Michael Lewis has written a series of excellent books, starting with Liar’s Poker, which lifted the lid on the investment banking game in general and Salomon Brothers in particular. His book Moneyball was a fascinating study of baseball and business, and has been turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt (which seems a bit unlikely) in the role of Billy Beene, the Oakland A’s GM.
Excellent reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes (currently 94%). Trailer link is below.
From the minutes of the September RBA Board meeting:
Members were informed that, in Australia, market pricing prima facie pointed to expectations of large cuts in the cash rate by the end of the year, but a range of technical factors meant that market pricing might not be giving an accurate reading of expectations in the current circumstances.
This loosely translates as: Bill Evans, you’re wrong!
And speaking of Bill, it’s nice to see that he’s snuck into my Wordle word cloud:
Check out this brilliant global house price charting app from The Economist. It’s got a bunch of indicators including raw house prices, real house prices, house price to income and price to rent ratios, and others. Impressive!
What’s also impressive are some of the results. No real surprise in some of them, like the spectacular price collapse in Ireland and elsewhere, but what I didn’t anticipate at all was the strength of the market in South Africa:
More than 550% growth since 1997 seems a bit too good to be true, and is, in a word, spruikalicious.
And here’s another great tool on the Economist site:
This thing tracks reader comments by topic, frequency and relationships with related topics. Fantastic for tracking what issues have got the online crazies arced up at any point in time.
While exploring the wonders of Bloomberg I came across this neat summary of total GFC related write-offs. A lazy US$2 trillion, and a great time to be bracketed with “Asia”.
Financial services firms seem to have a penchant for using climbing related themes to advertise themselves, often with laughable results (check here and here for some examples). Today it was the turn of that mighty organ, the Australian Financial Review, to have a go, using climbing themes extensively in a supplement entitled “Share Investing – the Complete Guide”. Putting aside the obvious problems of classifying a 26 page pamphlet as a “complete guide”, the climbing imagery is as follows:
| An impressive start – this girl looks the goods, from the nose stud to the chalked fingers to the slight sense of disarray amongst her quick draws. |  |
| This bloke looks the part too – plenty of bearded wonders just like this at any crag in the world. |  |
| The AFR gets extra points for the tatt, however it’s notable that he has chalky fingers but no chalk bag. |  |
| The sport of rock climbing and the job of hand model are mutually exclusive. Alas no climber on earth has hands like this! |  |
