February 5, 2009
This is worrisome: Just two weeks after saying protectionism was under control, the World Trade Organization is gathering nations in a special meeting Monday to discuss a fast-rising wave of barriers to commerce. Dozens of measures have been enacted...
Monster move coming for stocks, S&P 1000 by spring (TT/Harrison) BlackRock launches alternatives fund for pensions (Is this a joke?) (Reuters) A generalized fission-fusion model for the frequency of severe terrorist attacks (arXiv) Mortality as a growth industry (VanityFair)...
Only in America could the prospect of dying be promoted as a motivational tool to rack up frequent-flier miles. -- James Wolcott (“Final-Exit Strategies”, Vanity Fair)...
via Nate Silver: This is the percentage of articles in Yahoo! News that when containing the word "stimulus", also contain the word "pork", broken down for each of the 16 days since Barack Obama took office:...
Lots of people persist in pointing to improvements in China’s PMI as reason that the country’s economy is bottoming. Is it, however? As Michael Pettis points out, it’s tough to support the idea that China is bouncing back “surprisingly fast”...
Some thought-provoking points on the “cult of equity” in a new Citi report. Of course, many of the people promoting the following view are fixed income sorts who would benefit from a long-term reallocation of money from equities to bonds,...
Not sure what to make of this, but it’s definitely unusual: Someone has used Microsoft’s Songsmith to set financial data from the credit crisis to music: [via IA]...
One more interesting paper, this time on the hazards/merits of group behavior, like singing. The paper from Psychological Science demonstrates that people are more willing to do things contrary to their own economic self-interest if they sing as a group...
Fascinating new paper out in the journal Neuron on the biochemical reasons why it feels so good to go along with the consensus: Reinforcement Learning Signal Predicts Social Conformity Vasily Klucharev, et al. Summary We often change our decisions and...
