Author: Paul Jorion

  • The danger of half-truths in a time of crisis

    Published in Le Monde – Economie, March 2nd 2009 (transl. Danielle Goodman)

    Let’s assume that governments are actively concerned with the interests of the populace at this very moment – an ardent hope of mine. To succeed, their actions have to benefit from a certain surprise effect so as not to be thwarted in advance…

  • Time for a good laugh: patents on tax evasion

    Did you know that on February 17, 2007, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., introduced comprehensive legislation to stop offshore tax haven and tax shelter abuses, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, targeting $100 billion in lost tax revenue each year from offshore tax dodges ?

    One of…

  • Report and Recommendations Pursuant to Section 133 of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008: Study on Mark-To-Market Accounting

    The SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) along with the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) have just released their report on the valuation of financial products (Fair Value).

    The subject is what I discussed in « Juste prix » et « juste valeur » and in L’implosion. La finance…

  • The Madoff Affair : Crime and Punishment

    Original French version at rue89.com.

    Does the name “Donald Crowhurst” ring a bell? He was one of the contenders in the Golden Globe Race a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world yacht race held in 1968–1969. While he was ahead and therefore a potential victor, his radio signals stopped abruptly. His craft was later located but it…

  • Le Monde, October 12th

    Here an account of my column in Le Monde on the concept of a new Bretton Woods.

    Bretton Woods 2.0 – Paul Jorion on The Financial Crisis

    Paul Jorion wrote a column in Le Monde a few days ago concerning the prospects of a new Bretton Woods (never mind that the original died…

  • Friday Market Monitor (AM 580 CFRA), on October 17 at 2 PM (EST)

    I was Walter Traversy’s guest on CFRA a news only radio station in Toronto, between 2 and 2:30 PM.

    The podcast is here. I’m talking in the second part of the program … just after the weather report. But hear Walter introduce me in the nicest way at the very beginning.

    I’m…

  • What have anthropologists to tell about the subprime crisis that no one else has said before?

    Finance is in shambles. It has remained until now under the close supervision of economic and financial theory. In recent years, due to the overbearing dominance of views developed under the umbrella of the “Chicago School” of economics, finance has been regarded as explainable through the combination of a very simplified version of psychology: that…

  • The willing catalyst

    On September 5th, I wrote on my French blog : “D’ici à la fin du mois il semble donc bien que les conditions d’un krach soient réunies”, meaning in proper English:

    It seems therefore that from now until the end of the month the conditions for a crash are being met.

    The…

  • LA, 1999

    At Latitude 33 in Laguna Beach, CA 92651, I saw this book called Exile or Exiles with writings about Los Angeles by famous people. I read the preface waiting for Brenda at the end of her shift at the bookstore. It said that intellectuals don’t choose LA: those who lived there had no such intent…

  • Galactic Report XYZ 00098887

    Sir,

    I need to report to you what might be a case of acute poisoning while on mission on planet Terra.

    Yesterday, in the course of my duty, I happened to hold very tight for a couple of minutes a human female (from now on HF). Today, as a consequence of this I developed…

  • Where this blog stands

    Various commitments on papers commissioned in French have kept me away from this blog. Reward is another factor: with an average of around 30 daily hits on the English blog and 2500 on the French one, vanity has been a powerful drive for concentrating on the French one. Dialogue is another one. If you’ve had…

  • Foresight and Despair

    A review of my just published book L’implosion. La finance contre l’économie: ce que révèle et annonce “la crise des subprimes” by Adrien de Tricornot in Le Monde, dated June 16th (translation by Jiro Tanaka – many thanks Jiro!)

    Foresight and Despair (“Oracle, ô désespoir !”, pun on a famous line from Corneille’s play…

  • Would an interruption of the Gulf Stream be reversible? And if so, at what cost?

    I’m blessed with a very popular blog in French. One of the questions that came up lately in my dialogue with commentators is that of the reversibility of major ecological disasters induced by human activity and of the feasibility of reversing such disasters with the tools pertaining to our current technology.

    This is a serious…

  • The cunning of Reason

    The very justification of a Human Complex System’s approach to the operation of human societies, implying a continuous explanatory spectrum from the individual (particle) to the cultural or societal levels (field), is offered by Hegel when he writes in Reason in History (*) that

    … human actions in history produce additional results, beyond their…

  • A population dynamics approach to the subprime crisis

    One way of looking at the subprime crisis – and by this I mean only the properly real estate–based part of the unfolding drama – is in terms of population dynamics, in terms of three populations of borrowers who first entered the market and then left it in reverse order as the last to come…

  • The Implosion, Finance vs. the Economy

    My new book called “The Implosion, Finance vs. the Economy – What the subprime crisis reveals and foretells” (L’Implosion, La finance contre l’économie – Ce que révèle et annonce la crise des subprimes) will be published on May 4th. The publisher is Arthème Fayard, one of the top French publishers who will realize here a…

  • The reasoning artificial toddler

    I was interviewed earlier today by Richard Adhikari, a journalist at TechNewsWorld, about an Artificial Intelligence project. I didn’t know anything about that project except what would be the title of the article: “AI Program Thinks Like a 4-Year-Old”.

    There is an excellent summary of what I had told the journalist:

    “I’m always…

  • The end of trust in the subprime crisis and how to model it

    The subprime crisis is often explained in terms of trust: one day trust between financial counterparties vanished and here was a crisis. Explanations in terms of “market confidence” refer in fact to two distinct phenomena, one being indeed trust and the other one being more plainly straightforward profitability. Let me start with profitability. Subprime loans…

  • The subprime crisis at UCLA

    I’m happy with the way things worked out yesterday, March 8th, at the UCLA Complexity Science Conference with my paper: The Subprime Crisis: A Human Complex Systems Phenomenon.

    Of course, trying to squeeze the whole crisis into an hour (1 ¼ with John Bragin’s express permission), it turned out I had much too much…

  • Pricing models: why the good ones are useless and the true ones, priceless

    I’ve mentioned already in Agents using financial models and the “human cognitive cocktail” a number of pitfalls linked to the task of modeling the subprime crisis in a Human Complex Systems perspective, especially those related to agents’ partial understanding of the models they’re using or in errors they’re making when using them. I’ve…