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rffrydr
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 Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 8:58 am Post subject: |
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Makes sense to me:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/02/01/858921/sino-forests-diminishing-returns/
I don't know that I'd buy Sino-Forest bonds now as the company has become an international pariah--and probably a whipping boy pretty soon by its own government. But "hard assets" in china are often soft--determined by who knows who about what may or may not be "available." Just like investing in the world's model company, Exxon!
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 11:12 am Post subject: |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/world/europe/italians-embrace-a-hero-after-cruise-ship-accident.html?_r=1&hp
“The notion of running away is part of our history, and nails the Italian character,” Mr. Merlo said, noting that cowardice was a theme in many great films of Italy’s neorealist tradition. “That is our history, even when we try to modify it,” he said. And, he added, “our moments of greatness, often, have an element of the accidental hero,” as in the case of Captain De Falco.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2012 10:13 am Post subject: |
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You can't farm spiders--they're cannibals! But don't that stop you:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biology-spider-goat-genetics
I've been waiting for these goats to pay off since I came to the board....we're just about seeing it. "The Next Big Thing" always seems to take a long long long time. There's a lesson there.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sun Dec 25, 2011 8:22 am Post subject: |
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Before Apple there was the original sin. No mere fruit, I give you the product, Apple:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/21/111121fa_fact_seabrook
Indeed culture is our first industry. Voted: the "Honeycrisp" ranks with Google as one of 25 innovations that changed the world.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 10:04 am Post subject: |
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Let's hope this is the dying gasp of culture succumbing to technocratic indifference:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-13/monti-s-party-of-bankers-prompts-warning.html
| Quote: | | In the 1970s and 1980s, Italy suffered terrorism of all political stripes, from the 1980 bombing of Bologna’s railway station by neo-fascists that killed 85 people to the murder of former Premier Aldo Moro in 1978 by Marxist-inspired Red Brigade militants. That group’s most recent victims were Labor Ministry consultants Massimo D’Antona and Marco Biagi, both of whom were working on overhauling the job market when they were gunned down in 1999 and 2002, respectively. |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2011 7:35 am Post subject: |
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"Self-referential capitalism" in Italy--is it really that "un-german"?
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a9b07fb8-0b75-11e1-9a61-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1dakaozvJ
| Quote: | | It goes without saying that these sophisticated and interdependent webs of power and influence are not confined to the world of politics. Corporate Italy also abounds with these structures of tribal capitalism. Take the recent example of Italy's sixth-largest bank, Banca Popolare di Milano. Patently in need of a complete overhaul of its governance, management and finances, its entrenched local union owners and Milanese bigwigs mobilised their networks to fend off even the efforts of an apparently impotent Bank of Italy to force change. The message was clear. In spite of everything the system does not want reform. The financial adviser to BPM’s recidivists was Milan investment bank Mediobanca, itself a perfect example of the indestructible nature of Italy’s networks of resistance and power. |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 9:46 am Post subject: |
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A new kind of german efficiency:
http://www.economist.com/node/21531032
| Quote: | | Take Italy, say German officials. No sooner had the European Central Bank intervened this summer to stabilise its bond market than the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, retreated from his austerity programme, under pressure from within his coalition. Fear of damnation, not well-meaning exhortation, is the only way to right sinning ways. So the raging fire in the markets should not be quenched; at times it should even be stoked, for example by demanding that private creditors take losses on Greek debt. |
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2011 11:05 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | That was what the currency union always implied: entire peoples had to change their ways of life. Conceived as a tool for integrating Germany into Europe, and preventing Germans from dominating others, it has become the opposite. For better or for worse, the Germans now own Europe. If the rest of Europe is to continue to enjoy the benefits of what is essentially a German currency, they need to become more German. And so, once again, all sorts of people who would rather not think about what it means to be “German” are compelled to do so. |
| Quote: | | This is what makes the German case so peculiar. If they had been merely the only big, developed nation with decent financial morals, they would present one sort of picture, of simple rectitude. But they had done something far more peculiar: during the boom German bankers had gone out of their way to get dirty. They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds. The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.) In their own country, however, these seemingly crazed bankers behaved with restraint. The German people did not allow them to behave otherwise. It was another case of clean on the outside, dirty on the inside. The German banks that wanted to get a little dirty needed to go abroad to do it. |
| Quote: | | The Commerzbank Tower is 53 stories high and unusually shaped: it looks like a giant throne. The top of the building, the arms of the throne, looks more decorative than useful. The interesting thing, said a friend, who visited often, was a room at the top, peering down over Frankfurt. It was a men’s bathroom. Commerzbank executives had taken him up to the top to show him how, in full view of the world below, he could urinate on Deutsche Bank. And if he sat in the stall with the door open … |
| Quote: | | Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (xxx), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.” |
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/09/europe-201109#gotopage1
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 9:54 am Post subject: |
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With the same dogged determination and chinese strength in numbers applied in, say, industrial espionage, china takes on the once impregnable SAT:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_20/b4228058558042.htm
Most of it is brute study force (53days, 5hr/day memorizing 100 wds) and using math super-superiority to cheat the verbal section, but there's some clever discoveries here including gaming our cultural predilections:
| Quote: | | Jia Wen, a 25-year-old graduate student in finance at Boston College, recounted some other odd New Oriental gimmicks she learned for the TOEFL's listening section. Her teacher told her to remember that if the answer choices involve food, for instance, hamburgers always taste better than pizza. And that girls in the passages are always more intelligent and harder-working than boys. "You don't need to understand," says Wen, who scored 110. "After many practices, you can recognize the correct answer just by looking at the choices." |
| Quote: | Silu Wang and Zhu Xinyu, two Beijing teenagers who each scored 2200 on the SAT, say New Oriental deserves much of the credit. Zhu, 18, prepared essays on luminaries living and dead, such as Thomas Edison, Coco Chanel, James Cameron, J.D. Salinger, Howard Schultz, Woody Allen, and Florence Nightingale. She received the maximum score on the essay, she says. Zhu was admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Virginia. She is a "wonderful student from one of the best schools in China" and excelled in an English-language phone interview, says Muth, the UVA associate dean of admissions.
Wang, 19, chose Steve Jobs as her preferred subject. "His experience covers a lot of topics," she says. "You can always use Steve Jobs." |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2011 9:22 pm Post subject: |
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Yes, there's the scar of Weimar. But it is forgotten just how much labor in europe is still indexed to inflation (or greater in the case of Volkswagen). Germans (yes, this means Trichet) are natural hikers.
Don't believe this will go too far...or, as far is already priced in the curve. A lot of jockeying for the Saddle right now.
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