Author: Edouard Chazal

Some Of Their Parts

Howorth’s hands are insured for £5 million ($7.8 million), and she takes extraordinary care to look after them, given her job as a professional hand model. When she sunbathes, she wears gloves to protect them from the sun’s harmful rays; she opens car doors carefully; and she moisturises her hands more than 30 times a day.

I thought that made it unlikely she would proffer a hand; worse, were she to do so, I feared I might squeeze too hard and do untold damage to her livelihood — or perhaps get a call from her insurer and her solicitor.

→ The Magazine

Big Data’s Little Brother

Standard statistics might project next summer’s ice cream sales. The aim of people working on newer Big Data systems is to collect seemingly unconnected information like today’s heat and cloud cover, and a hometown team’s victory over the weekend, compare that with past weather and sports outcomes, and figure out how much mint chip ice cream mothers would buy today.

→ New York Times

Shadow Banking And The Global Financial Ecosystem

In either case, the fundamental problem we are dealing with is a financial ecosystem that has outgrown the safety net that was put around it many years ago. Today we have new types of savers (cash portfolio managers versus retail depositors), new types of borrowers (risk portfolio managers to fund pensions versus ultimate borrowers to finance investments and consumption) and new types of banks (dealer banks that do securities financing versus traditional banks that finance the real economy more directly via loans) to whom discount window access and deposit insurance do not apply.

These twin pillars of the official safety net were erected around traditional, deposit-funded banks to address retail runs. In contrast, the crisis of 2007–09 was a crisis of institutional runs where cash portfolio managers ran on dealers, and dealers ran on risk portfolio managers. But importantly – as the examples above demonstrate – beyond the institutional façade of the ecosystem it is ultimately real wealth and promises that are at stake.

→ VOXeu

David Byrne: Will Work for Inspiration.

The city is a body and a mind—a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information. Knowledge and creativity are resources. If the physical (and financial) parts are functional, then the flow of ideas, creativity and information are facilitated. The city is a fountain that never stops: it generates its energy from the human interactions that take place in it. Unfortunately, we’re getting to a point where many of New York’s citizens have been excluded from this equation for too long. The physical part of our city—the body—has been improved immeasurably.

→ Creative Time Reports