That’s the view from the room in Billund, Denmark, where Ole Kirk Christiansen founded Lego in 1932. Below is a Lego storage warehouse. Yes, every one of those boxes is full of Legos.
I spent Monday talking to various people at the company, which is in the process of outsourcing most of its production to Eastern Europe and Mexico. …
Meet a monstrous byproduct of European integration. The result of the Spanish slug moving north and breeding with the hardy local black slug. They call it a Draebersnegle, or killer slug.
See, this is why the Danes won’t adopt the euro.
The Curious Capitalist’s Danish journey has begun. I don’t have a whole lot to report yet, since I haven’t done any reporting. Instead, I’ve been hanging out with relatives who have this lovely view. That and chewing some licorice-flavored gum.
I’ll be headed to the big city soon, and it’s supposed to rain the rest of the week. So no …
Barry Ritholtz, one of my favorite financial bloggers, left a comment to my most recent post on Alan Greenspan. After declaring Paul Volcker the hero of the modern Fed story, he wrote:
Greenspan was like the long middle reliever in a baseball game. He took a big lead and ultimately gave alot of it away. He completely blew the dot com
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Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management, one of the hedge funds briefly caught in the Great Quant Meltdown of August 2007, has been sending around a “working paper” that attempts to explain what the heck happened. As with everything Cliff writes, it’s more entertaining than an explanation of quantitative investing has any right to be. …
I’ve got a new column up online and in the new issue of Time with a shrinking iceberg on the cover (and a cool story by Jamie Graff about the battle for the Arctic inside). It begins:
He has been out of office for more than a year and a half now–and has spent, by his own account, a notable amount of that time in the bathtub. Yet many
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Talk of a dollar crash has been all in the air today. The Daily Telegraph‘s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who would have to be taken seriously if only because of that name, but also happens to be a pretty smart and well-connected financial columnist, had this to say (via Barry Ritholtz):
Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in
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Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee today, Ben Bernanke allowed that the mortgage lending industry could probably do with a a few more rules:
We are looking closely at some mortgage lending practices, including prepayment penalties, escrow accounts for taxes and insurance, stated-income and low-documentation lending,
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The Curious Capitalist is going on a road trip next week to Denmark (because that’s where it’s all happening), and I’ve been studying up on the language. It rocks. This, from Aalborg University “medialogy” professor Jens Arnspang, demonstrates how linguistic efficiency allows Danes to devote valuable brain cells to more important …
From the Richter Scales, a San Francisco area a cappella group, to the tune of “It’s a Fine, Fine Line Between Love and a Waste of Time” from the musical Avenue Q (thanks for the tip, Julie). As Fed-related musical humor goes, it’s no “Every Breath You Take“, but it’s actually kind of nice to listen to:
Update: The video might take a …
Barbara Kiviat has a very entertaining piece up on Time.com about the visit she paid yesterday to a Greenspan book signing down at the Wall Street Borders. A highlight:
So, had they read the book, which had been selling since the day before? No. But the question prompted Oliver Young to remove his copy from the Borders bag he was holding
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