Peja Face

I'm watching the NO-Dallas playoffs game right now and I managed to catch some spectacular: someone in the Hornets organization is paid to run around with a huge blow-up picture of Peja Stojakovic's face. It's not surprise though, the man is incredibly dreamy and I'm sure the women of New Orleans love seeing his Eastern European mug every night.

Of course, why would Peja ever stray form this?



That's right, this entire post was an excuse to post pictures of a hot NBA wife. And did you know: Adriana Lima is going out with backup point guard Marko Jaric of the Minnesota Timberwolves. If only I was an Eastern European basketball player

History Rhymes

Here's a summary http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/1067 and here's the full 120 page beast: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/rogoff/files/This_Time_Is_Different.pdf

These guys look through almost 800 years of data, tracking default episodes and periods of financial crises. The stylized facts they've found are pretty eye-opening and really put the period that we're in right now into context.

Two especially important results:
"Serial default on external debt—that is, repeated sovereign default—is the norm throughout nearly every region in the world, including Asia and Europe.

...

Another regularity found in the literature on modern financial crises is that countries experiencing large capital inflows are at high risk of having a debt crisis. Default is likely to be accompanied by a currency crash and a spurt of inflation. The evidence here suggests the same to be true over a much broader sweep of history, with surges in capital inflows often preceding external debt crises at the country, regional, and global level since 1800, if not before."

"Also consonant with the modern theory of crises is the striking correlation between freer capital mobility and the incidence of banking crises, as shown in Figure 2. Periods of high international capital mobility have repeatedly produced international banking crises, not only famously as they did in the 1990s, but historically."

These two quotes offer an interesting look at the US's current situation: namely, are we going to enter a period of international debt defaults? Further, it offers an interesting look at globalization. It's interesting to think about this in terms of the LTCM collapse. Sure they help geographically diverse assets that should be uncorrelated, except as financial barriers fall, increasingly many disparate assets are held by the same people, thus when things go to hell, there's still going to be correlation as those holders are forced to liquidate their assets. It seems this provides historical evidence for that idea: perhaps as capital mobility rises,the concept of diversification goes hay-wire because there's this latent correlation between assets.

Discuss

Help Me to Help You

Make more money by giving me money to buy steroids

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1730662,00.html

According to new research from the University of Cambridge, a male trader's daily testosterone level is higher on days when he makes more than he would in an average day. What's more, the higher a trader's morning testosterone level, the more money he'll likely have netted before the close of business that day. Testosterone, in other words, can be good for business.

Credit Crisis My Ass

With all the attention lately on the credit markets, it's nice to take a step back and look at the commodities market. Two articles from Bloomberg highlight the run up in food prices:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a0fU0S8MSK64&refer=home

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_pesek&sid=aEcTZJbdEUiA


It's interesting thinking about the implications, namely that this is something going on in the financial markets that will affect the poorest of people even more than the rich.

Hate Thy Neighbor

What's the most racist country in the Western industrialized world?

According to this study, Northern Ireland, although Greece is a close second with Italy rounding out the top 3.

Not surprising that the top two countries have been party to religious/ethnic violence.

Sex and Risk

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/04/sex-drives-men-to-take-ri_n_95169.html

A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles _ sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

This is a really cool study that's actually pretty intuitive. Why else do casino's have attractive servers walking around? And what about CNBC and Fox Business News? If Erin Burnett was naked, would markets fluctuate wildly?

Sherron Collins

Posted without any presumption of truthfulness:

Someone from my dorm last year had a class with Sherron Collins and a few other basketball players (Darrell Arthur, Brady Morningstar, maybe someone else) and they always sit next to each other and cheat on tests and such.

Sherron enters class on a test day and immediately goes and sits right next to the other players, and of course you're supposed to have a seat between you and the closest person. The teacher tells Sherron to sit in the front of the class, where there are five or six completely empty rows. Sherron doesn't even look up and just yells 'AIN'T NO SEATS' and proceeds to continue in his studious ways and miraculously gets an A on the test while sitting next to the basketball players
This becomes a catchphrase on my floor of the dorm last year and we named our basketball ticket camping group after it.

Another story is Sherron was sleeping around with girls on the floor above me last year (he already has had two kids and supposedly has a girlfriend he's serious with). The people who were in the next room over from the one Sherron was in hear the girl let out a high pitched scream and then yell "NOT IN THE BUTT, SHERRON!"