I have been on a short trip, and I bring back for you… July 26, 2010 at 8:09 pm
… the worst knock-knock joke ever.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Sutton.
Sutton Hoo?
Category / Fun
Quote of the day July 13, 2010 at 6:06 am
From Steve Randy Waldman at Interfluidity:
I feel about the financial sector the same way I would feel about my morphine dealer after looking down to find piranha feeding between my ribs.
That’s a little unfair, but you take his point. However much you might despise bankers (and I like a good few of them) you cannot but admit that right now, we need banks. More specifically, we need banks to provide credit or we are all what a professional economist would call ’screwed’.
Fancy a drink? March 4, 2010 at 5:37 am
From the Guardian’s live coverage of the England vs. Egypt match:
Two Oxford Dons are sitting in a bar…
“Would you decline a little tequila, Oswald?”
“Certainly Jeffrey. Tequila, tequila, tequilam, tequilae”
High culture and discarded toys: from Frankfurt to Clapham February 21, 2010 at 3:03 pm
One of the things I love about the LRB is how it goes from high to low so effortlessly. Here are two sections from adjacent paragraphs in the same article in the current issue. First, the Frankfurt school:
… here’s something about the whole economic system that is false, because what capitalism brings about is the idea that things can’t be understood just in terms of what they are in themselves, but in terms of what they can be exchanged with
Next, — well, — let’s see what disturbs the author’s reverie on Walter Benjamin:
… in front of me was not a sluggish condom but an altogether more rapacious looking tool: a ten-inch-long dildo.
That kind of thing never happens in the FT.
Quants, Lightbulbs and the Demise of the Financial System January 28, 2010 at 6:48 am
From Naked Capitalism reader Matthew G:
How many quants does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Using ten racks of co-located blade servers, one quant can detect a janitorial inefficiency, step in between janitor and light fixture, and screw in 49,500 bulbs in less than a millisecond, keeping five hundred lightbulbs of profit.
Two quants competing with each other can screw in 99,998 bulbs in a millisecond, with each quant retaining a profit of one lightbulb.
When ten quant firms try to screw in a light bulb, the bulb explodes, the light fixture gets ripped from the ceiling, the building falls down, the entire electrical grid of the city of Greenwich shuts down, innocent civilians all over the world have their retirement accounts electrocuted, and the Federal Reserve has to give the counterparties of each quant firm five hundred million light bulbs to maintain the stability of the system.
Update. FT alphaville saves me from having an entirely frivolous post by referrring to this article at Trader’s Magazine. They say:
Bryan Harkins, an executive with the Direct Edge ECN, noted the market is “saturated” with high-frequency shops. He doesn’t expect overall industry volume to increase substantially in the next few years.
Volume, in the past three years, has doubled due to a large extent to the activities of high-frequency traders. Average daily volume is about 10 billion shares today. That compares to 5 billion shares in early 2007.
“Someone leaves a high-frequency trading shop to start a new one,” Harkins said. “You do a meeting [with them] and they say ‘We’re going to do 100 million shares a day.’ You get all excited with the next big account and then six months later they’re struggling to stay in business.” About half of Direct Edge’s volume comes from high-frequency trading firms, Harkins said.
[NYSE Euronext's Paul] Adcock noted the changes in volume at NYSE Arca’s top five high-frequency accounts mirror those of the VIX “almost perfectly.” And because most high-frequency strategies are similar, he adds, only the “biggest and fastest will make those strategies work.”
(Emphasis mine.) The comments above refer to the good times, too. Imagine what would happen if one of those big guys liquidates, or if we have a very high volatility episode with extreme decorrelations, as might happen for instance if there is a sovereign crisis. It won’t be pretty but we cannot say that we have not been warned.
Weather advice January 10, 2010 at 10:35 am
Snow is so much easier to bear in places that are used to it. Unlike, um, London.
Dodd gets it December 5, 2009 at 8:31 am
in a sudden and uncharacteristic burst of courage, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd has proposed a federal subsidy for vampire hunting. “Nothing brings a community together like a vampire hunt,” commented Senator Dodd. “Moreover, a vampire hunt requires serious tools. You don’t want to break into that crypt with a cheap stake that might snap or a hammer with a fragile plastic handle. Before you go after that inhumanly powerful undead creature with glowing red eyes, you are going to head down to the Home Depot or your neighborhood hardware store and load up on heavy-duty, top-of-the-line equipment.”
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, though, has doubts about Dodd’s proposal. “One problem is that it can be difficult to determine which blood-sucking supernatural parasites are in fact vampires and which are duly authorized and well-regulated components of the financial system, such as investment banks.
A cheap shot perhaps but it made me laugh.
Airlines of last resort November 7, 2009 at 4:23 pm
I often enjoy the lists in Canadian literary magazine McSweeney’s. Here from Mike Richardson-Bryan is a fine example, Airlines of Last Resort. It may have been slightly modified in transcription…
- Icarus Air
- Obstructed Airways
- Air Maintenance-Is-Optional
- Vengeful God Airlines
- British Airways
They call them peepers October 17, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Leaf peepers that is. But you can see their point: Maine in the Fall is very pretty.
Out of town October 11, 2009 at 5:38 pm
I just wanted an excuse to post this picture really.
Everything is OK October 2, 2009 at 8:25 am
Some apposite comment from the Everything is OK guys. I think that they are here see also here..
Via Infectious Greed.
Bring a problem parties – speed therapy September 21, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Sometimes, when you are talking to someone, you come on an idea that makes so much sense you are surprised that it has not been thought of before. Often these ideas are not anyone’s in particular: they emerge somehow in the conversation. Bring a problem parties are an idea like that.
To begin with, three observations. First, a pint is about the right length to talk over many problems. A pint shared lasts half an hour. With a good interlocutor, there is not much that you can’t get some helpful insight on in half an hour. Second, independent advice on problems – be they emotional, practical or technical – is often useful. OK, I wouldn’t ask the check out person in my local supermarket for advice on solving a high dimensional PDE, but often a random stranger can be helpful. Third, speed dating proves that if an experience is potentially interesting and short enough that a bad encounter is soon forgotten, then (some) people will sign up.
So, bring a problem parties. A selection of people, each with a problem. They are randomly matched into pairs, with one person selected as the solver, the other as the questioner. The questioner buys the drinks and presents his or her problem. The solver tries to help. After half an hour, a bell rings, and another round begins, with solvers as questioners and vice versa. Four rounds would be two hours, and you would be guaranteed two perspectives on your problem. It would also make for a more interesting evening than most. If you franchise it, cut me in please.
Inefficient Units of Currency August 7, 2009 at 6:41 am
By Joseph Streckert, from the Canadian literary magazine McSweeney’s:
- Children
- Millstones
- Imaginary euros*
- Copies of Now That’s What I Call Music! Vol. 7**
- Pieces of long-grain rice that are not actually very long
- Unicorn heads
- Canadian dollars
*Arguably, the ECU (which worked perfectly well as a currency) was imaginary.
**Vol. 7 is I suspect now a collector’s item. The current volume is 73.
Creativity August 5, 2009 at 6:42 am
A lovely rant from Jenny Diski on the LRB blog:
… I’m left wondering what the word ‘creative’ means to people who can overcome difficulty by just being creative. It seems to be like an ingredient that’s available down the shops. If it’s necessary, you’ll get some and use it. Need to produce something? ‘Oh, just think creatively.’ I want to say, how do you think creatively? What is thinking creatively? But I don’t want to let on that I’m ignorant of a process everyone else seems to understand perfectly.It’s a word I’ve never been able to use because I don’t know what it means really. Creative writing? As opposed to? Does it mean imaginative? OK, now imagination is called for. Right, there you go. How confident everyone seems to be about having the ability to be creative, and knowing what to do with it, and how very little effect it seems to have on the vast majority of products it is sprinkled on.
I especially like `Creative writing? As opposed to?’
Titled Coffee July 6, 2009 at 10:36 am
This blog was named partly in honour of a system that does actually work well, coffee in Italy. It’s good, it’s cheap, it enhances many people’s lives, and there is a modest living to be made in it. Given my proclivities, I should probably have used Deus ex presso instead, but I liked the partial homophony of macchiato better. Anyway, here’s your link of the morning — high does of coffee have some preventative effect against Alzheimer’s. Apparently. Of course like most people I prefer to pay attention to those articles which laud the benefits of things I like (red wine, coffee, …) and ignore those that mention how harmful they are.
Entrepreneurship June 4, 2009 at 5:04 am
From Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, via the LRB blog.
These individuals were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review by some bright young person from the London Review of Books but by a lack of custom and a prompt foreclosure.
I have no comment, really, I just like his turn of phrase.
Goat backed securities May 20, 2009 at 5:07 am
And other goat derivatives. I’m not joking. The BBC is, though. (This link may not work if you are outside the UK – I’m not entirely sure, but my apologies if it doesn’t.)
Homonym corner May 19, 2009 at 7:49 am
Many years ago, my research work was in concurrency theory. Therefore it was a bit of a surprise to find the Guardian asking Is concurrency to blame for spread of HIV in Africa? Fortunately it turns out to be a different sort of concurrency. It was a nasty moment, though. Any donations of strong spirits will be gratefully received. Well, apart from the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
Being Boring April 13, 2009 at 5:30 pm
I saw the Severn Bore over the Bank Holiday. It wasn’t a particularly big bore, as these things go, but it was still impressive. The oddest thing of all, though, was that the cows in the field we were in all lined up to look at it.
Strained, but not entirely silly banking system metaphor no. 151 April 7, 2009 at 8:31 am
Merkel, Sarkozy join protesters April 1, 2009 at 9:17 am
In a sensational development, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have stormed out of the G20 summit meeting and joined protesters demonstrating in front of the Bank of England. Coverage from the Guardian’s new Twitter service is here, and further background is here. This follows earlier threats by Sarkozy that he would leave the summit if he doesn’t feel members are seriously addressing business regulation, and Merkel’s NYT interview on Monday in which she stressed her opposition to the American stimulus package. Rumours that statues of Merkel and Sarkozy surrounded by demonstrators will feature in the planned Economist theme park are currently unconfirmed.
Gearing up for trouble March 29, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Even by the intolerably low standards of this blog, this one is going to be obscure…
I want to talk about gears. Bicycle gears. For ordinary people, rather than, say, drug crazed Americans who have recently broken their collar bones. So, what does a reasonable rider want from his or her gears?
- A bottom gear that is low enough to get up most hills. In practice unless you are really fit that means a gear of 42* or lower.
- A top gear that is high enough that you can pedal going down moderate hills. 100 is plenty.
- A fine spacing of gears in between.
- And in particular a relatively gentle change from the little to the big ring at the front.
It doesn’t sound like much, does it? Yet pretty much all standard gear set-ups from the large manufacturers fail on one or more of these criteria. 39/53 or 39/52 at the front gives far too big a change. You want at most a difference of ten cogs, I would suggest, or the change up is too jarring.
To get a bottom gear of 40 with a front ring of 42, you need a big cog on the back of more than 27. You can’t buy one. So that means that 42/52 at the front doesn’t work either.
By this point we have eliminated all of the standard front gears available. What does work is 38/48 on the front, and 13/25 or 13/27 at the back. This gives a top gear of a shade under 100, a bottom gear around 40, and a relatively gentle change between rings. But that requires custom front rings. Why does it have to be so hard?
* The gear in inches is given by dividing the number of teeth at the front by the number at the back and multiplying by the wheel size (usually 27) in inches. The biggest gear is therefore the largest ring at the front through the smallest at the back: the lowest is the small ring at the front through the big ring at the back.
Strained, but not entirely silly banking system metaphor no. 150 March 28, 2009 at 9:10 am
Two things which seem to go together at the moment March 14, 2009 at 11:53 am
Strained, but not entirely silly banking system metaphor no. 148 March 7, 2009 at 7:10 am
I will stop doing this soon I promise. But this is too good to resist.
Strained, but not entirely silly banking system metaphor no. 147 March 5, 2009 at 8:48 am
A little light relief February 18, 2009 at 7:28 am
“Knock knock”
“Who’s there?”
“Maybe it’s a big horse*.”
“Maybe it’s a big horse who?”
“Maybe it’s a big horse I’m a Londoner that I love London town**.”
[Hat tip the Guardian Diary.]
* Gratuitous Mark Wallinger reference.
** Classic footage here.
A warning from Bishopsgate January 23, 2009 at 8:06 am
More solid, responsible journalism from the Daily Mash:
The Royal Bank of Scotland is just days away from imploding like that house in Poltergeist, it was claimed said last night.As the bank’s share price plummeted, experts said it was now time to bring in a scary-voiced midget to expel the remaining demons before the entire structure is then devoured by a tiny black hole.
Economist Tom Logan said: “In Poltergeist terms, the chairs have been stacked, the little girl has been sucked into the TV and the Beast has been exorcised without his annual bonus.”
He added: “This once again demonstrates the folly of building a major financial institution on top of an old Indian burial ground.”
Quite right too: I just wish Robert Peston could be this sensible. Now if only we can get extensive exorcism into the FED’s armoury of facilities, perhaps we can beat this thing. All together now: Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus decoctor, …
Update. While we are talking about RBS, I must mention Simon Hattenstone’s wonderful and entirely appropriate attempts to get Fred the Red to say sorry, detailed in the Guardian. It harms all of us in finance that `managers’ like Goodwin (I use the term broadly) are not willing to admit their mistakes and say a simple `I’m sorry’. It’s not just that he screwed up. It’s that he screwed up so royally that it is detracting from the public opinion of my business. And that annoys me.
Three jokes and a purchase January 3, 2009 at 6:45 am
My three favourites from an extensive list at the National Post:
“Get my broker, Miss Jones.”
“Yes sir. Stock, or Pawn?”The problem with investment bank balance sheets is that on the left side nothing is right and on the right side nothing is left.
There’s a surgeon, an architect and an economist. The surgeon said, ‘Look, we’re the most important. God’s a surgeon because the very first thing God did was to extract Eve from Adam’s rib.’ The architect said, ‘No, wait a minute, God is an architect. God made the world in seven days out of chaos.’ The economist smiled, ‘And who made the chaos?’
Normal levels of seriousness will be restored shortly. But in the meantime did I hear correctly that the Munchkins have bought Indymac? Perhaps that is the true route to financial stability: only short blue people who are entirely fictional should be allowed to own banks.
New Year Resolutions January 1, 2009 at 10:42 am
Marina Hyde has a nice column in the Guardian today about new year resolutions. First she makes a good point:
The crucial thing is not to set goals too high. Resolutions should always be incredibly realistic and achievable, so you can despise yourself even more when you fail to live up to them. By way of an example, a friend tells me he “might try and eat slightly healthier snacks when watching sport”. See? There is simply no point kidding yourself about thrice-weekly gym visits, but piously denying yourself the fourth tube of Pringles before half-time is a possibility.
She then makes some resolutions for other people:
The rampaging armies of middle-class thrift bores currently laying waste to features sections should resolve to expand their ingenious brainwaves into the sports pages. We’ve already had our Christmases revolutionised by their suggestions for making our own presents (”Why not melt down 250g of really good quality white chocolate and stir in some nuts and rose petals?” Because it still costs a tenner, you tedious creature.) Now let’s see them work their alchemy in the transfer window, starting with solving Arsène Wenger’s midfield problems using only a ball of yarn and some really good quality white chocolate.
Hmmm, Frank Lampard in white chocolate? I see him more as a cheaply flavoured soft centre myself, but that could just be me…
Anyway, here are a few more for finance.
- Bankers should resolve to accept that the world has changed now that many banks have significant state ownership. A little humility – just a touch – might be in order.
- Ditto hedgies after Made-off. The regulators are coming: you know it, I know it, and the whole process will be a little less tedious if you could avoid foolish rants about the constraint of free enterprise while it is happening.
- Chicago school economists. The game is up. Please retire somewhere far away and never darken our media again.
- Finance ministers. Just once, for a change, why not actually spend some money on something the country needs. You know, like infrastructure. You might be able to build a credible midfielder from white chocolate, but it works less well for railways.
Holidays in Financial Capitals December 28, 2008 at 8:59 pm
With apologies to the Dead Kennedys:
So you been at the bank
For a year or two
And you know you’ve seen it all
In a company car
Thinkin’ you’ll go far
Back east your type don’t crawl
Play ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin’ that you know
How the niggers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul
It’s time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear:
It’s crunch time in London
It’s tough, kid, but it’s life
It’s crunch time in London
Don’t forget crime is rife
You’re a star-belly sneech
You suck like a leach
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you
Well you’ll work harder
When your group is downsized
For a hundred a day
Slave for bankers
Till you go mad
Then your head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son:
It’s crunch time in London
Money the banks do lack
It’s crunch time in London
Where you’ll kiss ass or crack
Gor-don Gor-don Gor-don
And it’s crunch time in London
Where you’ll do what you’re told
It’s crunch time in London
Where the dole’s got so much soul
Warning signs December 22, 2008 at 6:43 am
From Long or Short Capital, apropos Madoff:
If your investment manager is not charging fees, and is “making it up on volume” (more or less), step back and think about that for a second. If you were in Brazil and a whore said she wanted to give you a free sex because she was making it up on volume, what she really means is that you will wake up down a kidney or two. No different with an investment manager.
Private banker December 21, 2008 at 9:39 am
With apologies to Tina Turner and Mark Knopfler…
All the men come in these places
And the men are all the same
You don’t look at their faces
And you don’t ask their names
You don’t think of them as human
You don’t think of them at all
You keep your mind on the money
Keeping your eyes on the hall
I’m your private banker, a banker for money
I’ll do what you want me to do
I’m your private banker, a banker for money
And any old assets will do
I want to make a billion dollars
I wanna live out by the sea
Have a Porsche and some paintings
Yeah, I guess I want a mansion
All the men come in these places
And the men are all the same
You don’t look at their faces
And you don’t ask their names
I’m your private banker, a banker for money
I’ll do what you want me to do
I’m your private banker, a banker for money
And any old assets will do
Euros, yen or dollars
American Express will do nicely, thank you
Let me loosen up your regulations
Tell me, do you wanna see me do the tax arb again?
Hug rationing December 18, 2008 at 5:54 am
FT alphaville suggests hugging a hedgie. I beg to disagree with most of their reasons. Let’s go one by one.
1) They provide liquidity. More liquidity equals less market volatility.
Nope. The hedgies are often close to one way. They provide liquidity when we don’t need it, as bubbles inflate, but they all rush for the exit when the bubble bursts, making the fall worse and exascerbating downside illiquidity.
2) They help burst bubbles. Short selling is as popular as a cold sore under the mistletoe. But who can now say the shorts were wrong about the banks?
Case unproven. Some funds were short; others were long. Shorting is a good thing, but the hedgies are not necessary for it to persist as a mechanism for enhancing market discipline.
3) They help restore confidence. It’s hard to invest when credit is in short supply, but hedge funds naturally play host to the kind of inspired risk-takers who will spot likely gems in the rubble and pull them – and us – out of the downturn.
Possibly true, but their business model relies on leverage, and that is in short supply. There is no reason non hedgie investors cannot play the same role.
4) They innovate. Innovation is a dirty word. Combined with excessive leverage, it has proved a dangerous concept, but properly applied, it will provide creative fuel for recovery.
Nonsense. Most product development is done in banks. Hedge funds are typically too small and too profit focussed to innovate. I can’t think of a single product they invented rather than simply bought.
5) The survivors will be better people.
So clearly nonsense I won’t dignify it with any further comment.
6) The survivors will cost less to employ. The industry’s mid-2007 fee structure looks as outdated as a 1929-vintage stock ticker machine.
That’s like saying a Bentley at £200K is a bargain because it used to be 300. It’s still a very expensive way of getting about, and damaging to the environment to boot. Talking of boots, how about kicking hedgies? It could be more fun than hugging them.
7) They help prop up the economy. Do you really want to witch-hunt all that wealth out of Mayfair?
Err, do I have to answer that? But the concept of stalking Mayfair with a matched pair of Purdey’s taking out Porsche drivers is quite attractive for, say, a video game…
Seriously, though, I’m not anti-hedgie. But I do think that their leverage is dangerous and that the one way nature of their liquidity provision is not helpful to financial stability.
Best explanation for an unusual name December 14, 2008 at 3:07 pm
BBC Radio 4’s Milton Jones maintains that famous chef Heston Blumenthal is actually one of a band of brothers, all chefs, and all named after motorway service stations. If you like Heston’s smoked bacon-and-egg ice cream, you should try South Mimms’ kedgeree sorbet. The most talented brother is in fact Burton-in-Kendal Blumenthal, but little has been heard of him recently. Thus far rumours that Ferran Adrià is simply an alias for Ferrybridge Blumenthal have not been verified.
The dangers of code December 7, 2008 at 4:50 pm
A moment searching reveals numerous companies who will help you with a persistent technology problem – accessing data written using technology that is now out-of-date or hard to find. A great example of this was the BBC Doomsday project – unlike the paper (well, vellum) based original, this was difficult to read a mere 19 years later as it was based on the by-the-outdated BBC micro. See here for more details.
The LRB has an unusual example of this phenomenon this week – shorthand. You see, there isn’t a single shorthand. Most people these days learn Pitman, but the modern version of this is a simplification of the Victorian original. And then there are the now-dying if not dead historical systems due to Gurney, Tailor, Byrom and so on. (The picture is from an article in Wikibooks – it shows the Lord’s prayer in some common shorthand systems.)
Different systems are often mutually incomprehensible: an expert in one cannot read any of the others, especially if the writer is an advanced shorthandist. There is also the issue that many of these systems evolved significantly over time, so an expert in modern Pitman can’t even necessarily read something from a hundred years ago. Thus a diary, say, written in 1895 Universal Stenography is about as difficult to decode as a message in 512 byte RSA. Both are breakable (even without any hardware, user, trust model or failure recovery based attacks), but both require quite a bit of effort. Perhaps the military should take up obscure shorthand systems before quantum computing blows RSA completely out of the water?
More to the point, never underestimate the difficult of decoding a lot of stuff. The problem isn’t the decoding: it is reading the decrypt and figuring out what is valuable. That’s why those Victorian diaries are still lying around unread: the combination of a really small signal to noise ratio and moderately difficult cryptanalysis is a killer.
Prediction of the week December 2, 2008 at 10:03 pm
From Long or Short Capital:
We are at, or past, Peak Roubini
Go and read the whole post: it’s funny.
That embarrassing conversation November 23, 2008 at 10:47 pm
It’s the conversation every parent dreads. “Mom, dad, you know how I’ve always been a little different from the other kids? Well, I think it’s time you knew the truth. I think I’m, um, an investment banker!”
Blood and guts on Wall Street October 29, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I don’t usually post video links, but as it is Halloween and many market participants are white as Zombies…
Today’s Favourite Blog October 9, 2008 at 7:58 am
FT alphaville is consistently good value, as is The Big Picture. I like Alea and frequently value the insights of IBEX salad and The London Banker. Calculated Risk is OK on real estate (if sometimes misguided away from it) and Paul Krugman is the man in many regards. Long and Short Capital is amusing, and Dealbreaker is good for gossip. But despite all this linky goodness, the site of the day has to be Sad Guys on Trading Floors.
One more alarmist, not strictly relevant but funny quote October 6, 2008 at 2:12 pm
In order to save the banking system it was necessary to destroy it.
The Reason Program at 10:00 am
In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (currently being repeated on Radio 4), Reason is an artificial intelligence program:
“Reason constructs plausible steps to connect any set of unlikely premises to justify any decision.”“What would you use it for?”
“Anything that would otherwise look like a botched mess of lousy planning by the criminally stupid.”
“Like the current government attempts to bail out the banking system?”
“If you know what to look for, the pattern of the algorithms is unmistakeable.”
(OK, OK, I have made one minor change to the script, but I think Douglas Adams would have approved.)
My favourite of the nicknames for Ms. Palin October 4, 2008 at 9:48 am
Bible Spice
A New Approach To Bank Supervision September 11, 2008 at 7:55 am
The Tour de Crash March 3, 2008 at 3:23 pm
As any cycling fan knows, riding in the Peloton is dangerous: it is hard to avoid crashes. And so it proved. The broom wagon is gathering up the effected parties.
Happy Christmas December 25, 2007 at 11:41 am
I hope yours wasn’t quite as tacky as these deliciously awful figures.
Thank you, Dealbreaker.com, for the following moral failing on my part… November 30, 2007 at 8:49 pm
There is no excuse for the following link. None. I feel guilty even having read this article, let alone laughed at it. But to heck with it, I’m on holiday for a week
Meanwhile 
Enjoy, and there will be more when I get back.
Our one is better than your one September 20, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Melvyn might not have convinced everyone in his testimony today, but at least people aren’t publishing stuff like this about him.
Funny, though, no? (From Long or short capital.)
A letter you might not want to get… September 2, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Or perhaps you might. It is funny.
Godot waits for the close. August 19, 2007 at 10:13 am
Vladimir: Subprime?
Estragon: Subprime.
Vladimir: Slime.
Estragon: Triple A.
Vladimir: Exposure?
Estragon: Exposed.
Vladimir: Leveraged.
Estragon: Leveraged and Funded.
Vladimir: Funded?
Estragon: Roll coming up.
Vladimir: Roll that CP.
Estragon: CP?
Vladimir: ABCP.
Estragon: The End.
(Inspired by Long or Short Capital.)
