Turns out Australian banks are concerned that their customers have greater confidence and trust in Google and PayPal than in their own institutions. It wasn’t that long ago that financial institutions needed marble-clad offices and multi-decade histories to show that they were serious and were financially stable and could be trusted. Now the organisations that…
This is not the best way to start serious analysis of models versus markets in the prediction space, but given that I’m writing an exam tomorrow I thought I should put the links out there now. Â I’ll address this topic again in the future. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) discussed an old paper of his…
Venezuela has just nationalised the local arm of a US bottling company. It shouldn’t be long before this example hits the political spehere in South Africa and enters our own debate on nationalisation. The debate really has (or needs to have) two quite distinct elements: Are nationally owned / publicly managed companies and industries better…
This graph has been carefully lifted from Paul Krugman’s latest blog post The message to take from this? Well, France stuck to the gold standard longest during the Great Depression. Still think gold or a gold-standard currency is a good idea? Â The basics of monetary policy here seem to have been forgotten. We went through…
I have a clear strategy for how not to lose money playing the Make a Million competition. As I explain it, you may come up with some smart tactics to win the competition and enhance your returns, but you’re on you’re own there. So, how does one not lose money with the Make a Million…
China is the overwhelmingly major supplier of rare earth minerals to the rest of the world. (South Africa has a tiny share.) Rare earth minerals (or elements) are critical factors of production of many high technology items such as super-conductors, catalysts, rare earth magnets and batteries of the kind used in hybrids and laptops. With…
I haven’t yet found a WordPress plugin that creates really great word / tag clouds. I created this one from my post Clear, Simple and Wrong using Wordle. I think it sums up the post well.
Recently had a discussion around whether government should intervene to influence the exchange rate. Now, I don’t have fully thought-through views on if and when and how and by how much this should be done. Still thinking it through (and having to reconsider many things about currencies, interest rates, inflation, open market purchases, sovereign wealth…
