Lovely sunset shot tonight looking west from Vancouver over Georgia Straight toward Vancouver Island. The colors and textures are wonderful.

[via Katkam]

There is an upside to the credit crunch: Less mail...

• Mortgage and home equity direct mail down (Source)
• Credit card direct mail declines continue into 2008 (Source)

And this is with a mere recession. Imagine how peaceful it would be if we ever had an outright depression. You could go back to checking your mailbox again.

From an otherwise-interesting release I received this morning from the increasingly-useful folks at FirstCoverage, an equity markets research firm:

Overall market sentiment improves by 6.21%.

What does that mean? How does anyone claim two digits of precision in their measurement of something as fuzzy as "market sentiment"? Inquiring minds want to know.

Catching up and emptying my burgeoning browser tabs:

• Felix Salmon reads Ben Stein so the rest of us don't have to (Portfolio.com)
• Supply index gauges product demand by engineers (EETimes)
• Winter is finally leaving the northeast (Hillcam)
• Arnold has killed anti-PE bill in California (Euromoney)
• Fed portfolio composition has weakened considerably over the last year (Aleablog)
• Why Do Foreigners Invest in the United States? (SSRN)
• Follow this week's big NAB conference this week (Google News)

Provocative piece by the AEI's Peter Wallison on the case against further securities regulation. The gist comes right away:

Regulating securities firms the way we regulate banks, and giving them routine access to the Fed’s discount window, makes no practical or policy sense. Unlike banks, securities firms have no regular or inherent need for liquidity, and their failure—no matter how large they are—will not ordinarily cause a systemic event. Bear Stearns was bailed out because of the unprecedented fragility—indeed panic—in the world credit markets in mid-March. The fact that this has not happened in seventy years should tell us something. Accordingly, those who understand the failures and costs of regulation (to paraphrase the late William F. Buckley) should stand athwart the path to needless controls yelling “Stop!”

I've been watching with steady interest the emergence and gestation of web-based video services like Mogulus. While such services won't let you create CNN-class eye-candy yet, they are getting better ever day, and today's announcements on Mogulus Pro drive that point home. Some really compelling stuff going on as video online and and over the cable nets are increasingly coming crashing into one another.

The preceding said, TV technology incumbents aren't giving up. One of the stalwarts of television is Chyron -- it dominates the business of on-screen graphics, among other thing -- and it today announced a software-as-a-service series of products around its recently-acquired Axis Graphics group. Very cool stuff -- now, if only it were way cheaper.

Where is all this going? Well, in the same way that it's getting increasingly difficult -- stylistically and typographically -- to tell the difference between pro and edge text content online, the above developments show how the same thing is happening quickly in video media. Tools and technology are blurring the boundary between pro and non-pro media content, as well as making the difference between cable/broadcast and online video utterly blurred. Fascinating stuff.

I've been saying all morning, in light of the proposed deal, that Blockbuster and Circuit City need to be jammed together with AOL and Yahoo -- an equally moribund combination -- so we can just call it a day. I suggested the resulting ticker should be DREK, but others like ICK.

Feel free to post other ticker suggestions that will make it through the spam filter.

Granted, it wouldn't dent UFC ratings, but it would be great to see ex- Fed chair Paul Volcker and current Fed guy Ben Bernanke going at it. It's becoming increasingly clear that the two men are not fond of one another, and so far it's been Paul Volcker landing all the shots.

More here and here.

Interesting take on the declining relative importance of social networks in this Hitwise release today on the continuing rapid rise of YouTube to online video dominance:

Hitwise ... today announced that for the month of March 2008, YouTube accounted for 73.18 percent of all U.S. visits among a custom category of 68 online video websites. MySpaceTV received the second highest percentage of visits with 9.21 percent followed by Google Video with 4.06 percent.

..."As online video becomes more mainstream with internet users, the share referred traffic from the younger audiences of social networks is declining, shifting instead toward search," said Heather Dougherty, director of research, Hitwise. "Integration into search engine result pages through universal and blended search is increasing both the exposure of online videos and the importance of search as a traffic driver in the online video category."

More here.

It's true: Traders with bigger balls do better, at least as evidenced by this study of testosterone levels in London traders:

Little is known about the role of the endocrine system in financial risk taking. Here, we report the findings of a study in which we sampled, under real working conditions, endogenous steroids from a group of male traders in the City of London. We found that a trader's morning testosterone level predicts his day's profitability. We also found that a trader's cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice.

You mean like they might go nuts and tear up the joint? Fine, but as long it's after quarter end, but before bonuses are paid.

[via PNAS]

The current ardor for a new Kenyan IPO lends some support to fans of so-called frontier markets:

Taxi drivers, kiosk owners and street vendors have been queuing up at banks in downtown Nairobi to subscribe to shares of mobile-phone company Safaricom Ltd. in East Africa's largest IPO. The government is selling 25% of the company, a stake valued at about $800 million. The new shares will be listed on the Nairobi Exchange in early June. There is no underwriter on the deal, though Morgan Stanley & Co. International PLC is serving as the coordinator and sole bookrunner.

The Safaricom offering, which had been delayed from December amid election-related violence that month, could be an early indicator that Kenya's economy -- badly bruised by the violence -- is moving on.

"After the IPO, I'm going to make a bit of money," said Mwatha Karuita, a 50-year-old lab technician, as he prepared to buy shares one recent day.

... Jane Kerobu, 35 years old and with her three-year-old tied to her back with a red scarf, came into a Diamond Trust Bank branch in downtown Nairobi one recent morning. She supports her five children by selling cabbage, potatoes and sukuma, a vegetable used in traditional meals, in a small town outside Nairobi. With no bank or brokerage account, the single mother saved the $160 needed to buy a minimum stake, having decided to buy when the offering was announced last year. Bank representatives set up special tables to help first-time buyers open an account.

I love that markets are becoming more open and active in Kenya (and elsewhere in Central Africa), but people swapping sukuma for stock is unlikely to end well.

[via WSJ]