Showing posts with label North Korea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Korea. Show all posts

Friday, April 20, 2018

19/4/18: Geopolitical Risk: Who Cares?..


Geo-political risks, geo-shmalitical risks... who cares... not the markets...


None of the geopolitical risks registered on S&P 500 companies reporting radar according to Factset in 1Q 2018 https://insight.factset.com/more-than-half-of-sp-500-companies-citing-positive-impact-from-fx-on-q1-earnings-calls.  This is not very surprising as majority of earnings for 1Q accumulated before any spikes in these, and as "Tariffs" category probably absorbed the 'China' effect. Notably, however, earnings were impacted adversely by trade conflict and cyber risks (total of 3/25 companies impacted).

Saturday, November 18, 2017

18/11/17: North Korean Uncertainty and Market Impacts


S&P new post about the risks poised by North Korea is a neat summary of key actions and players involved (see the full note: https://marketintelligence.spglobal.com/blog/global-credit-risk-spikes-as-key-apac-countries-respond-to-the-north-korean-threat).

And it is very interesting to those of us, who study the links between geopolitical risks and financial markets.

Two pieces of evidence are presented in the S&P note worth pondering: first, the rising frequency of the North Korea threat signals:


The above shows that starting with 2016, acceleration in the North Korea threat signals has been posing a departure from the previous trend. Structurally, this suggests that we are entering a new regime in terms of potential market spillovers from North Korean risks to global financial markets.

Next, some evidence on changes in specific shares valuations timed close to the North Korean threat signals:

The evidence above suggests that, in line with our research findings in other instances, the uncertainty about North Korean threat evolution is feeding into the valuations of defence stocks. And that this effect is still ambiguous. Which is in line with our findings on the links between actual conflicts and defence stocks valuations revealed in my paper with Mulhair, Andrew, "Performance Analysis of U.S. Defense Stocks in Relation to Federal Budgets and Military Conflicts in the Post-Cold War Era" (April 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2975368. Furthermore, the nature of North Korean policy-induced uncertainty is consistent with our findings relating to terrorism spillovers to financial markets as revealed in my paper with Corbet, Shaen and Meegan, Andrew, "Long-Term Stock Market Volatility and the Influence of Terrorist Attacks in Europe" (August 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3033951. Note, the latter paper is now forthcoming in the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance.

While explicit testing of spillovers from North Korean uncertainty to global financial markets is yet to be firmly established in empirical literature, it is worth noting that the indirect evidence (based on data similar to S&P blog post) suggests that North Korean threat is likely to have a significant VUCA-consistent effect on the markets.

Friday, June 14, 2013

14/6/2013: Weekend reading links: Part 1


Weekend reading links as usual, and as in previous week - in two posts.

Let's start with some fun. After a week of reading economics on this blog, why not leaf through 12 "random and obscure laws" that still exist. I know the USofA is a liberty paradise but… allegedly, not in Maine and not when it comes to Christmas lights and wreaths… or in Wisconsin as it goes for margarine...
http://likes.com/facts/totally-random-and-obsucre-laws-that-actually-exist?pid=95328&utm_source=mylikes&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=ml&utm_term=25124720


My favourite visualisation of Big Data this time around comes from North Korea



And do check out the rest of the fab pics here…
http://likes.com/facts/wtf-north-korea?v=eyJjbGlja19pZCI6IDExMTkzMDIyNzksICJwb3N0X2lkIjogMjUxMjQ3MjB9

Note: on a serious side, I do find the above pic almost artistic - in the same vein as Andreas Gursky's real art: http://artblart.com/tag/andreas-gursky-tokyo-stock-exchange/


which (the above) also came from DRNK… and his very famous
http://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/gursky-99cent.jpg
My students from UCD courses in Masters in Management programme would remember the linked image.


From the sublime above to the atrocious below: The Kitsch of Ashgabat http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/06/the-city-of-white-marble-ashgabat-turkmenistan/100528/
My favourite is

The bizarre, tortured, almost shredded geometry of the totalitarian PhysEd comes to memory. No, the true derangement of the tyrant is measured not so much by thousands starved or banished or destroyed, but by grandiose waste of beauty, the more forced, the more permanent, the better. It is hard to explain, but violence to intrinsically beautiful is more characteristic of the delusion than violence to human. perhaps because nature usually poses no political threat, thus defacing nature is purely violent without any purpose.

Perhaps this would do for a better explanation: by Joseph Brodsky
 

Space is memory. The above photo records the former to sustain the latter.


A more modern - almost real-time - Duchampianization in Cyprus:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/10/us-cyprus-toilets-idUSBRE9590IA20130610
and it's inspiration:
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573
I could have chosen to term this Duchampianism - and almost did - except some attribute Duchamp's inspiration to a positive value - the ready made reproduction of the curvature similar to Constantin Brancusi's marbles, which obviously would not have been an appropriate allegory for Nicosia's installation. So perhaps we have amore ad hoc ready made analogy in two pieces, hence, Duchampianization term.


Take this quote for a teaser: "Most people have no clue that quantum computing exists. Even fewer know how it works. But once you understand it, and its vast processing power, you'll understand that this new Digital Age we're living in has barely scratched the surface of the computer potential."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-quantum-computing-2013-6#ixzz2WE8s9ZjW
You will want to read more... I know - I did. And here's the source: http://dwave.wordpress.com/ Just awesome!


Two sets of links on time:

The first one is of two watches - the diametrically opposing works of art:
2013 - Vianney Halter

http://basel.watchprosite.com/show-forumpost/fi-636/pi-5864183/ti-862138/
But do watch the video - a fascinating story, also told in the article linked below:

http://live.wsj.com/video/the-most-important-watch-of-2013/62A235B4-BF3A-4BA0-B500-21048E3B3C30.html?mod=WSJ_article_outbrain&obref=obnetwork#!62A235B4-BF3A-4BA0-B500-21048E3B3C30
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324063304578523182943531780.html


And Ukraine's brilliant entry to Basel 2013:
http://basel.watchprosite.com/page-slide.new/ti-867538/pi-5909858/msid-26618318/fi-/nalbumforum.all_bLoB_s-/
and more pics:
http://basel.watchprosite.com/?show=photo&fi=636&imgid=3355653&msid=26618318&ti=867538&pi=5909858


But time (we are on dimensions theme here - following the note about space) is also linked to memory:
And thus - to round up the first post of weekend reading links: of space and time... together:


Friday, June 7, 2013

7/6/2013: Weekend Reading Links Part 1



The weekly links page for weekend reading materials is now becoming a regular feature of this blog. Why? Because in my daily life I am privileged to come across a number of fascinating things - science and arts related - and these are simply worth sharing. Also because art and science are more important in value to humanity than economics (the bit of economics that is beyond science-art overlap, or, as I call it, applied economics). And finally, because it is often fun to tease out bits of my own thinking on the matters of art (and less so on the matters of science).

So here's this week's list in no particular order.


Since my days at IBM I came to appreciate the complex nature of data visualisation. Prior to my days at IBM I came to appreciate the value of visualisation in shaping our understanding of the world when information about the world is transmitted to us by means of data. Now, here's an article that added to my understanding of visualisation as a tool for shaping the long-term future of the world: http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/07/sparkon-releases-future-visualization-engine-to-help-kids-choose-a-career/ . Why is it important to me? Ok:

  1. It contains direct links to human capital (sorry, err… I know, no economics)
  2. If visualisation is about narrating the world, making it more comprehensible, then visualisation is also capable of altering the world around us by altering our understanding of it. That is second-order loop of causality: world causes data, which causes (via visualisation) our understanding which in turn causes us to interact with the world and thus cause data… If we take the visualisation as a tool for directly shaping human choice of careers, fields of study, inquiry etc, then the visualisation over time becomes the first order shaper of the world, right? Scary… You bet:
  3. The entire idea of shaping (via any specifically designated tool) one's future, as in "Let’s say your strongest “career personality type” is artistic follows by enterprising, you are extroverted, and you are passionate about art and video games. Sparkon suggests a range of jobs that bring all these together, like video game designer or art director, and suggests majors and skill sets that are useful for these areas. The engine then suggests specific videos, like “careers in the video game industry,” computer programming, or graphic design. There are also more general videos about college and SAT preparation, communication and leadership etc… Students can create a Netflix-style queue with recommended videos, and parents can also get involved by monitoring their kids’ progress to see what they are exploring." Missing something? Oh, yes, Sparkon won't really suggest you become an artist, cause you know… "there's no money in that". Now, imagine the world where humans are discouraged from making any errors by constantly being steered / selected into a stream of activities and information determined by a machine?.. Here comes Sparkon generation of drones?


Next, back to Venice Biennale:
"When I got out I felt I had escaped from the suffocating embrace of a revenant worthy of De Chirico. But this remake is perfectly in tune with the market of today now that the fairs have given up on the fuchsia and chrome-yellows of Murakami and Koons and have taken to showing off the pauperish neutrals of the Seventies. It is a much more radical product than the efforts of the young neo-conceptualists, but highly fashionable at a time when collecting is wearing the hair-shirt of the most hypocritical of penitents."

What?! Ah, yes, yes… that's about current reconstruction of the 1969 exhibition http://www.veniceconnected.com/node/29046. The review of it - the source of the quote - is here: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/reviews/The-Prada-Biennale-show-Creative-Energy-turned-into-Dead-Fetishism/29836 . Comes August, I am looking forward to being as suffocated by the embrace of the exhibition as I was suffocated by the embrace of the review, just as I am certain to be suffocated by the Venice stuffed by the 30+ degrees sun heated bodies of tourists, who usually leave Biennale the last on the list of amusements worth attending…


The art of displaying dead art (point above) is different from the art of feeding dead art to a dead dictator… and the latter doesn't quite offer the promise of the excitement of the former. Except when the dead dictator is Kim Jong-Wong-Bi-Din-Dong-Il of North Korea. Fascinating and fantastic account of Kim's favourite sushi chef depicted in a lengthy interview in http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201306/kim-jong-il-sushi-chef-kenji-fujimoto-adam-johnson-2013?currentPage=1

My favourite rhetorical bit: "And guesthouse is code for a series of palaces decorated with cold marble, silver-braided bedspreads, ice purple paintings of kimilsungia blossoms, and ceilings airbrushed with the cran-apple mist of sunset, as if Liberace's jet had crashed into Lenin's tomb." My favourite human bit: Fujimoto's two abandoned families. It has to be a rare twist of fate in which one abandons his two daughters and a spouse to serve the dictator in exchange for having a family that he subsequently condemns to labour camps by escaping the dictator… and so on… do read!


Science or fiction? http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/06/06/take-that-nsa-scientists-hide-communications-using-a-hole-in-time/ So basic idea is there are holes in time (not only the ones that follow copious consumption of alcohol) and you can hide stuff in them (well, for now, no white elephants - ease off, politicians with any plans). My favourite quote: "In practice, this system isn’t perfect." No sh*t, Sherlocks…


New stuff on 'how planets are formed' http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/32967-astronomers-discover-comet/ Predictably, nothing new on why planets are formed… but that is a different topic.


On the way we know stuff, plus the way we communicate, a very interesting paper from Cornell University "Social Media and Information Overload: Survey Results" (http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0813) looks at information flows via user-generated media, "such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter' based on smallish sample of 587 participants in a UK survey. "Participants who experience information overload are those who engage less frequently with the media, rather than those who have fewer posts to read." Kind of obvious: less you engage, bigger is build up of unanswered communications. "Microbloggers complain of information overload to the greatest extent. Two thirds of Twitter-users have felt that they receive too many posts, and over half of Twitter-users have felt the need for a tool to filter out the irrelevant posts." I have no idea how I would have answered their survey… maybe because I feel that I am more surveys-overloaded than twitter-overloaded?


Much is written by humanity on the topic of happiness. So much so that even the Guardian (a miserably Lefty paper) has gotten to the topic, let alone the economists (the latter also more often than not read the Guardian, which is clearly correlated with both being unhappy on average more than non-economist and so on…) Read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/31/secret-happiness-complicated-research?INTCMP=SRCH - it is somewhat 'all over the place' and not too deep, but is interesting nonetheless. And when you finished, read



And thereafter, come back to this page…


Last week, I posted links to several articles on the proof of the theorem that postulates that gaps between prime numbers are bounded (see: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/05/2552013-saturday-reading-links.html). Here's a human story behind the proof author:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/twin-primes/ - worth a read.


In contrast, here's the design for much-awaited Lego House design: http://aboutus.lego.com/en-gb/news-room/2013/june/the-right-look-for-a-lego-house/ and, argue with me on this, but I think it is banal. Made even more banal by monochromatic white, which is so 'not Lego' and thus expected in the world of reverse psychology of asymmetric innovation - aka the world of on-line aesthetics.


Stay tuned for more reading links once the kids are put into their beds...