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Remix Madness! I missed the main signup this year, but I will try to participate in this and my stories are up for remix.
Pro parenting tip: If your 4-year-old who is learning to ice skate asks you to assume a position that might end with a skate to your face, say no.
The more I read from Evgeny Morozov, the more I like him—though he might be hard to take on a daily basis.
Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management: While a better title might be “When Hubris Failed,” Lowenstein still tells an engaging and comprehensible story of fools who thought they were too smart to go broke, and turned out to be too big to fail. Indeed, after crashing a multibillion-dollar fund, many though not all of the principals went back to merely gorging themselves like ticks on the body politic, earning outrageous Wall Street salaries and waiting once again for the government to come fix the problems their risk-taking caused. The basic problems were simple: LTCM thought that it could arbitrage irrationalities in the market, but as more and more people figured out those irrationalities, it was required to take more and more risk for less and less profit—aka supply and demand, except that when the demand is for risk and when you can leverage (borrow) to multiply your exposure then things can go very wrong indeed. Moreover, LTCM’s model assumed that markets would behave pretty much as they’d done during the period covered by its models, which they then didn’t; as Nassim Taleb and others have pointed out, the market can stay “irrational” longer than you can stay solvent—unless of course Uncle Sam rides to your rescue, which poses a pretty serious moral hazard problem of its own. The most awful thing is that this wasn’t the last act: LTCM’s implosion demonstrated how dangerous derivatives were and how deluded Wall Street had become, and yet neither the government nor the market participants—too enamored of their bonuses and their short-term greed—took action to avoid another disaster. It’s as if there was a second Titanic following the first that didn’t even bother to change course.
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution: Really interesting history of African-Americans (and some Africans as well) who escaped slavery during/because of the American Revolution—some of them escaping from men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Schama follows them to Canada and Sierra Leone, where they rarely got what they were promised from the British but never stopped seeking freedom and security.
Pro parenting tip: If your 4-year-old who is learning to ice skate asks you to assume a position that might end with a skate to your face, say no.
The more I read from Evgeny Morozov, the more I like him—though he might be hard to take on a daily basis.
Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management: While a better title might be “When Hubris Failed,” Lowenstein still tells an engaging and comprehensible story of fools who thought they were too smart to go broke, and turned out to be too big to fail. Indeed, after crashing a multibillion-dollar fund, many though not all of the principals went back to merely gorging themselves like ticks on the body politic, earning outrageous Wall Street salaries and waiting once again for the government to come fix the problems their risk-taking caused. The basic problems were simple: LTCM thought that it could arbitrage irrationalities in the market, but as more and more people figured out those irrationalities, it was required to take more and more risk for less and less profit—aka supply and demand, except that when the demand is for risk and when you can leverage (borrow) to multiply your exposure then things can go very wrong indeed. Moreover, LTCM’s model assumed that markets would behave pretty much as they’d done during the period covered by its models, which they then didn’t; as Nassim Taleb and others have pointed out, the market can stay “irrational” longer than you can stay solvent—unless of course Uncle Sam rides to your rescue, which poses a pretty serious moral hazard problem of its own. The most awful thing is that this wasn’t the last act: LTCM’s implosion demonstrated how dangerous derivatives were and how deluded Wall Street had become, and yet neither the government nor the market participants—too enamored of their bonuses and their short-term greed—took action to avoid another disaster. It’s as if there was a second Titanic following the first that didn’t even bother to change course.
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution: Really interesting history of African-Americans (and some Africans as well) who escaped slavery during/because of the American Revolution—some of them escaping from men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Schama follows them to Canada and Sierra Leone, where they rarely got what they were promised from the British but never stopped seeking freedom and security.
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