Economics
Executive Compensation
The main problem with executive pay is not that they are compensated too highly, but that there’s not enough pain for them personally when they do a bad job. I propose that the top three executives in all public companies be required to invest 100% of their salary in their own stock each year, with a decaying lockup period before they can sell.…
3 Interesting Articles on The Economy
…The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
Betting on Recovery
I have a bet with a friend that Dow will exceed 14,000 at least once by October 12, 2012 (he says it won’t).
Click here to make your prediction on what year that will take place.
Comment below on why you think what you think.…
Behavioral Economics With Dan Ariely
If you liked this talk (as I do), check out Ariely’s 3 irrational lessons from the Bernie Madoff scandal.…
Radical Transparency
In a March 2009 Wired article, Daniel Roth calls for radical transparency in financial reporting as the path to recovery and a more secure financial system. He argues that the reporting requirements today allow companies to obscure what’s going on and that the way to fix things is as follows. Embrace a markup language with which bite-sized chunks of standardly defined pieces of financial data are thrown out to the world so that users can crowdsource the true picture of a company’s financial health.…
Complexity Economics
In Chasing the Dragon, I wondered aloud whether we could dampen boom-bust cycles in the financial system with an economic equivalent of a controlled burn. Kevin suggested that “generic countercyclical policies” might work. Underlying both mine and Kevin’s thinking is the idea that you can possibly do better (for the world as a whole) by (a) understanding the entire economic system better and (b) enacting policies which are in line with that understanding. In contrast to these assumptions are a point of view articulated by one of the readers on a different thread:…
Chasing the Dragon
Kevin just posted about a great article by Felix Salmon in Wired. I underlined three quotes in my reading of it:
- “Correlation trading has spread through the psyche of the financial markets like a highly infectious thought virus.” (Tavakoli)
- “…the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.” (Salmon)
- “Co-association between securities is not measurable using correlation…. Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism.” (Taleb)
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Has anyone read the entire text of the stimulus package?
The ambiguity of this question is intentional.
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Micro -> Macro -> Micro, etc.
Kevin has a few threads regarding the effect that micro behaviors have when aggregated to macro behaviors:
- Society According to Kevin
- I May Have Been Wrong About Macroeconomics
- But I Was Probably Right About Climate Models
It occurred to me as I was reading this Huffington Post article that there is a reverse-emergent dynamic that occurs when countries (often through their leaders) send signals to other countries through word and action.…