Saturday, July 11, 2009

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis

A 6 page article on William White, a former BIS economist, who was critical of Greenspan's policies. A string of gems: "[White's team]...observed the real estate bubble developing in the United States. They criticized the increasingly impenetrable securitization business, vehemently pointed out the perils of risky loans and provided evidence of the lack of credibility of the rating agencies....predicted the disaster, and yet not even his own clientele was willing to believe him.... the central bankers knew exactly what was going on, a full two-and-a-half years before the big bang... BIS reported that the index for securitized US subprime mortgages had fallen sharply in the fourth quarter of [2006]...At the London G-20 summit in April, the group decided to promote a crisis-prevention model based on White's theories."

He has come out of retirement to help instruct those who had ignored his advice. There is a cool graph, titled "The Curse of Cheap Money", embedded in the article.

Relearning: The Productivity Problem that We're Not Supposed To Talk About

I fascinating look into code solubility (I had to look this up). Gem "One of the worst mistakes that programmers make in writing code is in failing to recognize that more productivity will be spent over the life time of code navigating through the code than will be spent writing the code"


Better Now Beats Best Later

This is so true! I have done this too many times to count.


Why the Brain Craves Exercise and Sleep

A seven minute interview/overview of "Brain Rules" that covers roughly half of the book.


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