ABN Amro had “employed two former employees of S&P” to learn the agency’s methods, the judge said. It knew, for example, that for S&P to give the derivatives the top rating, its models had to show a likely default rate of less than 0.728%.
Author: Edouard Chazal
New York après Sandy? Le conte de deux cités
S’il y a une chose dont je vais me souvenir de cette semaine cauchemardesque, c’est à quel point la ville était séparée en deux. Pendant une semaine, il y avait deux Manhattan. L’équateur électrique a été tracé à la 25e Rue de Manhattan. Au nord, le confort. Au sud, la galère. Cette démarcation a créé deux espèces de New-Yorkais, ceux qui avaient l’électricité pour qui c’était “business as usual” et ceux vivant dans ce qu’on a surnommé “SoPo”, le quartier “South of Power”.
Getting to Normal
The de facto default by Greece early this year ended investors’ complacency. The government bonds of peripheral eurozone countries thus became toxic. Given the unprecedented nature of the Greek default, the market valuation of peripheral debt has been fluctuating widely, still searching for “fundamentals,” such as deficit or debt levels, that could explain the evolution of risk premia over time.
Goodbye Tweetie
I guess, in a way, this site owes much of its success to Tweetie for Mac. I woudn’t have been able to get to know developers, friends, colleagues, and readers if it weren’t for Twitter. If it weren’t for Tweetie, which to me, was Twitter.
Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week
Translation: the ultimate goal of many of these programs is to gum up the system so it slows down the quote feed to others and allows the computer traders (with their co-located servers at the exchanges) to gain a money-making arbitrage opportunity.
Abnormal Capitalist 