The lesson of the economic crisis ought to have been that there’s a lot of inherent uncertainty. Always has been and always will be. Even when we assume things are certain, or nearly certain. The problems were all caused or enabled by people having too much faith in the bets they were making, in the [...]
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Can’t sleep. So I open up my computer and there’s a new post from Felix Salmon, “When Morgan Stanley almost died,” saying that even in this “orgy of one-year-later reminiscing,” decision-makers still need vivid reminders “just how close the entire financial world came to collapse.” No doubt. Canadians can’t forget it either — even though [...]
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This article is amazingly rich… I’m still playing with all the threads. Michael Lewis comes through again — huge (literally, at about 10,000 words) – this time for Vanity Fair with a piece on the economic crisis in Iceland: ”Wall Street on the Tundra.” Highly recommended [via Felix Salmon]: Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can’t help but [...]
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Inside the Meltdown, Tuesday night at 9:00 on PBS Frontline. “Many Americans still don’t understand what has happened to the economy,” FRONTLINE producer/director Michael Kirk says. “How did it all go so bad so quickly? Who is responsible? How effective has the response from Washington and Wall Street been? Those are the questions at the heart [...]
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Being home sick today I’ve had all kinds of time to post but my mild fever and interrupted breathing got in the way of the writing process. I’ve done a lot of reading today on the Citigroup bailout (pretty much all of it is here now, via Mark Thoma); I wanted to comment on it [...]
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As I write this I’m watching this conversation, part of Harvard Business School’s centennial celebration, with John Doerr, Jeffrey Immelt, James Wolfensohn, Meg Whitman, and Anand Mahindra. To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting much, but it turned out to be pretty interesting and insightful. At the very least it’s refreshing to see top business leaders referring directly [...]
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Yesterday I dealt briefly with the long- vs. short-run looking forward. Today I want to deal with the long- vs. short-run looking back. We are always in a zone of imperfect visability so far as the history just over our shoulder is concerned. It is as if we were in the hollow of the historical [...]
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Sorry, it was a trick. Technically it’s advice from Warren Buffett, so you’ll have to settle with this: In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” More here on getting through the crisis. And here’s an [...]
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Things have gone from epic to cosmic. Tyler Cowen was on top of it, as always, pointing to this hastily-written story in the New York Times: The goal is to inject massive liquidity into the banking system. The government will purchase perpectual preferred shares in all the largest U.S. banking companies. The shares will notbe dilutive [...]
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Sometimes I worry that it’s presumptuous of me to even comment on the financial crisis, not to mention try to explain it and recommend solutions. I have no technical grasp of this stuff, and my own personal finances are about as unsophisticated as any 30 year-old’s could be. I rent a small apartment, I have zero investments (though I had [...]
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Continued… Action without understanding is the cause of our problems (at least if we feel we must identify a cause). This editorial from Terence Corcoran in the Post makes some unpopular points, laying much of the blame on zeal for governance and accounting reform. It turns out that maybe imperialist leaders, insider boards, and mark-to-market [...]
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Driving Processes
by OpenConceptual on 07-30-2009
in commentary,concepts
You will hear people talking about “latency,” which means the delay between a trading signal being given and the trade being made. Low latency — high speed — is what banks and funds are looking for. Yes, we really are talking about shaving off the milliseconds that it takes light to travel along an optical [...]
Tagged as: control, decision-making, decisions, finance, intuition, judgment, latency, mind, objectivity, pattern recognition, process, quantitative finance
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