HN user
He's also currently ranked 2nd in PER right behind LeBron James who by most metrics is the most dominant player in the NBA. PER is a metric for player efficiency adjusted for pace and time played etc. Pretty nuts.
Yep. Also have counterparty risk. Just because you have a contract for a purchase and a sale doesn't guarantee that the transactions will go smoothly.
Arbitrage is technically a set of simultaneous transactions where you buy and sell at the same time. Purchasing something and reselling it later for a higher price is not arbitrage.
It is usually used to describe a riskless transaction.
From Twitter:
I'm going to be doing an IAMA on Reddit, Monday around 1230pmEST I don't know what IAMA or Reddit are, but I'll be doing that.
awesome bunch of geeky-openness from ck.
Maybe its still hard to explain exactly because they never hit it big.
I think going back in time and explaining social networking to an audience would be tougher than it sounds.
Originators underwrote the mortgages who usually sold them to banks who packaged them into bonds. Later on to streamline this process the banks bought mortgage originators (lehman bought bnc) because their appetite for product was huge.
But originally the loans were passed onto somebody else (and most private label issuance by notional balance was in fact not held by either originator nor the underwriter/ibank). It was a method of breaking out credit risk (the borrower risk was separated from originator risk) and seen as a feature. Really it was the whole point of securitization -- to get bankruptcy remoteness for credit products.
Originate to securatize is now seen as a problem because it does not give the originator an incentive to make good, proper loans (which is already tough to do). We dont know if credit standards and checking would have become so lax without the securtization machine during 1998-2007 but it seems unlikely.
Well, without them to pick up the slack we would have almost NO mortgages issued in this country, which some of us might think is bad. The alternative would be for rates to rise (some of us might think this is a good thing, which it might be) and to allow housing prices to fall. This has many knock on effects like crippling pension funds and banks and insurance companies etc etc.
I find it horrible that guilty parties profited/are profiting from their mistakes. But its a complicated problem which is why we are going to go through hell to fix it.
FWIW I this does not excuse govt behavior, which leans far far too much in the way of banker cronyism, which might have been the original point of the article. I am just pointing out that its a complicated situation that is a mess to sort out.
Also I never stated that fre/frn never made bad loans and were not players in this whole debacle. I just stated that they were not the main engine of horrific growth and the "cause" of all of these problems.
because private label mortgage issuance shut down. over 90 pct of mortgage origination are now agency. this includes all refis which rolls crap out of private label onto the govt sheets. we went from investors loaning money to the taxpayer and this is a subtle method of bailing out the fin industry. no way fin instutions would have paid back any govt loans without this help and its a convenient place to sweep away the losses.
also prime mortgages from the bubble years got hammered and of course that hurt them.
freddie and fannie started issuing "subprime" loans in the 90s, to lower income and minority borrowers with reasonable default rates. by the time the boom came around their marketshare in this market plummeted because everybody else dropped their standards (the garbage was to be somebody elses problem anyways) and their marketshare dropped. the growth in subprime during the bubble period had little to do with them.
they are currently the garbage bilge where junk loans are deposited, but that is by design to protect housing prices.
they were not a huge area of growth when housing overheated, subprime or otherwise.
Misleading intro to article. The expansion of credit was not due to over ambitious politicans who wanted homeownership for the poor. It was fueled by lax accounting and regulatory standards which expanded private securitizations of mortgages (did not involve freddie and fannie). This generated money which went into legislator pockets though.
It is true that subprime products gave politicians something good to speak to poor constituants about but credit standards were never allowed to drop very far for the federal agencies (other than FHA/VA etc) and their marketshare of mortgage bond issuance dropped as a result.
Despite being a highly regulated industry too little govt involvement in key spots was a primary cause of the bubble not too much.
I also am not entirely sure how swapping beer for mortgages makes the situation easier to digest.
Enjoyed the post. Do programmers really not know who Peter Drucker is?
Public institutions generate revenue from patents as well. All in all not a bad system as long as the revenue flows to more research. A cut is taken along the way usually so that private business expertise can help the sales & marketing process.
Thank you to the poster and the author of this document.
Trying to read SICP on the new kindle in PDF format was impossible!
Agreed. See quote below.
The total direct and indirect cost of CVD and stroke in the United States for 2009 is estimated at $475.3 billion. This figure includes health expenditures (direct costs, which include the cost of physicians and other professionals, hospital and nursing home services, prescribed medications, home health care, and other medical durables) and lost productivity resulting from morbidity and mortality (indirect costs). Total hospital costs (inpatients, outpatients, and emergency department patients) projected forthe year 2009 are estimated to be $150.1 billion. ... CVD costs more than any other diagnostic group.
They wait until late friday to make big changes to give the officaldom/industry a weekend to scramble/grab parachutes. They actually didnt release today until after the SPY stopped trading.
from the press release:
"The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. "
Has always had AAA rating since the start of sovereign ratings. Look out below.
Diversification is usually a huge waste of money. It is hard for one company/culture to make money doing lots of things. Be glad they know their niche is ads and that they are doing everything they can to protect their castle (as a shareholder).
Relentlessness will enable them to hold on to their position for longer than other companies would. However, all companies will eventually fall to competitors as t approaches inf.
Sounds like a recipe for being hungry all the time.
I don't really think its a conspiracy unless you consider advertising to the public to be very secretive and back-room.
I agree mostly with what is said above but I think it is important to emphasize that what the public wants to buy is heavily influenced by what they see on TV.
While all of that is true I think the real story is one of economics.
It is VERY easy for me to eat as much swine as I feel like nowadays. If we assume that saturated fat/protein isn't bad for you then the fact that I can, in modern times, acquire the pig with less effort than my ancestors doesn't appear to harm me very much. It is tasty pretty much right out of the farm. I imagine it is difficult to make the margins on livestock very high.
Carbs have brands. They have business moats. They have high margins and great psychological keys that make selling them a great business (helps to be addictive). So they push and we buy.
Anyways my thought was that the obesity epidemic has less to do with how we are more sedentary than before but rather the peddlers of PROFITABLE products just got better at their jobs over time.
I think the real answer is because it is more systematically profitable to sell carb products and (food) companies are really really good at selling things to people.
It is interesting to see comments on this forum that involve the strategy of reasoning with the public to get them to accept their idea.
Next time you see somebody drinking a soda explain to them what fructose does metabolically to their bodies. Your message is a lot less effective than seeing a polar bear mommy drinking a coke on a wintery day or seeing kobe bryant dunk a basketball and popping open a bottle of sprite.
I don't have academic access to the actual article. A commonsensical result may not be surprising but I want to know how they did their metastudy. Anyone care to elaborate?
CNBC Twitter: Three Largest Internet Poker Companies Charged With Fraud, Illegal Gambling - Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker, & Absolute Poker - Charged
Stealing is a strong word. It's just business. It isn't AOL's fault your parents don't know better. BTW if you think that's bad this is still around for your grandparents:
In 2005 WebTV was still grossing US$150 million per year in revenue with 65% gross margin.
I think Diamond is pointing out that it may be a misconception to think of hunting/gathering as a "terrible" quality of life to indicate that population pressure might have forced us into ag. This suggests an order to the chicken/egg problem.
Basically the population grew to a large enough size where the game they were hunting and the berries they were gathering weren't enough (or went extinct) so they had to switch to a agrarian lifestyle, which needed more work and yielded less.
Gary says explicitly there is no conclusive evidence. He is making the appeal for the studies to be done. I find little that is harmful about the attempt. He just wants something that is potentially dangerous to be studied scientifically.
He explains this in his comments: "Again, one common theme here is that because sugar has gotten more or a less free pass from the federal authorities for the past forty years, little meaningful research has been done."
Dr. Lustig is a nationally-recognized authority in the field of neuroendocrinology, with a specific emphasis on the regulation of energy balance by the central nervous system. He is currently investigating the contribution of biochemical, neural, hormonal, and genetic influences in the expression of the current obesity epidemic both in children and adults. He has defined a syndrome of vagally-mediated beta-cell hyperactivity which leads to insulin hypersecretion and obesity, and which is treatable by insulin suppression. This phenomenon may occur in up to 20% of the obese population. He is interested in the hypothalamic signal transduction of insulin and leptin, and how these two systems interact. He is studying the cardiovascular morbidity associated with hyperinsulinemia, and developing methods to evaluate and prevent this phenomenon in children. He is also analyzing the contribution of the autonomic nervous system to insulin secretion and insulin resistance in obese children, and the utility of assessing insulin dynamics in targeting obesity therapy.
Anyone who has questions has the option of posing them directly to Gary himself. The NYT has a Q&A that's open for a few days. Looks like he has already started responding.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/well.blogs.nytimes.com...
CEOs of big companies yes. Middle mgmt of big companies and upper of small not so much.