financial engineering at its best. this is what we need, not dudebros playing with other people’s money. i’d gladly slash & burn 90% of finance if we can retain the useful 10%, like this.
Tag: finance
Buttcoin qualities?
i have made a lot of fun of bitcoin recently, because it attracts the worst speculators and confused “down with the man” types. if you peel away all that, there are interesting properties in the protocol that i hope will see the light of day, like Contracts . if we are lucky we can get rid of most banksters and also most lawyer types. that’s real progress 🙂
Turning finance into a utility
my proposal: treat the finance industry like a utility. put strong pressure on reducing transaction costs above all else. the purpose of finance is to grease the cogs of the economy, not for frat boys to play with other people’s money.
In striking contrast with these past prosecutions, not a single high level executive has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis, and given the fact that most of the relevant criminal provisions are governed by a 5-year statute of limitations, it appears very likely that none will be. It may not be too soon, therefore, to ask why.
Financial network complexity
How complex are international corporate structures?
If you want to understand how complex multinational companies are, consider this.
In Hong Kong, there’s a company called Goldman Sachs Structured Products (Asia) Limited. It’s controlled by another company called Goldman Sachs (Asia) Finance, registered in Mauritius.
That’s controlled by a company in Hong Kong, which is controlled by a company in New York, which is controlled by a company in Delaware, and that company is controlled by another company in Delaware called GS Holdings (Delaware) L.L.C. II….Which itself is a subsidiary of the only Goldman you’re likely to have heard of, The Goldman Sachs Group in New York City.
this already has info on 50M companies, and is starting to show ownership networks (banksters only for now)
Don’t Get Sucker Pumped
maybe this will get the cc companies to finally fix security instead of making bleating noises about identity theft.
Increasingly, pump skimmer scammers are turning to bluetooth-enabled devices that connect directly to the pump’s power source. These skimmers can run indefinitely, and allow thieves to retrieve stolen card data wirelessly while waiting in their car at the pump.
Wall Street regulation
There is an alternative to financial regulation: did you know that a cannon is pointed at wall street at all times? Next time wall street pummels the economy, why not pummel it?
In God we trust?
Hilarious, and overdue, on the Vatican Bank:
Imagine telling some pencil pusher from the European Central Bank that the shareholder of record is “1 God in 3 persons.”
Draining ATMs
the banking industry only have themselves to blame for having utterly amateur “security”.
In 2 precision operations that involved people in more than 24 countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45m from 1000s of ATM’s in a matter of hours.
Just roll a dice instead
Of course, a lot of Wall Street traders, and others, don’t want it to be known that they’re relying on anything other than their own talent. Arch Crawford, a financial astrologer who actually got his start on Wall Street as a stock analyst at Merrill Lynch, recalls one subscriber asking for his newsletter in “brown paper wrappers.”
in other words, retarded children playing with other people’s money who can’t get a real job.
Useless quarterly reports
no, vanguard, i really don’t care about your index fund quarterly report. why does it take 50 pages of blah blah to say we tracked the market?
Gregor J. Rothfuss 