Tag Archives: finance

Things I Learned This Week

Among the things I learned this week:

* Little J.B., a singer who I love from and tried to find more of based on his performance from Super Bad @ 65: A Tribute To James Brown, is Lee Fields (whom I have a few albums). (Courtesy: The New Yorker)

* Stops don’t make sense with country-wide ETFs for anything but day trading because of what it would take for a major price change. (Courtesy: YM)

* The Apollo is a lot smaller than I expected, and seventeen year olds can rock the house. (Courtesy: Wycliffe Gordon’s Jazz A La Carte)

* There is another type of gin, and it is fantastic. (Courtesy: ZS, JSK, and NYC)

* Not enough parents teach their children, some of whom are grown, how to enjoy a meal. (YM’s A and MS’ N)

* Myrna Loy modeled for Gil Elvgren. (Courtesy: Martignette and Meisel)

Trustbusting (To the Brooklyn Posse: TR was the Best)

Today’s NYT discusses some of the parts of Geithner’s new regulatory plan, including this paragraph from the article:

If regulators decided that a company had become “too big to fail,” as was the case with A.I.G. in September, they would subject it to much stricter capital requirements than smaller rivals and much closer scrutiny of its borrowing levels and its trading partners, or counterparties.

Isn’t the more tried and true method of handling these types of companies is to break them apart? And even better yet, prevent them from ever existing? That isn’t to write that additional regulations are a bad idea, just that let’s use some of the tools we already have.

Documents are Documents

For reasons I can’t figure out, Brandeis University is in such dire financial straights that the university has decided to sell its famed art collection housed in the Rose Art Museum.

The university is taking the line that its core mission is to educate its students, but isn’t artwork a learning tool and resource? And is the university also selling its library collection (because both are objects that contain knowledge and are used to build new knowledge)? If not, why not?

These questions are rhetorical because–clearly–I consider the sale of an art collection (especially during “times like these”) to be an educational absurdity that reflects the lack of big-picture thinking on the part of the university.