Research Economist at the Bank of England
Karl Smith is asking what financial market participants, as opposed to central bankers or academic economists, believe QE actually achieves (or is meant to achieve). This comment by Brito is just too awesome to not share:
Zero hedge [that’s this site] commentary suggests the fed manipulates our very life blood, as ordered by the lizard men, in order to create infinite debt and establish a soviet central planning regime.
So true …
*sniff*
Then again, Urlai also thinks that I’m over 66 years old.
My brother, who clearly has too much spare time on his hands, was yesterday browsing through my Archive page when he discovered that I have published 18 posts that refer to ‘Paul Krugman‘ in some way, but only two posts that refer to ‘sex‘. This, he proposed, suggested either an unhealthy attachment to Professor Krugman, or a most disappointing detachment from fornication.
The present post brings the ratio from a lofty 9:1 down to only 6.3:1, but I fear it may still be too high! Clearly a flood of pornographic material is called for …
… and since I finished my marking today, here are The Simpsons and PHD Comics on the typical graduate student’s lot in life in May and June:
The NY Times, writing about Shanghai’s efforts to improve it’s signs, has a gallery of amusing mis-translations from Chinese to English. This was one of my favourites:
As an aside, I like the javascript-free technique used by the NYT developers to prevent most people from saving the images. Here is the relevent section of the page’s HTML source:
<div class="centeredElement" style="background-image:url('http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/03/world/20100503_CHINGLISH-slide-DFXB/20100503_CHINGLISH-slide-DFXB-slide.jpg');width:600px; height:400px;"> <img width="600" height="400" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/pixel.gif" /> </div>If somebody right-clicks on the dispayed image (technically, the background image) and chooses to view it or save it, they get pixel.gif, which is a 1×1 clear pixel.
The Reserve Bank of Australia just decided, somewhat unexpectedly, to keep interest rates on hold. Channel 7 news needed to spin it into a story, though, so they did the usual thing of getting a talking head from the mythical (in Australia, at least) Macquarie Bank to say something. Unfortunately, there was a guy in the background who chose that moment to look at topless pictures of Miranda Kerr. Here’s the clip. The guy starts looking at them at the 1:00 mark.
I don’t think he’ll be fired.
It looks like he was opening images from an email and that gives him a little cover. If the sender was a Macquarie employee then they will have some serious problems, it being considered worse to send “offensive” material than to receive it.
The dude will probably get an official reprimand and he might not get the same pay rise as others in his team next time ’round (at the least, he was just demonstrably slacking off from work), but I think that’ll be about it for him.
I think that Macquarie will look at their email and web-browsing policy again and consider increasing the paranoid parameter of their filters. There are plenty of algorithms for detecting skin tones in images and I’m 99% sure that they’ve been incorporated into email filters. It’s just a question of turning them on.
I think they’ll also reconsider their policy on having their talking heads stand in front of an office like that. I know they do it to look more important — I’ve taken 3 minutes out from my dazzlingly busy schedule to explain that your mortgage payments won’t change today, but will probably go up in a month or two. Gosh, don’t I look impressive? — but exactly this sort of stuff is the risk with which it comes. I’ve seen other stupid things going on behind US presenters, so I don’t think they’ll stop the practice, but they might consider staging the background a little more than just sticking a big cardboard Macquarie sign in there.
In the end, it just shows what everybody working in an open-plan office already knows: the exact position and alignment of your desk is of crucial value.
Just awesome.
Last night Dani and I went to the Royal Opera thanks to the glories of Student Standby tickets: £10 each!
It’s luck of the draw for where you end up sitting. Last night we were in the nose-bleeds, but at the ROH, even there you get a perfect view and no acoustic trade-off that my untrained ears can notice. We’ve previously managed to get seats that would ordinarily cost hundreds of pounds.
We saw two one-act comedic operettas: Ravel‘s L’Heure espagnole (the poor-quality photo above is from that – Look! Giant breasts at the opera!) and Puccini‘s Gianni Schicchi. Freakin’ hilarious.
Alex Tabarrok points out the amusing truth:
Ladbrokes gives Eugene Fama the best odds for winning the economics Nobel. Thus, if Fama wins he will have deserved to have won and if Fama loses he will not have deserved to have won. The Nobel committee cannot go wrong no matter what it does! Think about it.
