Category Archives: Real Estate

Funny jobs

Sunday, June 22, 2008

In the late 90’s a lot of banking clerks and bartenders with some brain quickly completed the Cobol courses to become programmers - new cool profession that already drained anyone with at least some computing experience into dot-com bubble and Y2k bubble. Then what one would call a “creative destruction” happened and a lot of […]

Also filed in Economics, Finance, Kondratieff wave | | Comments (11)

The Brown Swans

Thursday, June 5, 2008

The mounting losses from mortgage papers forced financial institutions to raise capital. While capital inflows seem to be healthy the dangerous trend is developing.
Every bank maintains certain leverage between its assets and capital; the typical leverage is probably in the 26-29:1 area (read more here). With mounting losses from the credit crunch the leverage is […]

Also filed in Economics, Finance, Investing | | Comments (6)

How to price ABX.HE credit default swaps

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

I was not writing about credit default swaps for half a year and I think it’s time to revisit the topic and remind you some basic stuff that I already forgot myself. The good source of CDS info is markit.com where the most popular indices are published. This probably represents the most crazy top of […]

Also filed in Economics, Finance | | Comments (7)

The seasonality of carrots

Thursday, May 15, 2008

In this post I want to focus on some different issues related to each other only by the fact that they depend on some temporary, non-recurring factors. This is an invitation for discussion and I will gladly accept additional contributions.1. Apparently presidential elections make it impossible for the Federal Reserve to make additional tweaks in the […]

Also filed in Commodities, Economics, Finance, Kondratieff wave, Oil & Gas, Politics | | Comments (25)