“How Complex Systems Fail”
Complex systems are prone to catastrophic failure. Have we come to embrace policies and values that increase the odds of failure?
Read more...Category Archives: Moral hazard
A Pragmatic Approach to External Debt: The Write-Down of Germany’s Debts in 1953
Greece’s crisis has invited comparisons to the 1953 London Debt Agreement, which ended a long period of German default on external debt. Unfortunately for Greece, the motivations driving the 1953 agreement are nearly entirely absent today.
Read more...Entering the Nuclear Age, Body by Body The Nagasaki Experience
I felt I had not adequately commemorated the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and am putting up this offering to make up for that lapse.
Read more...Libor Trader Sentenced to 14 Years for Market Manipulation. So What About His Bosses?
While it’s gratifying to see former UBS trader Tom Hayes go to jail for large-scale Libor bid rigging, his bosses had to have known what he was up to. So when will we see their indictments?
Read more...Perry Mehrling: Flash Crash Explained by HFT
The official report on the October 15, 2014 “Flash Crash” raises some questions which unfortunately it does not answer.
Read more...How Pension Funds, Universities and Endowments Pay for Private Equity Private Jets
One of the class markers of the private equity industry is that its members routinely fly on private jets. That’s because the larger and even some of the smaller firms charge their private jet travel to private equity portfolio companies.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Microsoft Tallies the True Costs of the M&A Boom: Layoffs, Write-Offs, Shut-Downs, and Economic Decline
Microsoft illustrates the real-world fallout of letting corporate executives, either out of desperation or out of finding deal making more fun than the grind of making businesses perform better, follow the siren song of M&A mavens.
Read more...What If There is No Deal on Greece?
The alarming part of the deadlock between Greece and its lenders is the lack of a plan on the creditor side to develop a Plan B, a sort of mirror image of the Greek government’s claim that its has bet everything on securing a favorable agreement.
Read more...Bill Black: Geithner’s Ghost Writer and the Parable of the River of Risk
Bill Black flags a new stunning bit of bank propaganda, that risk is an unavoidable natural condition that is futile for regulators to control.
Read more...Bill Black: Sorkin on the Street’s Surge of Suicides – Ignoring the Obvious
Predictably, it never occurred to Andrew Ross Sorkin that being put in impossible ethical positions could be a cause of some of of Wall Street’s recent suicides.
Read more...Memo to Readers: If You Want to Beat Big Finance, You Need to Be Able to Take the Fight to Their Terrain
We are now 35 years into a finance-led counterrevolution. If you care about income inequality, student loan debt slavery, foreclosure abuses, and other products of the success of this effort, it behooves you, as Sun Tzu urged, to understand your enemy.
Read more...A Unifying Approach to Preventing Asset Price Bubbles
An integrated regulatory approach with a common leverage ratio for debt-based financing across the financial system would prevent bubbles
Read more...Bill Black: HSBC CEO – My Pay Was so Outrageous I Had to Use Tax Havens to Hide it from My Peers
This tidbit from HSBC reveals a new low in the standards of banking, which given how low those already are, amounts to an accomplishment of sorts. Perhaps we should create a Stuart Gulliver Award for other instances of creative extreme seaminess. Nominees?
Read more...The ECB’s QE Decision
The European Central Bank has just launched full-fledged quantitative easing. This column argues that the ECB’s watershed decision highlights both the strengths and the persistent vulnerabilities of the Eurozone. The limited-risk-sharing provision flags the need for greater fiscal union; and governments should use the respite that QE provides to launch much-needed structural reforms.
That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
Read more...Bill Black: Roger Cohen’s Ode to Colonialism and Imperialism: Why is It “Insidious” to Want Justice for Banksters?
A remarkable (in a bad way) New York Times op-ed shows that Roger Cohen is so deep in the banksters’ pockets that he cannot see that he is a leader in the movement to ensure that no bankster will ever “pay for his sins.”
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