Author: Edouard Chazal

Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

But why stop there? One trading engineer has proposed positioning a line of drones over the ocean, where they would flash microwave data from one to the next like the chain of mountaintop signal fires in The Lord of the Rings. “At what point do you say, ‘This is fast enough’?” asks Brent Weisenborn, a former NASDAQ vice president.

→ Mother Jones

The People Versus The Bankers

To understand why bankers love the status quo you have to understand how they pay themselves. Unlike most enterprises, labour actually has more power than capital at the big banks because debt plays such a huge role on bank balance sheets. To make shareholders feel better about this quasi-Marxist relationship, bankers use “return on equity” as a way to justify their compensation.

→ The Economist

How Toxic Finance First Met Toxic Chemical

But is the tie between industrial poisons and speculative excess a mere accident of timing? History suggests otherwise. Deregulation, financial bubbles, and chemical contamination have a common heritage that goes back all the way to Victorian England. They became linked in 1880, when the great British statesman William Ewart Gladstone restructured the taxation of beer.

→ Organic Consumers Association

Your New Landlord Works on Wall Street

So a bullish outlook for housing would seemingly augur a long-awaited recovery to Main Street. But the more you look into it, the clearer it becomes that it’s not being driven by the typical American families who lost their homes in the economic crash. In fact, it’s being fueled by the banks and hedge funds whose speculation caused that crash in the first place.

→ New Republic