19/11/17: The Next Global Financial Crisis

My column for Cayman Financial Review on how the stage has been now set for the next Global Financial Crisis is available at http://www.caymanfinancialreview.com/2017/10/20/the-stage-has-been-set-for-the-next-global-financial-crisis/.

19/7/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

The first part of my regular WLASze (Weekly Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics)... enjoy!

Before we begin, you can now follow my art wandering on-line here: http://theartstack.com/gurdgiev

And a nice pre-cursor to news yet to be released... something special is brewing for September 14th... news here, once public...

Now, on to WLASze:

Starting with some art. Altman Siegel Gallery showing Trevor Paglen photography. Here are select two images from the show and one image from archives:

A nearly abstract expressionist quality to this panoramic shot's composition:

Followed by 'spin'-styled composition:

And one of delightfully dark and dynamic, almost threatening with density and light:

The photograph's texture is so rich and viscous and the composition so stripped out of superfulous positioning drama to its raw natural subject that it reminds me of one of my old favourites: Emil Nolde. Especially his poignant late watercolours - artist's favourite medium in the 1940s after he was forbidden to paint by the Nazi regime in 1941 (though Nolde was a member of the Nazi party and yet was deemed to be unworthy of being called an artist. His work featured in the famous Entartete Kunst, 1937).

Meanwhile, in Orange County (yes, Detroit's bankruptcy spings to mind) we have an on-going California-Pacific Triennial, showing an excellent Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook Two Planets: Millet’s The Gleaners and the Thai Farmers, 2008

Some more of the Thai artist works: http://www.trfineart.com/exhibitions/28. Millet too dressed up his gleaners as if they were heading out to the church, just as Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Thai framers are dressed as if for posing...


Loving juxtapositions and ever slightly shifting toward science: "Ulric Collette is a French-Canadian photographer who does some quirky portrait work. In his photo series “Genetic Portraits” he photographs family members and then cuts them side by side to create one portrait." Genetic manipulation or photographic nature? Or vice versa? It's juxtaposition of age and genetics - one denotes distance, another proximity.


Proximity v distance juxtaposition leads to time v gravity juxtaposition and to Trinity College, Dublin where it took scientists 69 years to carry out one experiment - not to discover something new, but to illustrate a point: it takes a very long time for very viscous stuff to succumb to gravity...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=worlds-slowest-moving-drop-caught-on-camera-at-last Best quote: "it takes 7 to 13 years for a drop to form, but only a tenth of a second for it to fall". I dare not think what Sunday Indo might say about the use of taxpayers money for this stuff, but it made Scientific American and that is worth an Irish punt or two or few thousands... Oh, and in case you wonder - no, Physics gang did not invite celebrity economists to watch the historical moment...


Staying with juxtapositions for one more trip... WordlessTech has a photoshop fascination with merging 'two opposite place, New York and the Grand Canyon' that worries me for one reason: what is it in Grand Canyon's imagery that makes people constantly desiring to do aesthetic violence to it? http://wordlesstech.com/2013/07/18/merge-new-york-in-the-grand-canyon/ . I wrote about Grand Canyon as the focal or experiential point last week here. My plea is for people to stop attempting to fill Grand Canyon with 'stuff', bridge it with hotels and make it accessible to couch potatoes beyond the usual 'view from the top'. It is here to challenge, beat us into dreadful sweat and wear our legs out. It is not here to sip double-skinny-caramel-dill-latte while levitating in some fancy capsule over the abyss...


And onto science, simple: Classic dilemma for those in pursuit of public health and personal well-being: drink or dry… or trilemma for some cultures: drink till you drop, drink or dry… or 'To Drink or Not to Drink' problem.

Much of the research on life expectancy in relation to alcohol consumption shows an inverted U-shaped relationship: mortality is high for those who drink alot and... for those who do not drink. The question, that so far remained un-answered is: but why? What explains higher mortality for those who do not drink at all.

A recent paper (here is its 2012 version http://paa2012.princeton.edu/papers/122744) looked at a huge data set on drinkers and non-drinkers that covered their 'survivorship' data and also data about their social and physical health. The study divided nondrinkers into three major categories:

• "abstainers" - people who had 12 or less drinks in their lives; 
• "infrequent drinkers" - people who consumed less than 12 drinks a year; and 
• "former drinkers"

They then sub-divided Abstainers into sub-clusters.

• Abstainers with religious or moral motivations for not consuming alcohol, not drinking due to their sense of responsibility to their family had similar mortality risks to light drinkers.
• Abstainers who dislike the taste of alcohol and referenced this dislike as the main driver for not consuming alcohol had mortality risk 17% higher than light drinkers. 
• Infrequent drinkers overall exhibited a slightly higher mortality risk than light drinkers. 
• Former drinkers had the highest mortality risk of all nondrinkers. 
• Former drinkers with reasons for abstaining included being an alcoholic and problems with drinking had 38% higher mortality risk

So the dilemma/trilemma is sorted: enjoy your life, but don't abuse the enjoyment lest it becomes an addiction?


And while on drink subject, here is a more current data study on 'drink till you drop' cluster mortality outcomes: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130719085152.htm
Not a light-hearted piece of research, although I disagree with one of the scientists' policy prescriptions, but, hey that 'ze' in WLASze stands for 'zero economics', so no more on this...


Small Print Stuff: The above statements and research are not an endorsement of either consumption or non-consumption of anything, including alcohol. Please, exercise caution when operating heavy machinery while consuming vanilla ice cream. But seriously - do stay safe!

And stay tuned for Part 2 of WLASze coming up tomorrow.

15/7/2013: Two notes on HFT effects on the markets

Two interesting notes on the financial markets general operational issues in relation to High Frequency Trading (HFT).


A quick post from the Aziz Economics: http://azizonomics.com/2013/06/15/have-financial-markets-gone-post-human/ on the topic of HFT and data disclosure. Do read the Nanex post cited: http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4302.html

Basic idea is that speed of light separates trades in the current market. With some data being released in different formats and to different audiences at different times, this difference drives a massive wedge between HFT trades and ordinary order flows.

And a couple of quotes:

"... is having a two second jump on the market “insider trading”? Well, yes — but it’s legal insider trading with consent, out in the open."

Yep, you can pay more to get information ahead of everyone and then pay a bit more to execute trades ahead of the mere mortals. You can then collect the upside (you'd have to be pretty dim-witted to collect a downside on such a trade).

And that means that the old-fashioned elbow-grease and hard labour analysing stuff, forecasting it, setting a strategy, hedging etc… all become subservient to the speed of access + speed of execution.

Human is gone. Algo is in...
"… perhaps the beginning of the end for human traders is just the end of the beginning for global financial markets. Perhaps that is less of a death sentence, and more of a liberation, allowing talented human labour that in recent years has been channelled into unproductive and obscure projects in big finance to move into more productive domains."

I don't know. But I'd like to think a person is still somewhere under the sun in the markets. Otherwise, how can be make any connection between the financial markets, instruments traded and real side of the economy, aside from the sides glimpsed through high-frequency-advanced-release mechanism?..



And a paper on HFT effects on market index here: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130702/srep02110/full/srep02110.html

The paper shows that in short time scales stocks have a stronger influence on the index, rather than index has on stocks that are constituents of the index. This is encouraging, as it suggests that within shorter time horizons, extreme HFT-linked instrumentation of index is far less of a driver than HFT-linked instrumentation of individual stocks. In other words, whatever relevant information is contained in the stock gets indeed transmitted into index at high frequency and this information dominates index-own changes.

10/9/2012: Ireland's flop in securing European Science Funding

Departing from the IMF, European Research Council has released the list of 2012 winning projects that obtained financial support from the Council under the ERC Starting Grant results, totaling €800 million. The link to the list is here.

Now, a quick run through the headline results:

• Ireland scored 4 projects (2 each for TCD and UCD)
• Portugal (not a country we in Ireland usually associate with being the Land of Scholars) scored same as Ireland
• Israel scored 24 projects
• Austria 9 projects
• Belgium 19 projects
• Switzerland 33 projects
• Netherlands scored 51 project
• Finland 8 projects
• Denmark 13 projects
• Sweden 22 projects
• And to add insult to our injury: University of Bristol (UK) and University of Edinburgh scored 5 projects each (more than the entire country of Ireland), while University of Warwick 4 projects (same as Ireland as a whole)
• University College London scored 16 projects
• In some consolation, powerhouse of knowledge, Northern Ireland, scored none

Here's a handy chart from ERC:

But wait, it gets worse. When broken down by nationality of grantees, Ireland has 7 Irish nationals granted research proposals:

Which includes more Irish national academics working ABROAD than in Ireland:

And, among the researchers who got grants in Ireland, there are a number of non-nationals:

You can check the above in here.

So that strategy on funding and managing research in Ireland - it is clearly working marvels... oh, and do you now think Irish Universities poor rankings have nothing to do with real world outcomes?..