Wash Post AIG Story Missing Something

Reading Day 3 of the Washington Post series on AIG, I sense they are leaving out crucial information. For example, the story starts: The mo...

Stuff White People Like

Stuff White People Like creator Christian Lander was at Google Authors , and it's a refreshing story. His site mocks the status climbi...

Krugman Assumes One Must Act

Krugman writes : the opponents of a strong stimulus plan don’t really have an alternative to offer. Here's an alternative: nothing. Lik...

What the Government Used to Do

One problem with our government today is that there is so much oversight, there are so many rules and regulations, sensitivities, that the g...

Holiday Cards

I have a lot of holiday cards that say: Happy Holidays! with pictures of 2 kids (Jake and Abby with big smiles), and then inside minimalist ...

Happy Winter Solstice!

Love the feet. My mom would do this to me. Holidays are no time for blogging. Merry Christmas.

My Book

I see my book that is in the process of being published is listed at Amazon. The description is sufficiently vague that it really doesn...

When Investors Don't Ask Questions

Madoff's returns were clearly too good to reflect the 'split strike' strategy he intimated generated such returns. Further, the...

Benford's Law Catches Madoff (error!)

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit i...

Big Bang Theory Whiteboards

Professor David Saltzberg , an astrophysicist at UCLA, vets the science on " Big Bang ", including making sure all the equations o...

What Fraudulent Returns Look Like

These returns were from the document Harry Markopolous sent to the SEC in 2005, and while his allegations tend to ramble, his basic points a...

Revenge of the Optimists

Things are pretty bleak now, but one has to put this in perspective. As Flaubert noted, our ignorance of history makes us libel our own tim...

Peter Schiff, Prophet?

I haven't read much by Peter Schiff, but check out these clips of him calling a bear market back in August 2006! This might be cherry p...

Madoff Scam

Madoff's fraud is kind of funny because his purported option strategy didn't make any sense . He was buying stocks, trading options...

Columbus the Risk Taker

From Lester Thurow's The Future of Capitalism (p. 326): Columbus know that the world was round, but he...thought that the diameter of t...

Blagojevich Lesson: Don't Say It

Many are shocked by the Blagojevich scandal because of his brazen quid pro quos: given my campaign $1MM to get the senate seat, give my cam...

An Extreme Solution to Fraud

Execution! Sarbanes-Oxley is nice, but what we need is something that really gives financial hucksters a reason to behave. China recently ...

When Quant Models are Complicated

Paul Wilmott, a mathematician by training who publishes a lot on derivatives mathematics, notes the following: On a one-to-one basis many pe...

Krugman Highlights Nobelists Limitations

Krugman's Big Idea is outlined pretty well in his Nobel speech. To the extent it truly captures something big, the essence of the idea ...

Krugman's Nobel Lecture

If you have an hour to present to the Nobel committee, you lay out your Big Idea. Krugman's presentation here is pretty good. He goes ...

Taleb Blames VAR, Merton, Scholes for Crimes

You can't blame Taleb for arguing the same point over and over--he's a bestselling author and much wanted speaker, so supply is meet...

Paul Krugman's Humor Reveals

Paul Krugman won the Nobel prize, so he got to meet President Bush for a photo. Now, Krugman has been so highly critical of Bush, one wonde...

Does Economics Create Wisdom?

Brad DeLong looks at all 'we' have to figure out, and is exasperated : The Obama administration is going to be rebuilding and recons...

Union Work Rules

The UAW magnanimously announced that they may get rid of the job bank, basically mandatory featherbedding. They also may back off on the de...

What if Moody's Adjusted Their Ratings Earlier?

A AAA rating means about a 1 in 10,000 chance (0.01%) of defaulting, annually. This is very difficult to get at via mere experience, but wa...