" The quality of the question determines the quality of the answer." I agree with what you’ve said. I can also say that I taught under & graduate university finance for 8 years and then worked in investment banking for 25 years, starting as a front office fixed income quant. I have wel...

My experience with web AI to date is as follows. Pose a very well-defined mathematical problem and you will get a good answer. I am using it a lot to verify complex maths. Very useful. But give it just about anything requiring insight and putting two and two together and it falls flat on its face. F...

Ayn Rand? Didn’t she rise in American high society the same way the current First Lady did?  Ayn Rand messed up Alan Greenspan’s head so much they had to hide his PhD thesis!

Statistics is the creative arts of rulers! https://trends.ufm.edu/en/article/tax-b ... ns-paradox Stratifying data by income often yields insights, as anyone who has ever tried their hand at mortgage prepayment or more recently home equity release longevity modeling will know. The analysis seems va...

Something different this time around is that during Trump 1.0 the US military regularly and forcefully stated that they would not obey illegal orders whenever the rapist/felon/seditionist launched his trial balloon ideas of setting the military against US citizens on US soil. I cannot say I am liste...

This just in…. the Trump Department of Uneducation has just proclaimed that all US public school students will be required to memorize and recite the lyrics of the Shaker hymn “Tis the Gift to be simple.” Oddly admired for their crude furniture, the Shaker movement died out, perhaps not surprisingly...

Many financial institutions have outsourced internal service departments (e.g. accounting and HR) in search of higher profits. Poor service is unfortunately now the norm. Get used to it. And, trying to provide some free and frank advice here, you are being somewhat indiscreet in a business and in pa...

I'm going out on a limb here, but is this a reference to tariffs? Do you know how much paperwork is involved (for all parties)? Does the tariff go around in circles like VAT? Paul, drawing from ideas in the tax shifting literature, if you were asking is there a difference between the incidence and ...

"But it's been eighty years since then. Where are the thorium reactors? Even fusion seems to be making more respectable progress, at least in the last several years." Very true. I could be mistaken but I think the historical reason there are no thorium reactors is that they are not or at ...

For the betting person, capitalism’s imitative herd mentality brings with it a predictable tendency to overdo new things, creating a steady stream of opportunities to make money during both early valuation runups followed by near inevitable rationalizations. Internet hype and what I see as increasin...

If you’ll pardon the pun, Canada has only one trump card in its pocket. More specifically, the Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has just called a snap early election despite he and his party being under criminal investigation, holds a stop button on certain electricity and oil exports to the US. Ohio ...

The best way to rid Syria of Assad’s odour is not to arbitrarily murder his associates, but to publicly try them for their crimes. Given they currently have no meaningful rule of law, a practical way to do this in the short run might be something like a temporary single purpose court established in ...

Chicago’s Eugene Fama once said at a conference that disbelievers in market efficiency are criminals. As far as I can tell, however, he was honest in the sense that he didn’t fudge his research like his more influential colleagues Friedman and Stigler.

Keir Starmer ‘gets rid of’ 10 Downing Street’s Thatcher portrait | Keir Starmer | The Guardian

Who'd want that thin-lipped bloodless ghoul watching you?