Crime and Illegal Aliens

Reason #1 You Don't Mess With 'Murica

Here.

Top 10 Movies This Summer

Here.

Zappos

Zappos has created a real time map showing what shoe is being bought and where.

Last 6 Books

1. Catcher in the Rye
2. Great Gatsby
3. House of Cards
4. American Psycho
5. The Great Contraction, 1929-1933: Chapter Seven of Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960
6. The Brothers Karamazov
   

A Perishable History

Last week’s post talked about early-20th-century “egg gamblers” who bought eggs cheap in spring in order to sell dear in winter. Their kind of speculation proved not just controversial but also pretty risky, and ultimately doomed. Why?

Egg gamblers won only if they sold off their cold-storage stocks before fresh ones arrived in spring. They faced two major unknowns: housewives who sometimes protested egg “hoarding” with organized boycotts, and hens who might start laying earlier than expected. Because hens are acutely sensitive to shifts in daylight and temperature, all it took was a February thaw to set them off, sending egg prices plummeting.

Poultry farmers, meanwhile, just wanted to know how to get their own flocks to lay more eggs when fresh ones were scarcest and priciest. They knew that some chicken breeds laid a few more winter eggs than others, and that warm housing and a rich diet generally helped. But the most dramatic results came with the flick of a switch — literally. Read more…

The accompanying book.

Oh Those Rapscallions

U Penn, really?

Troubles for the Class of '09

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Where the Buck Stops

The Most Neurotic States

There is much more here on the geographic distribution of other major personality traits. The high conscientious people seem to cluster in the Plains. Openness is strong in the Pacific West, New England, Texas, and Florida. The upper Midwest dominates for extroversion.

Random Links

1. New Yorkers are drinking and urinating in public more...
2. Highest Paid Executives
   

Could Be the Best Board Game Ever

Read more here.

What North Korea Really Looks Like

Two Austrians recently entered the country by train, through a border crossing that has been closed to tourists since 1994, and took these pictures.

Really France?

Almost half of French people believe it is acceptable for workers facing layoffs to lock up their bosses, according to an opinion poll published on Tuesday.

Internet Perusing

That’s according to new research out of the University of Melbourne, which found that Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) improves productivity by giving internet-centric workers a chance to refocus their minds between tasks. The increase is startling; workers who spend as much as 20 percent of their office time leisure browsing actually get more work done than workers who don’t.

Prehistoric Debate

Notice the Arrow, bottom right.

1 Trillion Dollars

Read more here.

Sham Pow

Vince Shlomi was arrested in Miami Beach last month after cops say he allegedly hired a hooker, whom he took back to his hotel. According to the arrest affidavit, obtained by The Smoking Gun, Shlomi began kissing the hooker when she allegedly "bit his tongue and would not let go."

Read more here.

Jay Leno

According to the government, GM's Rick Wagoner was forced to resign because of poor performance. That’s embarrassing. You run an organization that loses billions of dollars and then get fired by a guy who heads up an organization that loses trillions of dollars.

US Auto Manufacturers

Liberals and Taxes

Liberals do not consider cheating on taxes to be as morally problematic as conservatives do. This presents an obvious moral quandry [sic] of its own, as, putatively less surprisingly, liberals are more likely than conservatives are to favor greater amounts of taxation and wealth redistribution.

Complete analysis here.

Game Theory in Geithner's Plan

Let's say that I am a bank ("financial institution") with $100 billion in "toxic assets". I have them on my balance sheet at 80 cents on the dollar. The market has them marked at 30 cents. We do not know what the held-to-maturity performance will be, since that requires knowing the future, although for the moment let's assume that they are cash-flowing at the present time.

What I (the bank) do know, however, is that if I sell them at 30 cents I take a monstrous loss - perhaps enough to force me under Tier Capital limits and thus render me subject to an FDIC enforcement action. I therefore will not sell for 30 cents so long as I have any belief whatsoever that the cash flow - or any government subsidy - will exceed that value.

If I, as a "financial institution" can participate as a bidder in these auctions I can foist off my loss onto the taxpayer. Here is how I can rig the game so as to avoid an otherwise-inevitable loss:

• I become a "bidder" and "bid" on my own assets at 75 cents.
• I am providing 5 or 10% of the money. The rest is covered by Treasury, The Fed and the FDIC via guaranteed bond issuance.
• The loan, ex my contribution, is non-recourse. That is, I can lose 5 or 10% of the total portfolio purchased, but nothing more.

Now the "assets" (a passel of CDOs?) turn out to be worthless. I lose 5% of $75 billion, or $3.75 billion that I put up, plus the other nickel on the original mark, but that's all.

The taxpayer gets hosed for the remaining $71.25 billion dollars.

This can and will be done if the "sellers" of these assets are allowed to bid either directly or indirectly as it provides a means for banks to intentionally dump bad assets at a certain loss that is much smaller than their expected realized loss over time, shifting the rest of the loss to the taxpayer.

This program has the potential to shift literally $500 billion or more in losses onto the taxpayer, not through the operation of "bad luck" but rather through what amounts to a bid rigging operation.

Do Men and Women Read Books Differently?

One study says the answer is yes.

A study of reading habits showed almost half of women are 'page turners' who finish a book soon after starting it compared to only 26 per cent of men.

The survey 2,000 adults also found those who take a long time to read books and only managed one or two a year were twice as likely to be male than female.

Men are also more likely to have shelves full of books that have never been opened.

The only similarities between the sexes came among those who have two books on the bedside table at once and who start one book on the middle of reading another, switching easily. Twelve per cent of women were in this category – exactly the same number as men.

How Walkable is Your Address

The White House is 99.
Former Pres. Bush's ranch is a 0.

Find out here.