advantage. That seems to me to be bluntly contrary to the purpose of the markets and that says to me the markets themselves need to be told they need to keep a more level playing field.
Re: “Most “abandoned” cities.”
The linked article makes reference to vacancy rates for commercial and residential property. Well, that’s one measure of a city being abandoned. But it’s not necessarily the best.
One could also look at population declines–in which case Kansas City, the leading city cited in the article, would be nowhere to be found. For cities with 150,000 mr more in population, New Orleans leads the way, having lost more than 57%% of its population between 1980 and 2007. Setting aside New Orleans–clearly, this result is largely determined by Hurricane Katrina–Flint may be the real leader (-28.3%). Kansas City, by way of contrast, ranks 43rd in from the bottom in population change (a gain of 0.53%). If we expand our view to include cities with fewer than 150,000 residents, Gary, IN has lost 32% of its population.
So cities that have been abandoned? I think KC looks OK.
I’ve no love for the US health system, but I must admit I also have no great sympathy for the story regarding the costs of pregnancy. After all, pregnancy is an elective condition, and as such in a different class from true diseases, accidents, and so on.
Or, to put it differently, the people up in arms over that sort of story are the same people who tend to laugh/sneer/mock at the idea of health insurance paying for breast implants or botox injections — other elective medicine.
Personally, in my ideal health system, elective medicine would be part of what is covered, just as much as true diseases; perhaps with some sort of annual or lifetime cap to prevent abuse. My point, however, is that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander — if you want to mock Susie over there for choosing to spend $5000 on improving her social life via better tits, why exactly is your choice to improve your life via kids something sacrosanct that the rest of us should pay for?