17 Sep – Economist – Lehman one year on, from the bottom of a glass
THE Playwright Tavern is across the street from the Barclays Capital building, on 49th St and 7th Avenue in Manhattan. Barclays’ building used to belong to Lehman Brothers; when Lehman filed for bankruptcy and Barclays purchased the company last September, the animated LED screens that wrap the building adopted their new owner’s name and colours.
3 Aug – Woot – Why Did Google’s CEO Really Quit The Apple Board Of Directors?
Don’t believe the disinformation doublespeak about why Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from the Apple Board of Directors this morning. For the story the Applo-Googlo-controlled media doesn’t want you to hear, check out the following straight-ish dope leaked by our sources on “the inside”. (What those sources are inside of, we’re not saying.)
3 Aug – CNET – Our Apple tablet hardware, software wish list
Hardly a day goes by without some form of feverish speculation gripping the Web about the existence of a tablet computing device from Apple. While most of these echo-chamber blog posts are fact-free excursions into wild speculation, the general zeitgeist points to a possibly 10-inch device that may cost $699-$799, and be released either in September, November, or sometime next year–perhaps on the heels of the similar-sounding CrunchPad tablet.
3 Aug – Wired – Analyst Claims to Have Seen Apple Tablet
To dispel any disbelief in Apple’s rumored tablet, an analyst claims to have seen a prototype of the gadget in person.
3 Aug – CNET – New hint of gallery for Chrome themes emerges
It looks like Google is nearing release for a gallery showcasing themes to customize Chrome’s appearance, judging by one reader’s experience. When a person opens a new empty browser tab in Chrome, the browser shows an array of thumbnails of previously visited sites. One of those sites, the reader said, was labeled “Google Chrome Themes Gallery.” The screenshot shows a multicolored array of themes for the browser.
3 Aug – Wired – Personal Supercomputers Promise Teraflops on Your Desk
About a year ago John Stone, a senior research programmer at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues found a way to bypass the long waits for computer time at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
3 Aug – Geek – Send alternate account e-mails from Gmail without “on behalf of”
Gmail has become popular with many users due to its ever expanding feature set, browser-based implementation, and ease of use. But users who choose Gmail may also have other e-mail accounts they need to access and respond to. Gmail offers users the ability to receive and send e-mail from another account without ever leaving your Gmail login. However, any mail sent in this way informs the recipient the mail has been sent “on behalf of” and shows your Gmail address.
3 Aug – Wired – Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
After years of enticing rumors, ambitious prognostications and flat-out blather, 2010 may finally be the year that the tablet PC evolves from being a niche device to becoming a mainstream portable computer.
3 Aug – BT – Baltic Dry Index drops as loading delays ease
The Baltic Dry Index, a measure of shipping costs for commodities, fell for a second consecutive session in London as delays at loading ports eased and newly built carriers compete for cargoes.
1 Aug – CNET – Astronaut doesn’t change his undies for a month
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who returned to earth Friday, had been on the International Space Station since March. And, well, I don’t know quite how I am to put this, but he didn’t change his underwear for a month.
29 Jul – Slate – Will Everyone Please Shut Up About Goldman Sachs?
The image of Goldman Sachs (GS) as a Borg-like hive mind that breeds a bald master-race of capitalists has picked up speed during the last month. Rabble-rouser Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone memorably called Goldman “a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Joe Hagan in New York magazine devoted several pages to “Goldman’s current public tarring.” The controversy has even attracted the genius of Michael Lewis, who wrote a searingly funny column in the wounded voice of the firm, arguing that Goldman owns only one of the three branches of government outright and that the firm habitually rounds down any number under $50 billion directly to zero.
7 Jul – blog – 25 Incredible TED Talks for Educators
The following talks include thoughts on creativity, play, technology, the future of entire countries through their children, projects to nurture learning in at-risk students, and much more. Educators from all backgrounds will find something of value from these incredible TED talks.
4 Jun – Top 5 ways to cause an earthquake (Wired Science)
In the first Superman movie, supervillain Lex Luthor plans to trigger a massive, California-detaching earthquake by detonating a couple of nuclear weapons in the San Andreas Fault. Crazy Lex! That scheme never would have worked, geologists will tell you. But, if he’d been serious about creating an earthquake, there are ways he could have actually done it. He would just have to inject some liquid (as some carbon-sequestration schemes propose) deep into the Earth’s crust, or bore a few hundred thousand tons of coal out of a mountain.
28 Jul – Economist – The barbarians are coming, again
ALONG with the rest of the finance industry, the private-equity business has endured a miserable couple of years. Congress continues to plan heavier taxation of its profits, even though they have slumped. As banks, which had been lending buy-out firms spectacular sums of money on extraordinarily generous terms, abruptly turned off their taps, buy-outs became a rarity. In the first half of 2009, just $24 billion of private-equity deals were completed worldwide and only three loans were extended to fund leveraged acquisitions, the lowest number since 1985, according to Dealogic. That compares with deal volumes of $131 billion last year and $528 billion in 2007.
28 Jul – Bloomberg – Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools (Michael Lewis)
From the moment I left Yale and started working for Goldman Sachs, I’ve felt uneasy interacting with those who don’t. It’s not that I think less of Goldman outsiders than I did while I remained among you. It’s just that I feel your envy, and know that nothing I can do or say will ever persuade you that I am no more than human.
28 Jul – Blog – Killing Email: How and Why I Ditched My Inbox
I’ve declared independence from email. After more than 15 years of dealing with email, of checking email multiple times a day, of responding over and over throughout the day, of deleting spam and unsubscribing from newsletters and unwanted notices, of filtering out messages and notifications, of deleting those dumb forwarded jokes and chain mails … I’m done.
28 Jul – FT Alpha – A vision of trading from 1995
Here’s an interesting vision of investing from 1995 as penned by Peter Bennett, an electronics engineer, designer and developer of information and trading systems for financial exchanges. It was featured in the World Handbook of Stock Exchanges that year.
28 Jul – FT Alpha – Dragon-king of the outlier events
In a new paper, author and physics professor Didier Sornette, presents the concept of “dragon-kings” — outlier events that exist within conventional power law distributions. Power law distributions are kind of like bell-curve distributions, but their tails (where ‘extreme’ events occur) are much longer, so that extreme events are considered rather more frequent.
28 Jul – FT Alpha – Evil commodities speculators in the dock
The CFTC hearings into the evil commodity speculators have got under way in Washington. We’re listening via the live web feed. And some key weapons in CFTC chairman Gary Gensler’s aresenal for proving that speculators are unreasonably influencing commodity prices have already appeared: position limits.
20 Jul – Books – Q&A: Brian Cox
Why Does E=mc2? is in some ways a simple book with a simple aim: we (Jeff Forshaw and myself) wanted to see whether we could actually derive E=mc2 in a way that any interested non-mathematical reader could understand.
[Old] Wired – Where Did That Galaxy Go? (12 Dec 01)
In the “not very far future” the universe will be a darker and lonelier place, and astronomers will look to the skies to see only dimming, frozen images of distant galaxies, like the fading photographs of friends who don’t call anymore.
[Old] Wired.com – The 2012 Apocalypse — And How to Stop It (17 Apr 09)
For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.
[Old] – Wired.com – Northern Lights’ Source Found in Giant “Magnetic Ropes”
An eight-month old NASA mission to unravel the source of the Northern Lights’ energy has made startling progress, discovering giant magnetic “ropes” that connect the Earth to the Sun.
[Old] Live Science – The Enduring Mystery of Light (26 Feb 07)
It goes through walls, but slows to a standstill in ultra-cold gases. It carries electronic information for radios and TVs, but destroys genetic information in cells. It bends around buildings and squeezes through pinholes, but ricochets off tiny electrons. It’s light. And although we know it primarily as the opposite of darkness, most of light is not visible to our eyes. From low energy radio waves to high energy gamma rays, light zips around us, bounces off us, and sometimes goes through us.
27 Jul – blog – Six Essentials of Being a GREAT Boss
Do your people think of you as a great boss? It isn’t that hard to be a good boss. Good bosses get the job done, but great bosses are leaders. They inspire and elevate their people. Great bosses go the extra mile to reach people’s hearts. Great bosses lead people to great victories! They win championships. They turn failing companies around. They rejuvenate the faith of the people in their country. We need GREAT bosses!
24 Jul – NY Times – Is Wall Street Picking Our Pockets?
“It is the hot new thing on Wall Street,” according to The Times’s Charles Duhigg, “a way for a handful of traders to master the stock market, peek at investors’ orders and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices. It is called high-frequency trading — and it is suddenly one of the most talked-about and mysterious forces in the markets.”
25 Jul – ContrarianEdge blog – The China Bubble’s Coming — But Not the One You Think
Financial commentators are obsessively debating whether the recent rise in the Chinese stock market means there’s a bubble — and if so, when it’s going to burst. My take? Who cares! What happens to the broader Chinese economy is what we should really be watching. It will have a far-reaching impact on the rest of the world — much more far-reaching than a decline in stocks.
26 Jul – Telegraph – Iceland’s krona proves the magic wand as Europe ails
Iceland’s krona is working its magic cure. Well-heeled Japanese tourists – once a rarity – can be seen these days sampling halibut at Reykjavik’s Siggi Hall, or buying Gymur jackets at the 66°North store on Bankastraeti.
26 Jul – The Oil Drum blog – Oil: the Market is the Manipulation
Clearly manipulation has been going on in the global market in oil – there’s nothing new about that – it’s what intermediaries who transact for profit do and have always done. Indeed, some market wags say that trading could be defined as “acceptable market manipulation”. But until the last few years what consenting adults were doing among themselves in the oil market didn’t really affect the man in the street.
27 Jul – FT Alpha – The finance of flu
With the British Chamber of Commerce hosting an online seminar on Tuesday to discuss the potential impact of swine flu on businesses, it is probably an apt time to look back at the effects of the last great influenza pandemic — that of Spanish flu in 1918 — on the financial services industry.
27 Jul – FT Alpha – UNG goes OTC
Bloomberg reports the United States Natural Gas exchange traded-fund, which has been buying Nymex and ICE natural gas swaps since at least the beginning of June, has now been pushed into the world of OTC bilateral swaps.
27 Jul – Apple – Richard Massey Demystifying Dark Matter.
Richard Massey makes the invisible visible. His job: mapping the presence of so-called “dark matter” in the universe. “Everything that science has studied so far is ordinary material—it’s the periodic table and the standard model of particle physics,” says Massey, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, in Scotland. “But that’s just this tiny tip of the iceberg. There’s five times as much dark matter, about which we know basically nothing.”
27 Jul – WSJ – Rio Tinto Sales Executive Found Success in China’s Changes
For years, Stern Hu, the Australian mining executive detained here for allegedly stealing state secrets, has worked at the intersection of powerful economic and political forces. Mr. Hu, manager of Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto PLC’s iron-ore operations in China, and three colleagues who are Chinese citizens, are being held by the State Security Bureau in the Detention House of Shanghai, a red-brick compound next to farm fields on a small road not far from the city’s financial center. Authorities allege they bribed steel-mill operators to obtain secrets related to iron-ore price talks, damaging China’s “economic security.”
23 Jul – BT – Housing market shows classic recovery signs
Three classic signs of a recovery have emerged in the Singapore housing market. Subsales and foreign buying have accelerated while the share of HDB upgraders in the private home buying pie has declined.
25 Jul – BT – Home supply pipeline shrinks, prices stiffen
LATEST government numbers are offering clues as to why some developers are busy looking for land and nudging up home prices. The supply pipeline for private homes has shrunk, from about 71,600 units at end-Q2 last year to 62,600 units as at end-Q2 2009. The stock of unsold units in uncompleted projects with planning approvals has also contracted from about 43,500 units to around 38,500 units over the same period.
27 Jul – BT – Pre-IPOs fall out of favour in S-E Asia market
Private equity players in the region are turning their backs on pre-IPO and venture deals amid challenging times for the industry, according to a Deloitte & Touche survey.
23 Jul – Guardian – Swiss scientists aim to build a synthetic brain within a decade
The world’s first synthetic brain could be built within 10 years, giving us an unprecedented insight into the nature of consciousness and our perception of reality.
23 Jul – FT – Iron ore spot prices forge ahead
Spot iron ore prices are fast approaching $100 a tonne, well above the levels at which miners and steelmakers in Japan, South Korea and Europe have struck supply deals, as demand outside China recovers.
22 Jul – HuffingtonPost blog – The Economist Eats the WSJ’s Lunch
Because there is so much information available on the internet free and because more and more people are using the internet as their main source for information, consumers of information content are becoming more discriminating. Interesting, well-written, thoughtful content thrives and boring, poorly written, mindless content gets little or no traction or traffic among educated, discriminating consumers.
22 Jul – Econbrowser blog – Output Gap Measurement and Prospects in the Wake of the Crisis
For serious macroeconomists, the magnitude (or existence) of the output gap is a central factor for determining the appropriate policy actions
23 Jul – Mashable – 5 TED Talks on Science That Will Blow Your Mind (edited)
Some of the most entertaining, informative and mind-blowing science videos on the web come from TED – the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference. Challenged to give the “talk of their lives,” the world’s top scientists and science communicators have been dazzling audiences – many of whom are thought leaders, trend-setters and entertainers – for years now. Most of the best talks are now freely available on the internet, but sifting through hundreds of video clips to find the real gems can be hard going. To make things easier, here are five of my favorite TED Talks on science.
23 Jul – Dilbert creator’s struggle to regain his voice
The rules changed all the time—sometimes day to day, sometimes hour to hour—and whenever he tried to recite them, people thought, “This guy is nuts.” The rules dictated when and where Scott Adams, the chief engineer of the Dilbert comic empire, was allowed to speak. He could neither control them nor predict exactly when they’d go into effect. All he knew was that he’d woken up one morning and found that his voice had turned against him, imposing a set of bizarre restrictions.
22 Jul – AsiaTimes – Was Enron right?
The huge profits reported by Goldman Sachs and the investment banking end of JP Morgan Chase last week surprised markets and demonstrated once again the power of trading operations to earn spectacular returns for their protagonists and even occasionally for investors. // It was of course the theory of Jeff Skilling and the late lamented Enron, of which he was president and chief executive, that in the new wired world, business would increasingly be done from trading platforms to the great benefit of all. So was Enron not, in fact, an obviously malevolent scam that deserved to get its top official a 25-year jail term, but a noble misunderstood pioneer of 21st-century business?
16 Jul – BT – More mortgagee sale properties in H2 unlikely: DTZ
BARGAIN hunters waiting for more distressed properties to show up at auctions could be in for a disappointment. Real estate consultancy firm DTZ believes that the number of mortgagee sale properties will not rise in the second half of the year as the open market has improved.
16 Jul – WSJ – At AIG’s Asian Arm, Business as Usual
American International Assurance Co.’s conservative investment strategy and the strength of its brand across Asia have kept the pan-Asian insurer’s business resilient ahead of a planned initial public offering next year, the company’s chief executive said.
21 Jul – BT – CPF Life scheme is now all set
CHANGES to the Central Provident Fund (CPF) Act were passed yesterday to help ensure that Singaporeans have sufficient savings to last them their entire lives.
21 Jul – BT – Review of Companies Act attracts mixed reviews
MARKET insiders’ responses to the latest proposed changes to the Companies Act were as mixed as the reviews of the latest Transformers movie.
22 Jul – FT – Economics is in crisis: it is time for a profound revamp
There can be little doubt. The science of macroeconomics is in deep trouble. The best and the brightest in the field fight over the most basic problems. Take government budget deficits, which now exceed 10 per cent of gross domestic product in countries such as the US and the UK. One camp of macroeconomists claims that, if not quickly reversed, such deficits will lead to rising interest rates and a crowding out of private investment. Instead of stimulating the economy, the deficits will lead to a new recession coupled with a surge in inflation. Wrong, says the other camp. There is no danger of inflation. These large deficits are necessary to avoid deflation. A clampdown on deficits would intensify the deflationary forces in the economy and would lead to a new and more intense recession.
22 Jul – FT – Starbucks’ restructuring starts to show results
Starbucks, the coffee retailer, reported improvements in its comparable sales and transaction trends during its third quarter, pushing its shares up almost 10 per cent in after-hours trading.
20 Jul – BloggingStocks – Collectible Investments: U.S. auto stock certificates
Can investing and collecting go hand-in-hand? Yes — especially if you are collecting coins, stock certificates, bank notes, or other rare items of value. Larry Schutts, an expert in investment-related collectibles, will periodically review items of interest from his collection and answer your questions here.
17 Jul – WSJ – Peek Takes On Gadget Market
In a world full of fancy smart phones, a start-up called Peek Inc. last year launched a $100 email-only device as a bare-bones workhorse for the frugal-minded.
15 Jul – The Deal – Goldman, J.P. Morgan and Wall St.’s original sin
Every high school biology student (if they’re awake) knows the story of the famous experiment concocted by Columbia’s Harold Urey many decades ago. Urey used a set of basic inputs — heat, electricity, water, some basic elements — to simulate the creation of the first organic compounds in a flask. That’s what today feels like: a simulation. The question before us is not how life began, but how did we produce the kind of large, conflicted, high-pay firm that was a prime actor in the recent debacle?
15 Jul – ClusterStock blog – How Pay At Goldman Really Works
When Goldman Sachs announced yesterday that the amount it was setting aside for pay had surged 75%, to a total of $6.65 billion for the second quarter alone, the headlines about Goldman employees looking at a $1 million pay day were inevitable.
16 Jul – WSJ – Natural-Gas Prices Slide as a Key ETF Can’t Buy
U.S. Natural Gas Fund’s failure so far to win regulatory approval to issue new shares has prevented the exchange-traded fund from buying new contracts, weighing on gas prices.
15 Jul – Geek.com – Optical computers? Yale University finds theorized repulsive light force
In 2005, Yale University researchers discovered an attractive light force which they used in a type of light-switched mechanism in nano-electrical systems. At that time they theorized that a similar, complementary repulsive force must also exist, but until now it’s never been seen. But now, they’ve actually seen the complementary repulsive force in the lab. It could prove to be the discovery which yields the necessary missing ingredient to make optical computers a viable reality.
17 Jul – NYT – Two Giants Emerge From Wall Street Ruins
A new order is emerging on Wall Street after the worst crisis since the Great Depression — one in which just a couple of victors are starting to tower over the handful of financial titans that used to dominate the industry.
16 Jul – Matt Taibbi – The real price of Goldman’s giganto-profits
So what’s wrong with Goldman posting $3.44 billion in second-quarter profits, what’s wrong with the company so far earmarking $11.4 billion in compensation for its employees? What’s wrong is that this is not free-market earnings but an almost pure state subsidy.
16 Jul – Epicurean Dealmaker blog – Do Not Forget to Specify, When Time and Place Shall Serve, That I Am an Ass
Late yesterday, I published on this site a post commenting on an article by one Julie MacIntosh of the Financial Times concerning the rise of boutique advisory shops. I thought the article was well-balanced, informative, and well-written, and I said so. However, in addition to a rather lengthy disquisition on a couple salient points which I thought Ms MacIntosh had missed or underemphasized in her piece, I chose to sprinkle a few jibes and asides into my post that focused on certain possible aspects of Ms MacIntosh’s putative appearance. While you may question my judgment, I thought they added a little harmless and humorous spice to my essay.
16 Jul – The Atlantic – How to Understand The Derivatives Market
In 2006, few people outside of the derivatives market had used the word “credit default swap” in casual conversation. By 2008, it had become an inescapable household term. People continue to throw around buzz words gleaned from the pink pages of the FT, but as my colleague, Daniel Indiviglio recently asked: Does anyone out there really understand what the Over-The-Counter (OTC) Derivatives market is? Since I consider myself the resident derivatives wonk at Atlantic Business, I felt compelled to respond. But rather than focus on any particular instrument or issue, I thought it would be best to focus on the overall structure of the market – who the people in the market are, what they do, and what relationships they have to each other – and leave the banker-bashing to somebody else.
17 Jul – WSJ – MAS Gives Singapore Banks Options to Increase Liquidity
Singapore’s central bank Thursday announced new steps that will give banks more options to increase their liquidity, while saying its monetary policy remains appropriate to support the economy.
17 Jul – WSJ – CP Prima Dispute Ends in Lawsuits; $4 Billion Sought
HONG KONG — A clash between an Indonesian shrimp producer and its hedge-fund creditors has erupted in lawsuits seeking $4 billion in damages against the hedge funds’ trustees, Bank of New York Mellon and PT Bank Danamon Indonesia.
14 Jul – Robert Reich blog – Goldman’s Back, and Why We Should Be Worried
Should we breath a sigh of relief that Goldman Sachs has posted record earnings as revenue from trading and stock underwriting reached all-time highs (second quarter net income was $3.44 billion) — less than a year after the firm took $10 billion directly from taxpayers and $13 billion indirectly through AIG?
10 Mar – The Barrel/Platts – How long can Dated Brent still live up to its name?
As long ago as 1997 market commentators said the importance of the North Sea to world oil markets outweighed its contribution to world oil supply. Boosted volume in the benchmark complex has kept that relevance strong but, with the grade that started it all hitting a new output low, it seems Dated Brent/BFOE might soon be due another change.
15 Jul – ZeroHedge blog – Why Does Goldman Need A Fed Exemption For VaR Calculations?
Lately the topic of Goldman’s VaR has taken on significant prominence, not least because as Zero Hedge disclosed yesterday, it hit a record high. The implications for this were large enough that even Bloomberg picked up on this story. Many readers raised questions of how is it even remotely possible for the company to have a VaR in the low-mid $200 MM ballpark, yet to post a record number of $100MM+ trading days in Q1; Zero Hedge is willing to wager that the upcoming 10-Q release will demonstrate another record number of $100MM+ days in the just closed quarter as well.How is that possible?
17 Jul – WSJ DJ – Live Blogging JPMorgan’s Earnings Conference Call
J.P. Morgan Chase, like Goldman Sachs did earlier this week, blew away analysts’ expectations in the second quarter. The bank reported $2.72 billion in profit thanks to strong investment banking performance, which offset its credit card and mortgage losses. Deal Journal is following the bank’s conference call this morning to find out JPMorgan secret sauce. Investors will want to know how much risk JPMorgan is taking to achieve these results. (Goldman took a lot of risk) and what the bank’s oulook for loan losses looks like.
15 Jul – Wired – Tips for Choosing the Right PDF to Word Converter
There must be someone who is typing a file from PDF to Word, or copying paragraphs one by one in this moment. If you are really doing so, please hold on a second and read this article, after that you can spare your ten fingers, have a cup of coffee instead of sitting in front of the computer doing the endless typing job. Let technology do that for you.
5 Jun – WSJ Books – The Examined Working Life
The Swiss essayist Alain de Botton has cultivated a following by unpacking the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of our everyday lives.
18 May – Research Reloaded – Shipping Rates Are Lousy For Predicting The Economy
In finance, be cautious of anyone who uses historical correlation to back up their argument. In shipping, just flat out run from them. Shipping’s notorious Baltic Dry Index, which is an index of spot rates for shipping dry bulk commodities such as coal and iron ore around the world, achieved deathdefying heights and then, well, death-causing lows, in the course of 2008, falling 90% from its peak, and attracted a lot of attention in the process both on the way up and down. The BDI meme is still alive, especially given a recent rally, and we have quite a few people claiming it as a quality indicator, or even the best indicator (sheesh) for the direction of stock markets or the world economy. Unfortunately, a lot of smart people misunderstand what the BDI represents.
14 Jul – Economist – In the beginning
With traditional jobs difficult to come by, MBA students are increasingly looking to start their own businesses. We talk to three business-school graduates about what it takes to succeed
16 Jul – WSJ – Shining Results Aren’t Solid Gold (re Goldman)
Only months after the government rescued Wall Street, risk is back in fashion. Or at least it is on Broad Street, home to Goldman Sachs Group.
16 Jul – WSJ – Sale-Leaseback Sticker Shock
NEW YORK — Demand for corporate sale-leaseback real-estate transactions is picking up across the U.S. as companies seek a fast way to raise cash to ride out the recession. But a scarcity of buyers and low bids mean fewer deals are actually getting done.
15 Jul – WSJ – China’s War for Ore
China was miffed by the outcome of what we last year called the corporate “deal of the century.” But shareholder interests prevailed. How often will that be said in the future? Politics, that ugly dynamic when mixed with business, was already back in play last week as Rio Tinto, an Australian mining giant at the heart of the controversy, saw four of its Chinese executives arrested in Shanghai on spying charges.
16 Jul – WSJ – MAN to Buy Stake in China’s Sinotruck
German truck maker and engineering company MAN SE said Wednesday that it plans to acquire a 25%-plus-one-share stake in China’s Sinotruk Ltd. to forge a long-term strategic partnership.
15 Jul – BT – Far East scheme helps new entrepreneurs
FAR East Organization has launched a scheme that allows budding entrepreneurs to pay for space in its malls with preference shares instead of regular rents.
15 Jul – BT – Improving the auction market for COEs
THE latest round of bidding for Certificates of Entitlement (COEs) started on July 6 at noon and ended on July 8 at 4pm. The Business Times of July 9 titled its report on the results as ‘COE premiums still on the rise’, and a study of the bid system merits further evaluation. Indeed, a fundamental shortcoming with open bids is a market that emerges only late in the three-day auction. The hourly progression of the auction on July 8 is summarised in the table above.
15 Jul – BT – SGX unveils new scheme for companies research
THE Singapore Exchange (SGX) is replacing its existing companies research scheme with a new one aimed at better addressing the needs of listed companies and their investors.
15 Jul – BT – The bleeding stops, a pale recovery on its way (re 2Q GDP)
GDP contraction may be just 4-6% for the year after Q2 turnaround, but outlook is subdued. (SINGAPORE) The first positive GDP numbers in five quarters are in, and the full-year contraction will now likely be less severe than earlier thought. Going forward, the big question is: will the budding recovery be sustained?
15 Jul – BT – The new normal (re 2Q GDP)
EVEN for a high-beta economy like Singapore, 20.4 per cent is an eye-popping number for quarter-on-quarter GDP growth – which is what we look to, for early signs of an economic turnaround.
19 Jun – WSJ Books – Why the Eyes Have It
Why are we humans so good at seeing in color? Why do we have eyes on the front of our heads rather than on the sides, like horses? And how is it that we find it so easy to read when written language didn’t even exist until a few thousand years ago—a virtual millisecond in evolutionary time?
Apart from a fascination with how much money Goldman Sachs made by the day, minute, hour and second in the second quarter of 2009, the media reaction to Tuesday’s record-breaking figures mostly focuses on whether they will be some sort of regulatory backlash.
15 Jul – FT Alpha – Getting to the bottom of negative gold-leasing rates
We drew attention to Professor Antal Fekete’s concerns over the spate of ‘ongoing’ backwardation in the the gold physical market on Monday. The backwardation apparently has much to do with a decline in the activity of those eager to sell physical gold in the market.
13 Jul – Mint.com – Personal Finance According to Family Guy
Peter Griffin is the latest in a long line of stereotypical television dads: dense, crass, jealous, impulsive, eager to drink and constantly living in the past. It would be easy to ignore anything this man had to teach us about money, or anything else we value, for that matter. But perhaps to think this way would be oversimplifying. After all, it was the sophisticated, smooth-talking financial “experts” who kept us all in a lather while the economy was secretly imploding. In light of their failures, maybe the unpretentious straight-talk of an true American family man is just what our wallets need, once again, largely in the form of, “do the complete opposite of this guy:”
15 Jul – FT Alpha – The business of financial commentary
We try not to indulge in media navel gazing here at FT Alphaville, but sometimes something comes along that just deserves a wider audience. Step forward, Felix Salmon, the blog ambassador at Reuters, who penned an interesting analysis on comment service Breakingviews and more widely on the value and business of financial commentary itself. The back story here, of course, is that Reuters is in preliminary discussions to buy Breakingviews.
15 Jul – FT Alpha – Goldman’s blow-out Q2, the analysts react
There are two clear takeaways from the analyst reaction to Goldman’s blow-out second-quarter results on Tuesday. Firstly, while the results were pretty impressive, there’s a lot of uncertainty about where future profits will be coming from. Secondly, there’s some concern about the bank holding onto excess capital that (shock, horreure) could be deployed for profitable purposes — such as a share buyback.
14 Jul – CNET – Bill Gates offers the world a physics lesson
It’s been a year since Bill Gates left full-time work at Microsoft, but he’s found plenty to keep him busy. In between trying to eradicate polio, tame malaria, and fix the broken U.S. education system, Gates has managed to fulfill a dream of taking some classic physics lectures and making them available free over the Web. The lectures, done in 1964 by noted scientist (and Manhattan Project collaborator) Richard Feynman, take notions such as gravity and explains how they work and the broad implications they have in understanding the ways of the universe.
14 Jul – WSJ – Live Blogging Goldman Sachs’ Earnings Conference Call
Goldman Sachs is on a roll. The firm’s second quarter profit was nearly twice as large as many analysts expected. The firm has paid back its TARP funds and is taking trading risks that other banks are afraid to take. The big question investors will be asking: Can Goldman keep the profits rolling through the rest of the year?
14 Jul – Wired.com – Future of Newspapers: Profitless? Go Wireless
It’s undeniable that the going rate for information on the internet is “free.” That’s meant big trouble for newspapers, which have seen nearly all of their traditional roles usurped by better, faster, free online services over the past few years. If a newspaper doesn’t make its content available gratis on the Web, it’s irrelevant. If it does, it’s got nothing left to sell but fishwrap and inkstains.
12 Jul – NYT – For Goldman, a Swift Return to Lofty Profits
Most of Wall Street, and America, is still waiting for an economic recovery. Then there is Goldman Sachs. Up and down Wall Street, analysts and traders are buzzing that Goldman, which only recently paid back its government bailout money, will report blowout profits from trading on Tuesday.
13 Jul – MoneyScience (blog) – 20 Finance Blogs You Might Not Know
Simoleon Sense
Business issues through an interdisciplinary lens. >> Blog Home
Satyajit Das’s Blog
Fear and Loathing in Financial Products >> Blog Home
The Reformed Broker
An Irreverent and Insightful Blog about Wall Street >> Blog Home
Wall Street Folly
The hilarious, the sordid, the salacious, the absurd and the horrific on Wall Street >> Blog Home
The Aleph Blog
Teaching investors about better investing through risk control >> Blog Home
Marginal Revolution
Small steps toward a much better world >> Blog Home
Financial Rounds
The finance classroom meets the outside world (and vice-versa) >> Blog Home
Finance Professor
Academic Papers, notes, finance videos, links to classes, reading lists and more >> Blog Home
Socializing Finance
A blog on the social studies of finance >> Blog Home
Fama / French Forum
Observations, opinion, research and links from financial economists Eugene Fama and Kenneth French >> Blog Home
Paul Wilmott’s Blog
Serving the Quantitative Finance Community >> Blog Home
Falkenblog
Mainly Observations about Quantitative Finance >> Blog Home
Credit Risk Chronicles
Rick Bookstaber’s Blog
Commentary in the spirit of, A Demon of Our Own Design >> Blog Home
Derivatives Issues
A blog on the social studies of finance >> Blog Home
Reasonable Deviations
Celebrating the pleasure of understanding things at a fundamental level >> Blog Home
FiNTAG
Finbar Taggit. Who doesn’t read him? >> Blog Home
Hedge Fund Blogger
Richard Wilson’s Hedge Fund Blog >> Blog Home
Hedge Fund Implode-O-Meter
Hubris, Extreme Leverage and Other People’s Money >> Blog Home
All About Alpha
Hedge Funds, portable alpha, 130 / 30, and alpha-centric investing… >> Blog Home
