After my introduction, one senior official explained the German position on a banking union in just five words: “We do not want it.” I looked around to see a sea of heads nodding in agreement.
Author: Edouard Chazal
Fiscal Discipline in the Monetary Union
From the perspective of the centralised versus decentralised debate, it is immediately apparent that the compact is a decentralised solution of the US type, even if the decentralised solution is centrally imposed.
Learning to Love Volatility: Nassim N. Taleb on the Antifragile
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility. Take the coffee cup on your desk: It wants peace and quiet because it incurs more harm than benefit from random events. The opposite of fragile, therefore, isn’t robust or sturdy or resilient—things with these qualities are simply difficult to break.
Total Recall
On Arnold Schwarzenegger :
His surname, translated, means “black corner”: he is the dead end at which the evolution of our species and the development of our society have abruptly arrived.
Watch Out, Ratings Agencies.
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%.
