News Links: Greeks will have ‘Bulgarian salary with London prices’
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BBC News – Greeks will have ‘Bulgarian salary with London prices’
Greece’s 340 billion euro debt has led to huge austerity cuts which have dramatically impacted the standard of living in the country. Ilia Iatrou, a housewife and mother-of-two in Athens, said she could not afford to buy fresh milk anymore.
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Greece debt crisis: Greeks believe Germans owe them £60bn | Mail Online
Economists (German ones, as it happens) have calculated that, allowing purely for inflation, Greece’s 1942 loan to Germany would today be worth £9bn. But if one adds even a modest rate of interest of 3 per cent, then that debt increases to a staggering £60bn.
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Scoring Strategies for the Underdog
When facing a heavily-favored opponent, an underdog must be willing to assume greater-than-average risk. In statistical language, one would say that an underdog must be willing to adopt a strategy whose outcome has a larger-than-average variance
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Occupy Oakland: second Iraq war veteran injured after police clashes | World news | guardian.co.uk
Kayvan Sabehgi in intensive care with a lacerated spleen after protests in Oakland, a week after Scott Olsen was hurt. He says police beat him with batons
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Bunds Post Record Weekly Gain as Greek Concern Spurs Safety Bid – Bloomberg
German 10-year yields dropped 35 basis points to 1.82 percent as of 4:42 p.m. London time yesterday. The 2.25 percent security due September 2021 climbed to 103.795. The two-year note yield declined 20 basis points to 0.40 percent.
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Macro and Other Market Musings: A Win-Win for Conservatives and Liberals
nowhere have we argued that indebted households should take on additional borrowing. Rather, monetary easing via a nominal GDP level target would make its biggest impact, in our view, via changes in expectations that would cause households to rebalance their portfolios in a way that would stimulate spending. Bank lending and borrowing are not key to this story. And yes, there is ample evidence that expectations do affect spending decisions.
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Apple Gives Its Key Execs $400 Million In Bonuses
Apple has awarded seven of its key executives with massive stock grants worth approximately $400 million in total.
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German court grants injunction against Apple for infringement of Motorola patents — Engadget
Motorola just confirmed that earlier today, the Mannheim District Court in Germany granted an injunction against Apple for patent infringement.
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FT Alphaville » Jefferies: for the love of a Greek God, how many times must we explain this?
As we explained earlier, this doesn’t necessarily mean Jefferies is safe should Europe take a further turn for the worse. It is though a stark reminder of the size of the Italian bond market and how dominant it is among eurozone shorts.
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Greece’s Government Faces Deficit in Public Trust
The no-confidence vote taking place in Greek parliament Friday is the latest chapter in a crisis of confidence that has been deepening in the country for years. Gallup surveys show Greeks’ confidence in their national government hit a new low of 18% in April and May 2011 after steady declines since 2005.
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One of the most robust finding in political psychology is that liberals tend to explain both poverty and wealth in terms of luck and the influence of social forces while conservatives tend to explain poverty and wealth in terms of effort and individual initiative
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Mathematically detecting financial bubbles before they burst | ScienceBlog.com
The key characteristic in determining a bubble is the volatility of an asset’s price, which, in the case of bubbles is very high. The authors estimate the volatility by applying state of the art estimators to real-time tick price data for a given stock. They then obtain the best possible extension of this data for large values using a technique called Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS), which is a widely used method for statistical learning.
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BBC News – Tepco to get $11bn government aid after plan approval
Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is to receive 900bn yen ($11.5bn; £7bn) in bailout funds after the government approved its business plan.
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Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: The legal scope of Fed purchases
Section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act sets out the rules governing Fed asset purchases. It currently limits the Fed’s purchases to gold (14.a) and US Federal government issued and guaranteed assets (14.b.1), including those of Federal agencies (14.b.2). Eligible government and agency securities include treasuries, agency debt, and agency-issued MBS. These purchases must be conducted in the open market, or secondary market. The open market stipulation prevents the Fed from purchasing Treasury or agency debt directly from the Federal government or its agencies. Such direct purchases would constitute monetary financing of the government. The Fed is also permitted to purchase bankers acceptances and bills of exchange in the open market (14[para 1]). These are privately issued assets. But both are legacy instruments. Few American institutions use them much anymore. The Fed is also allowed to purchase state and municipal debt with a term not exceeding six months. (14.b.1) Lastly, it can purchase foreign government issued and guaranteed assets, as well as those of their agencies. (14.b.1)
“liberals tend to explain both poverty and wealth in terms of luck”
A related NYT article from last week:
What’s Luck Got to Do With It?
by JIM COLLINS and MORTEN T. HANSEN
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/business/luck-is-just-the-spark-for-business-giants.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all
The question of wealth attribution to skill or luck is the way the human species addresses a more general problem that is key in the evolution of altruism — how to dissuade freeloaders and detect cheaters (See https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5328549). The selection pressure for this skill is so strong that I believe liberals are every bit as capable of being blind to the role of luck just as conservatives are. Liberals simply deny the existence of random chance in different areas — namely a bias toward seeing everything as a big corporate conspiracy, and not simply a major systemic failure caused by short-sighted actors taking too many chances. As a result of this difference in positioning of respective blind spots, we find deniers of probabilistic conclusions of science on the both extremes of the political spectrum:
Vaccine deniers on the left who see only a big pharmaceutical conspiracy;
Anthropogenic climate change deniers on the right who see only a scientific hoax freeloading off government research funding.
The drive to eliminate cheaters and freeloaders in the long run helps to restore a sense of equality — a topic of a recent Wired article:
“Does Inequality Make Us Unhappy?”
by Jonah Lehrer
https://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/does-inequality-make-us-unhappy/
Being a left-wing myself (socialist if you like) because where I come from we regard Liberals as dangerous compromisers -:) I cannot agree with the claim that Liberals see everything as so called “conspiracy”. In fact the opposite the truth. Many theoreticians of Marxism were heavily inspired by anarchism which in turn drew heavily from the Chaos theory. Actually Marxists do not regard the actions of different groups in the society as a result of some clandestine conspiracy but as an effect of “class consciousness” which is developed to a different degree in distinct classes. You don’t need a formal conspiracy to guess that if somebody is a millionaire entrepreneur he/she is much more likely to vote Republican (conservative)…
Risk-reward (return) relationship is one of the things I have been interested in for a long time. There is an interesting article about this balancing act between return and risk one has to assume from legendary Ed Seykota :
https://www.galtcapital.com/Publications/betsize.pdf