Author Archives: josh

Laughter: the best Fed-icine

Posted on April 17, 2012 by josh

I forget who originally came up with the idea of searching for “[Laughter]” in the transcripts of Fed meetings (though this piece from the Atlantic collects all the best ones from bubblicious 2006, and is pretty much canonical as far as … Continue reading →

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Talk Nerdy To Me: Amazon EC2 backup shell script

Posted on April 16, 2012 by josh

Update: right, here’s a new version of the script that doesn’t spew when you run it as root. Update 2: made the path to /sbin/service explicit so that mysqld goes down properly.  As you may have noticed from the intermittent downtime, … Continue reading →

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“Dear Ben Bernanke, Please Do Our Job For Us”

Posted on April 4, 2012 by josh

PBOC gov Zhou Xiaochuan doesn’t quite understand that the Fed sets policy for the American economy, and the PBOC sets policy for the Chinese economy. Have a taste of this fine whine from his speech at the Boao Forum yesterday, … Continue reading →

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Two thoughts on the DBS/Danamon deal

Posted on April 2, 2012 by josh

DBS Bank has just launched the largest ever banking M&A deal in south-east Asia, offering more than SGD 7 bio to buy Indonesia’s Bank Danamon (which is 67% owned by Temasek, the SWF that also owns a one-third stake in … Continue reading →

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Everything old is new again

Posted on March 31, 2012 by josh

One of my favourite passages in Josh Brown‘s new book Backstage Wall Street talks about the “embarrassing” and “egregious” TV spots that online brokerages ran back in the bubblicious days of the late ’90s: Of all the shockingly irresponsible commercials, … Continue reading →

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“Why”, asked Brenda the sea lion, “do I work with these idiots?”

Posted on March 31, 2012 by josh

“Why”, asked Brenda the sea lion, “do I work with these idiots?”, originally uploaded by Shiny Things. The sea lions are indisputably the stars of the show at Sentosa’s Underwater World. It can’t be long before they realise this and … Continue reading →

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Most cable companies like to rip their customers off…

Posted on March 28, 2012 by josh

…but Starhub, Singapore’s biggest cable provider, thinks everyone should be able to join in the ripping-off-its-customers game. This flyer was stuffed in with my cable bill last month. I’m not sure which genius in the marketing department decided to run … Continue reading →

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Signed: Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

Posted on March 9, 2012 by josh

Singapore made a significant change to its laws recently, after years of lobbying from human rights groups: from next year, live-in maids (most of whom are migrant workers from Indonesia or the Philippines) will be given one day off a … Continue reading →

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People Rich

Posted on March 6, 2012 by josh

Are these the world’s richest people? Sure, why the hell not. But I can’t just let the launch of Bloomberg News’s Bloomberg Billionaires Index (“a daily ranking of the world’s 20 richest individuals!”) go by with just a gag lifted … Continue reading →

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China in one statistic

Posted on February 22, 2012 by josh

“60% of […] Chinese people with assets over 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) were either thinking about emigrating or taking steps to do so.”

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