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California salivating
What we did last Saturday was a bit over the top: we drove 200 miles to have dinner. We’re bound to have eaten too little on Friday night as we woke up the following morning wondering where to have dinner. We ruled out our default solution, the zero degree of our imagination, Gladstone’s in Pacific…
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The Greenspan and Kennedy papers on Equity Extraction from Housing (1990-2006) – A graphic exposition
The first Greenspan and Kennedy paper (*), published in 2005 provides figures about equity extraction in the US over the 1990 to 2005 period. In the first diagram, the numbers for cash-out extracted at the occasion of refinancing are shown along origination of Home Equity Loans and Lines of Credit. There is no essential difference…
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Please keep quiet Mr. Greenspan!
Poor Mr. Greenspan: can’t open his mouth without giving investors the heebie-jeebies!
He promised he would be quiet, just like his predecessor Mr. Volcker was about monetary policy when he himself took over. Even when he only whispers, people pay a lot, a lot of attention, and go into a frenzy of wanting to… -
Subprime, CDOs and the threat to home ownership
In a well-documented recent paper (*), Joseph R. Mason of Drexel University and Joshua Rosner of Graham Fisher & Co. ask if a chain of events has not begun unfolding that will end up in a situation where funding for the mortgage industry is massively curtailed. In their paper, Mason and Rosner draw a parallel…
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An experiment in Wikiology
I marvel at Wikipedia. There is hardly a day when I don’t go and check their site, looking up some concept, often mathematical, sometimes financial, or finding out about any other question I happen to be asking myself, about Joachim Pateniers or the bodhisattva.
In the beginning, I would only fix the typos I was…
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Beijing’s Food Palace
The girl who was taking us to the opera asked where we intended to have dinner and we told her we would be going for the third time in a row to the Golden Tripod Attic. There was some sneer in her voice when she said “But that’s a normal place!” And she was right:…
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Where did the housing bubble come from?
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Andy Laperrière, a managing director of the Washington office of the ISI Group, wrote a piece on the crisis in the mortgage industry, I wrote to the Journal’s editor, the following letter:
In his “Mortgage Meltdown” (Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2007), Andy Laperrière assigns the residential real estate bubble…
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Malaise in the subprime sector
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Alex J. Pollock a former President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago wrote a piece on the subprime industry, I wrote to the Journal’s editor, the following letter:
“In his “Credit Crack-Up” (March 12, 2007), Alex J. Pollock offers a perceptive summary of the…
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Optimistic and pessimistic views on immortality
Religions are most often associated with a representation of the after-life where immortality, which is clearly unattainable in the nether-world, is ultimately achieved.
Other widely held belief systems don’t share that view, in particular Taoism, the “atheistic religion” or “philosophy” of the Chinese people over the ages. Indeed, some disparagingly called “superstitious” versions of… -
The safest financial world of all
A recurrent theme in Alan Greenspan’s speeches, either when he was head of the board of governors of the Fed or now in his capacity as an invited speaker, has been that the financial world has become in recent years a much more sturdy, much more robust and let’s say it, a safer place, because…
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Artificial reason and the heart
So, Marvin Minsky has just published a new book called The Emotional Machine (Simon & Schuster 2007) where he states that Artificial Intelligence should rest on the observed feature that intelligence is emotional by nature. This of course rings a bell, as some twenty years ago an audacious AI engineer, traveling between Martlesham Heath (Suffolk)…