The Continuous Statistical Investment Committee of the Actuarial Society does fabulous work at gathering industry data and analysing it for broad use and consumption by actuaries and others. I can only begin to imagine the data horrors of dealing with multiple insurers, multiple sources, multiple different data problems. The analysis they do is critically useful…
So Bitcoin’s had a good run recently, countering my prediction of irrelevance. Price is about $90 $108 per coin and total value of Bitcoins (hoarded mostly) worldwide is about a Billion US Dollars.
South Africa has a pretty rich history of banking failures. This paper, part of a masters, by Sipho Makhubela, provides an interesting over of banking failures since 1994. I haven’t read the entire paper yet, but Section 4 (starting on page 72) outlines the background behind banking failures in South Africa and is fascinating reading…
Poorly controlled spreadsheets give rise to huge errors.
There is a serious problem with journalism. Throughout the Lonmin strike, local and international news repeated the R4,000 per month current wage for miners as fact. One or two people pointed out that this wasn’t in fact the case, but that shortly disappeared from the stories and the amounts all over the media (and in…
This recently collapsed ponzi scheme was based on Bitcoins. It could have happened with US Dollars or Danish Krone or South African Rand, so it’s not really the fault of Bitcoins (to personify a digital currency momentarily) but I think there is a link. Those who like Bitcoins are from four groups Nefarious ne’erdowells who…
South African government policy and Eskom lethargy have long posed a risk to independent power providers and particularly renewable energy project developers. The rules change, policy documents take forever to be released, and ultimately the economics of the subsidies can be quite different from envisaged. FT has an OpEd on virtually the exact same issue…
The second largest Bitcoin exchange is shutting down (possibly to reopen elsewhere). Bitcoin experienced a rough night on Monday as TradeHill, the second-largest Bitcoin exchange, announced that it was closing its doors. In a statement, CEO Jered Kenna cited regulatory problems and the loss of $100,000 in a dispute with one of its payment processors…
