Brett Hutley's Blog

There's a new Banksy gone up on Newman Street (just around the corner from our flat).

Some interesting papers have come out on the "Credit Crunch".

• Leveraged Losses: Lessons from the Mortgage Market MeltdownThis paper provides a good overview of the financial market turmoil occurring since August 2007, and discusses how the crisis might impact other areas of the economy.
• A Black Swan in the Money Market This paper examines the sudden jump in spreads between the overnight and term inter-bank interest rates.

Here is a great talk by Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren on the upcoming collapse of the middle class. The first 5 minutes are spent on introducing Professor Warren, so I recommend skipping to roughly 5-6 minutes into the video. She gives a very, very interesting comparison of the changing socio-economic factors between 1970-2007. The talk was given on the 8th March, 2007 at Berkeley.

So, on Sunday I was lying on the couch reading when I heard this commotion from Oxford Street. I jumped up and went out onto the balcony - just in time to see the Olympic Flame go past! It was driven past on an open top bus, held upright by this girl in a track-suit.

I live in London, on Oxford Street. You can't really live in a more urban environment than that. Last weekend Helen and I got out of London to the North Downs to go hiking. For me, this is the ideal lifestyle; live in the city in an exciting, stimulating environment. When you feel like "getting back to nature" - pick the environment you want, and go there for the weekend. The countryside is a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there!

Garth Sundem of Geek Logik fame has a blog in which he comes up with formulas for wrapping every-day decisions in a mathematical framework. It's something I've been thinking about for quite a while - especially with regards to procrastination. The trick is to quantify all the factors that you think are important in the issue you are considering, and then describe the relationship between the variables mathematically.

I read the following quote at "The price of everything" blog: “You couldn’t get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.” – Edward Flaherty. I can't wait to find someone to insult.

While reading this article in The Economist, the section on rising inequality leapt out at me. The newspaper suggested that technology may be to blame. This is certainly a situation that I've been expecting for a while. In contrast to the Singularity proposed by Vernor Vinge, I believe that as people become more educated, have better tools, and live longer, it will be harder and harder for young, less well educated, and poorer people to compete. This will stratify society.

Here are some more financial blogs that seem good:

• The Aleph Blog - Investment strategies and advice (seems pretty US-centric)
• The Epicurean Deal Maker - Sarchastic, sardonic and humerous insight into Wall Street
• Going Private - The Sardonic Memoirs of a Private Equity Professional - This is an absolutely hilarious blog about the world of Private Equity. Excellent!
• A Fist-full of Euros - An interesting blog focusing on European finance/economics/politics.

There's a great interview in Reason Magazine with economist Lant Pritchett about how stopping immigration is effectively holding countries' citizens hostage. He argues that constraining people within artificial borders bounding countries which are economically unviable is one of the biggest sources of global inequity. Very interesting read.