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Take it backAdventures in Sky Flying
Excellent and fascinating video by National Geographic on Dean S. Potter – climber, rope-walker and BASE jumper.
Archive for December, 2009
Visualizing Bank Failures
Fascinating visualization of US bank failures by the folks at Computational Legal Studies.
The interesting thing to note, of course, are the three key takeaways:
- Acceleration: There were four failures in the first six months of 2008, followed by another 22 failures in the next six months. By January of 2009, there were 21 failures in the first three months of the year, followed by 138 from April to last Friday.
- Magnitude: Failures in the past two years have cost the Depositors Insurance Fund an estimated $57B. The IndyMac failure of July 2008 accounted for $10B alone, followed by BankUnited at $4.9B and Guaranty Banks at $3B.
- Spatial Correlation: There is a significant amount of spatial correlation in California, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Illinois. These states account for 77% of the total costs to the Depositors Insurance Fund. Furthermore, most of the losses in California and Georgia were concentrated highly around a few urban centers.
(Link du jour Paul Kedrosky)
Berkshire Hathaway Class B Split
Following Berkshire Hathaway’s SEC filing last Friday, I received the ballot to vote on the splitting of Berkshire Hathaway Class B stock.
To me, it is an unfortunate sign because this would effectively invite every option trader to speculate on Berkshire Hathaway — and BRK will move away from being one of the few remaining investment equities and go towards being a speculative equity (although, one may argue that all equities are by definition speculative).
Doing some rough math, the number of Class B shares would go up from ~47 million to potentially ~2.33+ billion. And that would also raise the issuing maximum from the current 57.7 million to 3.23 billion.
Cheap options and easier buy = higher noise and higher volatility.
We should all rejoice, for it signifies the return of Gen Braham, the rather Unintelligent Speculator.
