Feb 6, 2009

Agence France-Presse brings us this little gem: SINGAPORE - A Singapore lawmaker has a simple explanation for the city-state’s lack of babies: procreation, he says, is “not our forte.” […] “We should accept that as a people, our procreation talent is not our forte – nothing to crow about,” Loo [Choon Yong] told the legislature on Wednesday. Really, it’s not that hard. (Or maybe that’s the problem! Boom-tish.)

Jan 13, 2009

The BBC website has just posted a rather good glossary of terms that’ve cropped up a lot in coverage of the Continuing Financial Crisis From Hell. It’s missing a certain something, though. Here, then, is JRE’s Alternate Finance Crisis Glossary. AAA-rating 1) A guarantee of financial soundness, that the AAA-rated product will almost never fail. See also: New Orleans levees. 2) A BBB-rating after it’s been leveraged up fifteen times.

Jan 10, 2009

There’s a certain subset of investors who take it all a bit too seriously. The CEO of overstock.com famously believes that a cabal of short-sellers (led by a “Sith Lord” and encompassing the press, Wikipedia and the Russian mafia) has been suppressing his company’s stock price - for the last five years. Here is his website. Some people are convinced that the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets is actually a “plunge protection team”, stepping in and buying stocks whenever they decide that markets have become too irrational (November 20, 2008, we’re looking at you).

Nov 21, 2008

In Singapore, the government tightly restricts the number of cars on the road, and enforces this restriction through an auction system for car permits. As people scrap or export their cars, the permits are recycled back to the government, which auctions them off every month in a reverse Dutch auction (so the lowest accepted bid is the price that applies for the whole auction). Lately there’s about 2,000 permits on offer every month and 3,000 bids, so there’s plenty of demand to keep the price high.

Nov 16, 2008

Buying a pig in a poke, colloquially, is to buy something risky without examining it beforehand. The phrase arose in the middle ages, when confidence tricksters would offer to sell a pig in a sack - but when the customer opened the sack, they’d find they’d bought a nice juicy cat. Or rabbit. These days, the pig in the poke is more likely to be a nice juicy “risk-free” yield on a structured deposit.