Posts from ‘March, 2009’

This tournament has had fewer upsets than any tournament up to this point – all of the top 12 seeds advanced, as well as two #4 seeds and a #5 seed. Note that if you want to have all of the higher seeds advance you’d make the difference between seeds constant in the bracket, not [...]

$165 million is about 50 cents for every man, woman and child in the USA. $170 billion is $500 for every man, woman and child. We just don’t have the mental tools to grasp these sorts of numbers.

Today Bernard Madoff plead guilty to eleven charges of fraud. He said he never invested the money, instead he placed it in a Chase Manhattan account and paid clients out of that. So, maybe when clients withdrew money you paid them with a fraction of what later clients gave you. And you’re getting close to [...]

Here are two stories from the Book of Judges. Judges, Chapter 19: A Levite and his concubine are traveling in a strange country. An old man in Gibeah, a town of Israelites, offers them shelter for the night. A mob comes upon the house and demands the housekeeper give up the Levite, so that they can sodomize [...]

Here’s a look at futures contracts on house prices, in today’s NYT: Here’s a look at house prices divided by median family income: I’m short housing futures… Hat tip in both cases to Big Picture.

Public trusts spend a lot of time and money trying to get us to change our behavior with regard to smoking, gambling, drunk driving and other vices. I believe that most of these ads are ineffective, because they don’t frame the issue in a way that people can relate. Most people think of themselves as [...]

Fiddling around with this chart of unemployment, I noticed that West Virginia has a large white patch – low unemployment and few layoffs, indeed job growth in some areas, in the past year, while the area surrounding it has higher unemployment. The state’s personal tax burden is slightly above average and it ranks 36th in [...]

When, in 2003, [Icelanders] sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much [...]

Some wise people have been saying we should quickly nationalize failed banks and sell them to investors at discount prices, like we did with Washington Mutual in October 2008. Other people don’t think nationalization is such a good idea. Paul Krugman says we’ve been socializing bank losses while allowing shareholders to keep profits (a lose-lose [...]

Deficit spending is financed by issuing bonds, which are bought by large institutional investors, and repaid thirty years down the line. Interest accumulates each year; at the moment the yearly interest rate on a 30-year treasury bill is 3.67%. It’s important to recognize that the money has to come from somewhere; if we spend more [...]