Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Black Monday crash of 1987, which was something that everyone’s favorite cynic Mr. Taleb would call a Black Swan event.

It would have been nice to look back and reminisce, if it were not for the fact that post August, the markets aren’t exactly healthy today, either.

And in related news, Wallstrip turned a year old this week.  And they celebrated it by talking about one of the two most profitable areas (not sex, since Lindsay Cambpell makes up for it) — guns.

Finally, I’ll be off the weekend and probably a bit for next week. I’m going on a trip to the Smokeys with folks and Lana to hopefully catch some fall colors, so see all you wonderful readers sometime next week.

Have a good weekend, all!

The MIT Technology review has an interesting two part write-up on the quant meltdown from this August.

Extremely interesting and a must-read.

A quick look at the market the past few days would suggest that the banks and other financial institutions are having a particularly bad time. Most of it is the remnant effect of the sub-prime mortgage tomfoolery that everybody happily part-took in, but the other half is the serious credit crunch that’s been going on in the market.

And of course, a lot of this originated from the fact that these guys decided to sell asset-backed securities when their very assets were in question. So, our beloved (I use that term very loosely, of course) treasury department decides that that is not a good thing.

What do these guys do? Citi, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America decide to come together and build a $100 billion Structured Investment Vehicle backed by - get this - more asset backed commercial paper. Heh.

Quite aptly, the folks at Dealbreaker have termed this “master” SIV as The Entity.