Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
March 25, 2011 marks the hundred year anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. One hundred forty-six workers perished in a blaze that engulfed the ten story Asch Building in lower Manhattan. Most were young seamstresses who worked six days a week for a...
The SEC’s Problem With the First Amendment
The SEC’s approach to regulating US securities markets relies on controlling speech: they compel “disclosures”, prohibit certain statements, and impose onerous requirements on others. All of this is difficult to reconcile with the First...
Conflict Over Risk Management: A Case Study
Conflict is a recurring problem for financial risk management. At your own firm, are risk managers dismissed as “risk police”? Are risk committee meetings contentious? Do traders hoard information? If you answered “yes” to some of these, you...
What Exactly is an Infinitesimal?
During the 1800s, mathematicians, and especially Cauchy, finally got around to rigorizing calculus. They got rid of the “infinitesimal” business once and for all, replacing infinitesimals with limits. It is troubling how widespread misunderstanding of calculus is 150 years later. Instead of understanding calculus from Cauchy’s rigorous standpoint, people embrace a hodge-podge of infinitesimals AND limits.
More Questions Than Answers
For the past four years, I have been living with a mystery—a real-life mystery about some things that weren’t supposed to happen but did anyway. Today I will share with you what has been going on, at least to the extent my limited knowledge—and my fear of a...
I’ll Be Gone. You’ll Be Gone.
In his new book The Accidental Investment Banker, Jonathan Knee introduces us to the phrase IBG YBG, which means “I’ll be gone. You’ll be gone.” This might be whispered between investment bankers when an inconvenient fact comes to light during...
The Trend is Your Friend: Value-at-Risk and Amaranth
This week, Jeff Skilling received a well-deserved sentence of 24 years for his creativity at Enron. I wouldn’t take the sentence too seriously. Remember that Mike Milken—the Junk Bond King of the 1980s—was sentenced to ten years. After two years, he was...