Will Pate's Blog - Peek into a mind of boundless curiosity

Readings

Published on 09/04/10
by willpate

Here is some of what I have been reading since April 8th:

  • A Math Primer on Sovereign Debt
    "How can a country support debt of more than 100 percent of its gross domestic product for many years and then suddenly start descending toward insolvency?"
  • Meet the Credit Score Perfectionists
    I wish I had gotten serious about my credit score earlier in life
  • What Would Really End “Too Big To Fail”?
    "Making our largest banks smaller is not sufficient to ensure financial stability…there are many other complementary measures that make sense – including higher capital requirements, more transparency for derivatives, and generally more effective regulation."
  • An Iranian Secret Agent's Message to America
    "Study the clerics, the leadership behavior for the previous decades, they’ve taken the world hostage many times over, and they have won. Now just imagine that they have a nuclear bomb."
  • NYT identifies words that readers find look up most often
    Neat
  • Big Banks Masking Risk Levels
    "Major banks have masked their risk levels in the past five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt just before reporting it to the public, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."
  • The humble hound leader
    Sounds familiar: "spends a lot of time on metacognition – thinking about her thinking – and then building external scaffolding devices to compensate for her weaknesses."
  • Outsourced Paper Grading Comes to College
    The lesson for faculty and students alike: take advantage of the global brain
  • 7 Reasons Things are Not as They Appear in the Financial Markets
    Consumer spending is thanks to drop in already low savings rate, home prices may be a statistical mirage, consumer confidence index is still low, supply management index rose mostly because of inventory, stock buybacks driven by desire to avoid dilution through expiring options, government being relied on too much, payroll reports are inconsistent
  • Complexity one of the key reasons Wall St became so dangerous
    "And so as it got more complicated, it got harder and harder for normal people to understand it, and easier and easier for smart people to persuade dumb people to do things they shouldn’t do, and easier and easier for smart traders to disguise what they were doing from their bosses because it’s so complicated."
  • A Lesson in a Technology Investing Thought Processes
    "To make money in technology you need to do two things. Firstly you need to change the world (which First Solar clearly did) and secondly you need to keep the competition out. Alas very few businesses manage the second trick."
  • Incentivizing Investment in Startups to Drive Job Creation
    "From 1980-2005 firms less than five years old accounted for all net job growth in the United States." So our firm recommends "incent investment in new companies by High Net Worth (HNW) individuals: implement zero capital gains tax rate for 100% of capital gains resulting from a startup investments over the next 5 years. This would provide an irresistible lure to get HNW investors back into the startup game"
  • Regulating financial swaps
    Chairman of the SEC proposes clear lines of regulation, more transparency, maximize the use of clearinghouses and exchanges
  • The search for big political ideas
    Some interesting suggestions for the next 10 – 20 years: preventive medicine, cognitive & biological enhancement, AI, rationality, robotics, clean energy, patent reform, smarter regulation, geo-engineering, etc
  • The end of the Liberal empire?
    Coyne shows the way forward as "The party of democratic reform. How we nominate candidates, how we choose leaders, how we elect members, how Parliament functions – there’s clearly lots of work to do here."
  • Under the Hood of Toyota's Recall
    Caused by a "tremendous expansion of complexity" and their overconfidence in managing growing complexity. This issue is popping up all over lately.
  • IDEO's Tim Brown on Using Design to Change Behavior
    A few tips on nudging people into new behaviors

That's it. What Next?

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