The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.
The Big Picture | Alan Greenspan on The Daily Show
Topic: Business
7:43 am EDT, Oct 14, 2007
Greenspan: I was telling my colleagues the other day...I’d been dealing with these big mathematical models for forecasting the economy, and I’m looking at what’s going on the last few weeks and I say, “Y’know, if I could figure out a way to determine whether or not people are more fearful, or changing to euphoric... I don’t need any of this other stuff. I could forecast the economy better than any way I know. The trouble is, we can’t figure that out. I’ve been in the forecasting business for 50 years, and I’m no better than I ever was, and nobody else is either.”
Stewart: (Leans back in chair)...You just bummed the sh*t outta me!
Orthodox economics assumes that people know roughly what they are doing, that they are rational, and that rationality is unambiguous. But in financial markets, people often don’t know what they are doing. Recognising this helps to solve our puzzles.
Many hedge fund managers, for all their fancy jargon and maths PhDs, do what Nassim Nicholas Taleb accused them of in his book The Black Swan: they are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.
The same people who've been saying for weeks that all was well are now the loudest in urging the Fed to reflate the bubble. These pleaders ignore two major risks.
The first is the "moral hazard" problem of rescuing Wall Street banks and hedge fund players that walked too far on the wild side during the boom. They made money then, and they need to absorb the losses now. Without enduring the discipline of losses, the offenders will go even further out on the risk curve next time.
The second problem is that a Fed reflation could lead to even more trouble if it causes a loss of confidence in the dollar.
VMware's IPO - Insanity turns Silicon Valley back to normal | The Register
Topic: Business
11:06 am EDT, Aug 15, 2007
VMware - trading on the NYSE under VMW - looks to ship 33m shares at $29 each. That leaves the sever virtualization maker hoping to bring in $957m. Most indications have the company blowing past that figure and igniting a Silicon Valley boom.
I can't seem to find this on any of the finance sites, but this would be a good one to own.
pjammer wrote: Looks like a link-farming site. A few 'articles' that regurgitate obvious facts, and a bunch of advertising. What is this?! :P
That's because essmeier is a piece of shit link spammer. Memestreams has implemented measures so the Google bot doesn't follow his links, or anyone's links who doesn't have a "good" reputation (ie their memes are read/recommended by others). Link spamming Memestreams does nothing for him now.
Memestreams is constantly improving. Personally I am working on several security issues with the site, and plan to move to enhancing the Memebox. Decius and I have talked in the past about a kind of killfill for Memestreams, where you simply wouldn't see assholes like essmeier. Regardless of whether he ultimately decides to do this, there are 3 simple ways you can get rid of his posts now:
-Don't read anything he posts if you see it.
-Meme nteresting articles, that people will read and thus are placed on the front page. Link spam only gets to the front page when there aren't any more popular stories to display.
-Get more legitimate users for Mememstreams. The more users we have, the more data Memestreams' presentation and recommendation algorithms have to work with. Shit like essmeier will sink to the bottom and you will not see their posts.
