Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1374312 Comments:2390
Enemy sustain severe losses in Kabul Zabihullah Mujahid E-mail Print PDF Sunday, 21 Jamadil Akhir 1433 Sunday, 13 May 2012 07:01
KABUL, May 13 – Later on Saturday, Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate confronted a great number of the puppets in Sarubi, Kabul, triggering a one-hour fight in which a number of the enemy soldiers got killed and wounded.
We’re Fighting in a War We Lost Before the War Began by Phyllis Bennis, May 12, 2012 Print This | Share This
It shouldn’t surprise anyone, but support for the longest U.S. war is dropping further and faster than ever. The latest national U.S. poll, released on May 9, shows 66 percent of Americans are against the war in Afghanistan – with 40 percent "strongly opposed."
We can expect to hear the usual spin, claims that it’s a hard slog but Afghans are still better off and we have to finish what we started.
With all due respect to Phyllis, no one will hear Any spin because none is necessary.
No one is reporting anything about the Afghans. Refute silence? ;}
If that money ($571 billion according to the National Priorities Project) had not been wasted on the war in Afghanistan since 2001, it could instead have paid for ten years of health care for 12 million low-income people, or hired 840,000 elementary school teachers for ten years, or paid for converting 246 million households to all solar energy for a year."
us spends more in 5 hours on defense than in 5 years on healthcare
The move reveals for the first time the desperation of Mr Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, and Mr Osborne, to win over the Murdoch empire as they manoeuvred to secure a general election victory.
As the Leveson inquiry prepares to hear more evidence this week about the relations between News International and the Tories, The Independent on Sunday has learnt that Rebekah Brooks and her husband spent a weekend at Dorneywood, the Chancellor's official residence, during a key period in the bid by News Corp to take over BSkyB.
The previously undisclosed "pyjama party", in 2010, which also featured Mr Coulson and his wife, Eloise, will add fuel to demands for the Chancellor to be called to give evidence to Leveson in person.
The IoS piece goes on to point out that Cameron, Hunt, Brooks and most of Newscorp’s lawyers were more or less sharing bodily fluids nonstop during the crucial BSkyB bid run-up, and even more so once Vince Cable was conveniently pushed out of the juggernaut’s way. In a normal world, there is no way either Hunt or Cameron should survive such a clear case of Prime Ministerial favouritism.
The Combat-Application-Tourniquet is the 1st choice of the U.S. Army and is deployed with our troops around the world. If you are looking for a light weight, ...
A scaling law, or power law, is a simple polynomial functional relationship, i.e., f(x) depends on a power of x. Two properties of such laws can easily be shown:
* a logarithmic mapping yields a linear relationship, * scaling the function’s argument x preserves the shape of the function f(x), called scale invariance.
See (Sornette, 2006).
Scaling-Law Distributions Scaling-law distributions have been observed in an extraordinary wide range of natural phenomena: from physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science and demography to the social sciences; see (Newman, 2004). It is truly amazing, that such diverse topics as
* the size of earthquakes, moon craters, solar flares, computer files, sand particle, wars and price moves in financial markets,
* the number of scientific papers written, citations received by publications, hits on webpages and species in biological taxa,
* the sales of music, books and other commodities,
* the population of cities,
* the income of people,
* the frequency of words used in human languages and of occurrences of personal names,
* the areas burnt in forest fires,
are all described by scaling-law distributions. First used to describe the observed income distribution of households by the economist Pareto in 1897, the recent advancements in the study of complex systems have helped uncover some of the possible mechanisms behind this universal law. However, there is as of yet no real understanding of the physical processes driving these systems.
AND
For how long have we known about the fat tails?
"Heavy tails: the (unconditional) distribution of returns seems to display a power-law or Pareto-like tail, with a tail index which is finite, higher than two and less than five for most data sets studied.
In particular this excludes stable laws with infinite variance and the normal distribution. However the precise form of the tails is difficult to determine."
Cont (2001) # MANTEGNA, R.N. and H.E. STANLEY, 1999. Introduction to Econophysics: Correlations and Complexity in Finance. books.google.com. "The degree of leptokurtosis is much larger for high-frequency data (Fig. 8.2)." Mantegna and Stanley (2000)
What JP Morgan's MANY theoreticians are desperately trying to wrap their heads around at this very moment:
"However the precise form of the tails is difficult to determine."
"The main concepts that are needed to understand stock markets are imitation, herding, self-organized cooperativity and positive feedbacks, leading to the development of endogenous instabilities. According to this theory, local effects such as interest raises, new tax laws, new regulations and so on, invoked as the cause of the burst of a given bubble leading to a crash, are only one of the triggering factors but not the fundamental cause of the bubble collapse. We propose that the true origin of a bubble and of its collapse lies in the unsustainable pace of stock market price growth based on self-reinforcing over-optimistic anticipation. As a speculative bubble develops, it becomes more and more unstable and very susceptible to any disturbance."
Jamie Dimon, the king of controlled risk, just now hearing about any of this
"statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the “logic of science”; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but… let’s not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you.
In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system)."
Clearly, with current International Monetary Fund estimates of the costs of the 2007-2008 subprime crisis, the banking system seems to have lost more on risk taking (from the failures of quantitative risk management) than every penny banks ever earned taking risks.
But it was easy to see from the past that the pilot did not have the qualifications to fly the plane and was using the wrong navigation tools:
The same happened in 1983 with money center banks losing cumulatively every penny ever made, and in 1991-1992 when the Savings and Loans industry became history.
After 1998, when a “Nobel-crowned” collection of people (and the crème de la crème of the financial economics establishment) blew up Long Term Capital Management,
a hedge fund, because the “scientific” methods they used misestimated the role of the rare event, such methodologies and such claims on understanding risks of rare events should have been discredited.
Yet the Fed helped their bailoutand exposure to rare events (and model error) patently increased exponentially (as we can see from banks’ swelling portfolios of derivatives that we do not understand).
Figure 1 My classical metaphor: A Turkey is fed for a 1000 days—every days confirms to its statistical department that the human race cares about its welfare "with increased statistical significance". On the 1001st day, the turkey has a surprise.
people tend to overweight small probability events.
So, what is behavioural economics?
Well, behavioural economics recognises the limits of human rationality, with ‘rationality’ being defined by the mainstream economic sense of the word, and comprises of a number of observations appertaining to human decision making that do not sit well with the neoclassical orthodoxy (Dolan et al. 2010). These include:
the observation that losses loom substantially larger than gains, a phenomenon known as loss aversion;
(ii) that reference points matter, such that people often care more about what they gain or lose around what they already have, rather than what they end up with;
(iii) that people tend to overweight small probabilities;
(iv) that people allocate their money to discrete bundles, so that the value that they attach to a particular amount of money will be contextual;
(v) the observation of motivational crowding, such that offering money to people to do something has been shown often to ‘crowd-out’ their intrinsic, altruistic motivation to do that very thing; and
(vi) ‘hyperbolic discounting’, which is the observation that people tend to place an enormous weight on the ‘immediate’ compared to the future, living for today at the expense of tomorrow.
In addition to the above stated observations, individuals often seemingly adopt a number of rules of thumb (or ‘heuristics’) when reaching their decisions, and apparently ‘satisfice’ rather than ‘optimise’, which goes against the grain of mainstream economics.
A far from exhaustive list of these rules of thumb include:
(a) the availability heuristic, in which people tend to assess the probability of an event by the ease with which similar instances can be brought to mind (e.g. many people erroneously think that the annual death rate from shark attacks is greater than that caused by falling coconuts);
(b) the anchoring heuristic, in which individuals often unconsciously focus upon, and can be manipulated by, entirely irrelevant cues when making decisions, and
(c) the overconfidence bias (e.g. most people think their driving ability is better than average), which has obvious implications for choices in financial markets, and elsewhere.
Behavioural economists have thus uncovered a library of systematic preference patterns and heuristics that cannot be explained by standard economic theory. Interestingly, although perhaps for many, on reflection, unsurprisingly, several of the observations and rules of thumb (e.g. the importance of reference points, availability, anchoring)
appear to suggest that humans are influenced very much by prominent, or ‘salient’, attributes in choice options – once their attention is focussed (sic) upon a particular feature of a task, they tend to overlook somewhat other potentially important information (for an entertaining example of this phenomenon, see selective attention test).
When the world pushes you to your knees, your are in the perfect position to pray. ... Ali ibn abi Talib (radiAllah anhu)
Which is where Jamie Dimon should be right about now....;}
Now here's Dimon/JPM's muse from 2008, explaining why
The Black Swan: Quotes & Warnings that the Imbeciles Chose to Ignore
is/was worth ignoring.
I'm wondering if Jamie spent some time with
Posted by Eric Falkenstein at 8:31 PM Sunday, December 07, 2008
Now THAT's an amazing date to be pontificating on how Behavioral Economics/Power Laws/Central Limit Theorums/ and the risk of Untold exposure to Non Linear Heavy Tail Risk is TOTALLY out of fashion.
As bush43 and a traitorous Congress REWARD WALL ST BANKSTERS for bringing the SYSTEM to its KNEES.
When the world pushes you to your knees, your are in the perfect position to pray. ... Ali ibn abi Talib (radiAllah anhu)
But INSTEAD of praying, these BANKSTERS get to run the ship into ANOTHER iceberg in order to speed the sinking.....LMFAO...8D
Notice how Falkenstein/Dimon NEVER consider FRAUD CONTROL in the following (VaR analysis;)?
" Value at Risk is a broad concept, that basically is a framework that has as its goal estimating a 99% or 95% worst-case-scenario, over an arbitrary period of time (day, week, year). Now, clearly many people underestimated the risk in mortgage-backed paper of all sorts, but this error was not particular to Value at Risk, rather, the assumption that housing prices would not decline, which then lead to errors in your stress test, or whatever you call your 'worst case scenario'. This error was made at many levels, by investors, issuers, rating agencies, banks who warehoused these loans, regulators, etc. Again, Value at Risk is pretty independent of this error, though the error would be reflected in any VAR that had such erroneous assumptions (garbage in, garbage out). Further, Value at risk is pretty agnostic as to method, whether you use data with really fat tails, 99.99% worst case scenarios, whatever you want. Blaming Value at Risk for the latest crisis is like blaming soup, rather than sanitation, for Typhoid Mary.
And with Jamie Dimon's EPIC FAIL, this arguement from Falkenstein has proved prescient and yet Falkenstein thought it was beautifully insane to even think about.....;}
" My argument still stands: he's basically someone who makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Like a communist reveling in the Great Depression, Taleb may take heart in recent events vindicating his worldview, but as Taleb knows, there are always 'lucky fools' who merely were fortunate. I would like to see a risk management report from Taleb, perhaps a page always saying "risk=inf", because of course, we could lose everything in WW3, a new virus,
***** all the banks fail, etc.*****
Every assumption isn't true, so make no assumptions. Be prepared for anything. Go long volatility (especially extreme tails). I don't think that's very good advice, though clearly it worked great this year (and funds he's affiliated have done very well, being long tail volatility).
Note to the reader: this was written a decade ago. A deeper explanation (which tells you that Jorion & his financial engineering IDIOTS are dangerous to society) is here: "The Fourth Quadrant", an EDGE (Third Culture)
"These patterns suggest that standard economic models based on the notion of equilibrium — markets will fluctuate but then settle down like the surface of a still pond — may not capture the whole story. Freak events may be a normal part of long-term economic behavior. If that’s true, then the mathematical methods guiding Wall Street’s estimation of risk are seriously flawed, offering a dangerous false sense of security.
“You have to understand that the bad events can be really, really bad,” says J. Doyne Farmer, who is trained in physics and does research spanning several disciplines at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “And there’s a significant chance that over a five-year period we will get hit by a really big event. That’s where the rubber really hits the road.”
My refutation of the VAR does not mean that I am against quantitative risk management - having spent all of my adult life as a quantitative trader, I learned the hard way the fails of such methods. I am simply against the application of unseasonned quantitative methods. I think that VAR would be a wonderful measurement if we had models designed for that purpose and knew something about their parameters. The validity of VAR is linked to the problem of probabilistic measurement of future events, particularly those deemed infrequent (more than 2 standard deviations) and those that concern multiple securities. I conjecture that the methods we currently use to measure such tail probabilities are flawed.
FLAWED
A Standard Deviation = a SIGMA Example: How far a random group of economists missed a BLS NFP report. Before 9/11 a 2 Sigma (Standard Deviation;) Event Miss was Unusual.
But after 9/11, we've regularly had 3&4 Sigma Events.
the informative book by Philippe Jorion, "It summarizes the expected maximum loss (or worst loss) over a target horizon within a given confidence interval".
"It is the uniqueness, precision and misplaced concreteness of the measure that bother me. I would rather hear risk managers make statements like "at such price in such security A and at such price in security B, we will be down $150,000". They should present a list of such associated crisis scenarios without unduly attaching probabilities to the array of events, until such time as we can show a better grasp of probability of large deviations for portfolios and better confidence with our measurement of "confidence levels". There is an internal contradiction between measuring risk (i.e. standard deviation) and using a tool with a higher standard error than that of the measure itself. "
Taleb 1997.
If the above had been followed, we wouldn't be facing TOTAL MELTDOWN of our banking system THIS morning.....;}
The risk management objective function is survival, not profits and losses ( see rule-of-thumb 8 ). A trader according to the Chicago legend, "made 8 million in eight years and lost 80 million in eight minutes". According to the same standards, he would be, "in general", and "on average" a good risk manager.
I’m still in a tryptophan coma, but here’s a timely mention of the story of the turkey from Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan which I am (supposed to be) reading. The following excerpt is taken from the transcript of a Charlie Rose interview.
—— CHARLIE ROSE: And what is the story of the turkey?
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: In the book, I have the story of a turkey that is fed for 1,000 days by a butcher, and every day confirms to the turkey and the turkey’s economics department and the turkey’s risk management department and the turkey’s analytical department that the butcher loves turkeys, and every day brings more confidence to the statement. So it’s fed for 1,000 days…
CHARLIE ROSE: Gets fatter and fatter and fatter.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Fatter and fatter. On the day when its comfort will be at its maximum, there is going to be a surprise. There will be a surprise for the turkey.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: There will be a surprise for the turkey’s economics department, all those Ph.D.’s. Will it be — after all, there’s maximum (inaudible)…
CHARLIE ROSE: But it’s not a surprise for the butcher, is it?
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Not a surprise for Charlie Rose as well. Not a surprise for humans. It’s a surprise for the turkey. So the whole idea here is we are not to be a turkey.
Now the question is, WTF did the top of the Ponzi Bondholders actually GET the money to loan to you?
At some point, it had to be Borrowed into existence with the Central Bank creating the currency. So if you are close enough connected to the center of this, you can Borrow money at very low interest directly from Da Fed to then go and loan at higher interest to somebody else and collect on the spread between those rates.
This is bad enough, but the evolution of Derivatives made it even worse, because lots of Banking Houses could create financial instruments like CDS and CDO without ever actually borrowing money from Da Fed to do it. These instruments represent Trillions if not Quadrillions of Dollars of debt obligations that cannot be paid off unless Da Fed goes ahead on a Printing Spree that would make the current one look like a Sunday Picnic.
Needless to say, I don’t think the Political Will is there to do that kind of printing, it would totally destroy the currency and that is not in the interest of the people who hold all the Bonds. The trick here is to keep the House of Cards standing so these instruments do not trip.
However, as the debt problem moves up the line to bigger and bigger Sovereigns (next up, Spain and CA), just the amounts necessary to make them nominally solvent is probably beyond the political will of the Banks, and most certainly against the political will of the populations that are forced into Austerity. So at some point here the Ponzi will collapse.
Nor am I swayed with the usual argument that the VAR' s wide-spread use by financial institutions should give it a measure of scientific credibility. Banks have the ingrained habit of plunging headlong into mistakes together where blame-minimizing managers appear to feel comfortable making blunders so long as their competitors are making the same ones.
The state of the Japanese and French banking systems, the stories of lending to Latin America, the chronic real estate booms and bust and the S&L debacle provide us with an interesting cycle of communal irrationality. I believe that the VAR is the alibi bankers will give shareholders (and the bailing-out taxpayer)
to show documented due diligence and will express that their blow-up came from truly unforeseeable circumstances and events with low probability - not from taking large risks they did not understand.
But my sense of social responsibility will force me to menacingly point my finger. I maintain that the due-diligence VAR tool encourages untrained people to take misdirected risk with the shareholder's, and ultimately the taxpayer's, money.
makes the Hypothesis that Da Fed is sufficiently in control of all of this that they can manage a controlled Stagflation, but to me this begs the question of what is going on all around the World all tied to the Dollar as World Reserve Currency.
While here in the FSofA we might be able to withstand a Slow Boiled Frog effect of say a 10% yearly Inflation of Prices while Wages Deflate at 10% and not run up into a Rock/Hard Place situation for 5 years,
that is not the case for all the impoverished countries around the world where people live on $2/day and 90% of their income goes to just buying enough Rice to make it to tomorrow."
"Options may or may not deliver an estimation of the consensus on volatility and correlations. We can compute, in some markets, some transition probabilities and, in some currency pairs with liquid crosses, joint transition probabilities (hence local correlation). We cannot, however, use such pricing kernels as gospel. Option traders do not have perfect foresight, and, as much as I would like them to, cannot be considered prophets. Why should their forecast of the second moment be superior to that of a forward trader's future price ?"
-Taleb
We're now at least $1.75 Quadrillion in Synthetic Debt Derivatives later.
JPMorgan holds over $90 Trillion of this vaporware....;}.... more than the COMBINED WORLD GDP. Been arguing this point since 1982....;}
"As long as Da Fed is “managing” a steady inflation, these folks ($2/day/90% of income goes to enough RIce to make it to tomorrow;) are going to be quickly (if they are not already there) in a position where they simply cannot afford to buy enough food to eat.
If they are in a location where there is no Oil, it’s a Humanitarian Crisis but we don’t send in the Marines. If it is a location where there IS Oil, we clearly DO send in the Marines to try to secure the Oil Fields.
We also have to send Food Aid to the faction that will line up with us for the moment, and arm them with AR-15s and RPGs at the very least to try to take back control.
That problem is difficult enough by itself to manage, but on top of that you have all these Wars breaking out in marginal countries, and you also have your Natural Disasters like Tsunamis messing up Production out of Japan and Cyclones turning part of Australia into an Inland Sea and now apparently non-stop Tornadoes taking out Airports like Lambert in St Louis.
How many of you noted the story in the Newz that Shillary Clinton was in Japan promoting a “Private/Public” Partnership to help the Japanese rebuild? She was joined by Chamber of Commerce Big Wigs from Nippon and the FSofA, basically BEGGING people not to Abandon Japan. You have to KNOW they are doing this because companies are EVACUATING Tokyo in droves.
"I only see one use of covariance matrices: in speculative trading, where the bets are on the first moment of the marginal distributions, and where operators rely on the criticized "trader lore" for higher moments. Such technique, which I call generalized pairs trading, has been carried in the past with large measure of success by "kids with Brooklyn accent". A use of the covariance matrix that is humble enough to limit itself to conditional expectations (not risks of tail events) is acceptable, provided it is handled by someone with the critical and rigorous mind that develops from the observation of, and experimentation with, real-time market events. "
WTF is going to stay in Tokyo with an Office when they can move it over to Taiwan or Shanghai or Hong Kong or Singapore? The Nip Goobermint is now talking about a “6-9 Month” period to get some control over the reactors. No actual plan here for doing so, but this is the spin. Even if it was only 6-9 months, who would stay there while they figure it out?
Our standard of living will approach that of the current 3rd World. This is inevitable now, its just a question of how long it will take to slide down and how the society will adjust to the new reality.
Here is the good news: we are 100.4% certain JPM was the ONLY prop trading bank to be massively, massively short IG9-18 into this epic blow out. Because if other had suffered billion dollar losses, they would all pull a Jamie Dimon and fess up. Right?
Warning: This commentary is not for the faint of heart.
I thought I'd start this particular Monday morning, May the 14th, with a little rant. Sometimes it helps to ditch the uber-rational, cool-headed analysis and remind people just how screwed up things are on this third toxic landfill from the Sun.
And then the wo/man calmly walked out the front door, got in a car, and drove away, telephoning the Taliban to report FOUR men killed....;}
If you were a Muslim terrorist seeking retribution for Washington’s crimes, would you try to smuggle aboard an airliner a bomb in your underwear or shoe in order to blow up people whose only responsibility for Washington’s war against Muslims is that they fell for Washington’s propaganda? If you wanted to blow up the innocent, wouldn’t you instead place your bomb in the middle of the mass of humanity waiting to clear airport security and take out TSA personnel along with passengers? Terrorists could coordinate their attacks, hitting a number of large airports across the US at the same minute. This would be real terror. Moreover, it would present TSA with an insolvable problem: how can people be screened before they are screened?
Or coordinated attacks on shopping malls and sports events?
Why should terrorists, if they exist, bother to kill people when it is easy to cause mayhem by not killing them? There are a large number of unguarded electric power substations. Entire regions of the country could be shut down. The simplest disruptive act would be to release large quantities of roofing nails in the midst of rush hour traffic in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. You get the picture: thousands and thousands of cars disabled with flat tires blocking the main arteries for days.
Before some reader accuses me of giving terrorists ideas, ask yourself if you really think people so clever as to have allegedly planned and carried out 9/11 couldn’t think of such simple tactics, plots that could be carried out without having to defeat security or kill innocent people? My point isn’t what terrorists, if they exist, should do. The point is that the absence of easy-to-do acts of terrorism suggests that the terrorist threat is more hype than reality. Yet, we have an expensive, intrusive security apparatus that seems to have no real function except to exercise power over American citizens.
