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Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012
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Published: Feb 26, 2012
Author: Various
Post Date: 2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone
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Views: 1374583
Comments: 2390
Mcgowinjm Wire Service.
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#817. To: A K A Stone (#0)
www.mybudget360.com/top-1...-promises-of-mega-wealth/
Taleb: 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
Taleb Blames VAR, Merton, Scholes for Crimes Taleb was/is EXACTLY correct and "I'm wondering if Jamie spent some time with Posted by Eric Falkenstein at 8:31 PM Sunday, December 07, 2008" are EXACTLY wrong. falkenblog.blogspot.com/2...r-merton-scholes-for.html Minus Chaos Theory or even a blind hog can pick up an acorn every now & then EXCEPTION...;}
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).
Taleb's reply: Against Value-at-Risk(Edit:VaR): Nassim Taleb Replies to Philippe Jorion http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/jorion.html 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) A different (source) but succinct summary: www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/335383 "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.
Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan ARE the turkey. Happy TurkeyDay, Jamie!!!!...Lulz...8D
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. -hat4uk
Taleb: 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.
Copyright 1997 by Nassim Taleb. That's....Wait for IT....15 Years ago. That's how long, at least, that us Dirty Fuckin hippies have been yelling this warning. Maybe we shoulda been whisperin' instead....;}
Jesse over on Café Americain 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." -hat4uk
"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. " www.fooledbyrandomness.com/jorion.html EXACTLY what I was doing until driven off the ranch by Synthetic Debt Derivative 'options' trading circa Reagan/Greenspan....;}
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. BUWHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ....8D
Just checking in Jim; I had 'puter problems for several days and now I'm connected again. I'm excited to see Saturday's Preakness.
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. Paul Craig Roberts EXACTLY.....BOO
As iron sharpens iron, So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend. -Proverbs 27:17 (NKJV)
As iron sharpens iron, So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend. -Proverbs 27:17 (NKJV)
Thanx for the lead in to talk about Israeli's at the USSA tit....;} H.R. 4133, the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012, was introduced into the House of Representatives of the 112th Congress on March 5 “to express the sense of Congress regarding the United States-Israel strategic relationship, to direct the president to submit to Congress reports on United States actions to enhance this relationship and to assist in the defense of Israel, and for other purposes.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) reportedly helped draft the bill, and its co-sponsors include Republicans Eric Cantor and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Democrats Howard Berman and Steny Hoyer. Hoyer is the Democratic whip in the House of Representatives, where Cantor is majority leader. Ros-Lehtinen heads the Foreign Affairs Committee. The House bill basically provides Israel with a blank check drawn on the U.S. taxpayer to maintain its “qualitative military edge” over all of its neighbors combined. It requires the White House to prepare an annual report on how that superiority is being maintained. The resolution passed on May 9 by a vote of 411–2 on a “suspension of the rules,” which is intended for non-controversial legislation requiring little debate and a quick vote." The AustroHungarian Empire could only dream of having the KAiser do the same....And history calls THAt a blank cheque....LMFAO A Congress with a 10% Approval cast a 411-2 vote for Israel....8D Feel like a Third World Country yet?
Wondered why RedLeg checked in. Seems if anyone but me posts here, it gets checked.....;} Still going with Bodemeister.
So what happens when a major retailer hires a CEO away from a personal electronic conglomerate who has no experience in retail? This, as reported by Market Watch: J.C. Penney Co. said on Tuesday that it swung to a first-quarter loss of $163 million, or 75 cents a share, from a profit of $64 million, or 28 cents, a year earlier. Sales fell 20% to $3.15 billion. On an adjusted basis, the company said it lost 25 cents a share. Analysts surveyed by FactSet estimated the Plano, Texas-based company to lose 1 cent a share on sales of $3.45 billion. Comparable store sales tumbled 19%, also missing estimates.
I don;t think JPM's gotten out of their position yet. But I do think the FedRes is doing all in their power to cover....;}
The problem with bank runs is that once they start, they don't stop. Look forward to not hearing a WORD about any bank runs anywhere. Except for maybe our closest colonies....and there will have to be video.... like say the Brits... "Machine-guns will for the first time be toted by guards on the London tube. Police special forces, "trained to kill", will wear balaclavas to avoid identification. There are to be naval landing craft roaming the coast off Weymouth and submarines at the ready. The Olympics have become a festival of the global security industry, with a running and jumping contest as a sideshow. No one in government dares call a halt. Nero in his prime could not have squandered so much money on circuses. O Boy! Walking past Mask wearing Mercs with shoot to kill mentality on the way to Fun& Games.... sounds like Berlin 1936 on steroids....8D
Silver's $2 away from a 50% retracement and the Conventional Wisdom is that the Bull Market for PM's is STILL intact....;} And oil. And cotton....not so much....;} Mr Margin Calling on Line 1, sir. Says it's urgent....
Now Simulposting TM to me...;} at
The MSM should stop harping on Greece, its done. The real story is what will Greece's bust bring about. Watch MET and PRU now. They're in the vortex.
Lone speed...looks like a good bet. Morning Line odds 8/5 aren't generous though. Best of luck!
An interesting world you live in:) However, when I think things are "normal" I just check in here to see what you have to post. BTW, the weather cooled down quite a bit in Central TX.
As iron sharpens iron, So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend. -Proverbs 27:17 (NKJV)
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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....;}
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Just checking in Jim; I had 'puter problems for several days and now I'm connected again. I'm excited to see Saturday's Preakness.
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Still going with Bodemeister.
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