The Dow ended the day down 370 points, after being down more than 800 in midafternoon. How can this be explained? 1. Pure random chance. As Nassim Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness: To be competent, a journalist should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of the information he is providing, [...]
Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, former Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson and former Bank of Israel Governor (and AIG vice chairman!) Jacob Frenkel had a little press conference this morning to discuss the structure of financial regulation or–more precisely, a report called The Structure of Financial Regulation (pdf; and it’s just the press release, not [...]
For the last few weeks the U.S. stock market has been a haven of relative calm in global financial markets. Seriously. I know it doesn’t look calm, what with drops (and occasional increases) of 5+% becoming the order of the day. But instead of freezing up like credit markets, the stock market been functioning smoothly [...]
