The Dark Magic of Structured Finance
Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution provides the most clear explanation I have seen of how financial markets tried and failed to manage risk.
tofias dot net
log | a bucket full of thoughts
Posts tagged with markets
“ So much of our cultural industries have been built on consumer mistakes and those days are coming to an end, rapidly.”
— Tyler Cowen on the ongoing changes in the film and music industries
Liberal Magazines Suffer Under Obama
Last week, Seth Masket posted about the disincentives toward winning majority power that some political actors might face. I thought it was a cute argument, but mostly bunk. However, some figures from Vanity Fair make me reconsider (via Political Wire). In the past year, liberal magazines are doing poorly but sales and subscriptions to conservative magazines are up – even in the down economy.
If (relative) political extremists are willing to purchase media as a way to compensate for their favored party’s minority status, doesn’t that potentially speak to the Tea Party movement? In this light, the Tea Party movement is just a group of vendors selling t-shirts and conventions, profiting off of angst like the magazine publishers. Maybe they’re just monetizing the hate. Real parties need elites, maybe the Tea Partiers are just angry consumers with political roots who need more than magazines.
Revisiting the Marriage Supermarket
Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution on the non-linearities induced by imbalanced sex ratios in the marriage market.
“ And so we’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.”
— The War For the Web - O’Reilly Radar (via Instapaper)
Rob Neyer is confused that the Brewers are selling tickets
As The Munger would say, don’t forget that most important economic decision variable which is price. The tickets are relatively inexpensive and beer and hot dogs are relatively inexpensive as well. Sure the quality of the product on the field matters and probably the impression of the quality (a lagged measure winning and excitement) probably matters more, but price matters too.
We’ve been to games twice this year. Tickets close to the field probably cost 1/4 what they would have cost at Fenway Park.
“ The fundamental error in the free-agent market, going back 30 years, is paying players for the year they just had as if it represents their level of performance going forward, when even a cursory look at the evidence will tell you otherwise.”
— Joe Sheehan
