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

Here is some of what I have been reading since April 6th:

• In social dealings, being older is being wiser
  "older people were more likely than younger or middle-aged ones to recognize that values differ, to acknowledge uncertainties, to accept that things change over time and to acknowledge others' points of view."
• A Theory of Google (That Makes Sense)
  Why launch so many unprofitable products? "Google doesn’t have to dominate any of these industries to be successful, provided that they dominate content monetization. They merely have to make these industries more competitive, lowering the barriers to consuming a lot of content online."
• What’s Worse: High Unemployment or Inflation?
  I've been wondering this myself lately. My current thinking is that if you factor in all the negative effects of high unemployment, it's worse.
• "Airline pilot" protocols in finance
  Using checklists to evaluate opportunities. Studies show it works for VCs & institutional investors.
• The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More Evidence
  "A 2000 paper surveyed 136 studies in which human judgment was compared to algorithmic prediction. Sixty-five of the studies found no real difference between the two, and 63 found that the equation performed significantly better than the person. Only eight of the studies found that people were significantly better predictors of the task at hand."

• Five Keys to Creating an Information Advantage
  "The reason that an information advantage is becoming more important in today's world is that information about your customers, your market and your suppliers is one of the few proprietary assets that are available to you."
• What You Don't Know About Making Decisions
  "Scholars now have considerable evidence showing that a small set of process traits is closely linked with superior outcomes. While they are no guarantee of success, their combined presence sharply improves the odds that you'll make a good decision."
• Poor governance on Moody's board?
  "Several former Moody's executives who made presentations to its board as the financial crisis emerged in 2006 and 2007 described the board members as incurious, saying they seemed to be there primarily to enjoy the perks and prestige of board membership."
• Unrealistic, dithering academics jeopardizing the futures of humanities students
  "As a profession, we are enrolling too many Ph.D. students, we have been doing so for decades, we spend far too long in guiding them to their degrees, and we then consign them to a dysfunctional job market."
• Barack Obama Is A Fox, Not a Hedgehog
  "foxes, in fact, have better political judgment than hedgehogs"

Here is some of what I have been reading since April 4th:

• Pimco's battling brains
  "leaving no stone unturned in the hunt for the best investments. Every investment decision and economic projection is second-guessed. Scuffed egos are a small price for results."
• Current rally has echoes of 1930 snapback
  "the current rebound in the economy is a statistical mirage orchestrated by record amounts of monetary and fiscal stimulus that are simply unsustainable"
• Bounded rationality and the credit crisis
  "Responses to the recession should not be based on unrealistic expectations of rational behaviour. We now know enough about real, flawed human psychology to be able to take some account of it in policy setting."
• HBS Working Knowledge
  A first look at faculty research – yes please
• The secret of leadership
  "Psychological research supports a related circular conclusion: the people we follow as leaders are the ones who decide they've got what it takes to lead."
• The difficulty of measuring leverage of banks
  "…for large complex financials, capital cannot be measured precisely enough to distinguish conservatively solvent from insolvent banks, and capital positions are always optimistically padded."
• The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky
  Clay Shirky does it again: "When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things…when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present…who get to say what happens in the future."
• Inflation: 'Financial Death by a Thousand Cuts'
  A good explanation of inflation, analysis of risk, and some good advice on how to hedge against it
• Signs of a Coming Crisis in the Municipal Market
  SEC Senior Policy Adviser Rick Bookstabber provides an interesting analysis of why cities are at risk of becoming the next financial crisis
• How Washington Abetted the Bank Job
  "Our bank regulators were not, as they would like us to believe, outside the disco, deaf and blind to the revelry going on within. They were bouncing to the same beat."

In 3 and a half minutes Kirk Citron, Editor of the Long News project, challenges us to view the deluge of news today through the lens of what will matter in 100 years.

Entrepreneurs and innovators looking for problems to solve should be following with great interest.