7/13/10
CLOSED SYSTEMS OF PHYSICS AND FINANCE
(Li)took a notoriously tough nut-determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related-and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.
For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of financial legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.
His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched-and was making people so much money-that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.
Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008-when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.
....Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.
-Felix Salmon
Dr. Li, after publishing his formula, returned to China in 2008 and has been curiously silent during the debate over the causes and culprits behind the crash. But in the ultimate twist to the story, he has returned to Beijing where he is in charge of the risk management department of China International Capital Corporation.
-Farrell
7/9/10
6/26/10
6/25/10
AN ERA AND CONCEPT LEFT IN THE ISLAND'S
Any discussion of financial policy by any politician of any political party affiliation in any nation that does not begin with a call to restore the power of money creation and issuance to the government in such a capacity that it is made to serve the public good and not the private rapacity of a banking class, is merely deception, and deception for a very simple reason. The big secret of money is not that it must represent something, but rather that it must represent someone. As such, there are really only two basic models of money known to history, the first model, where money represents a debt interest-bearing note - the "something" - created by a private monopoly-the "someone" - for its own class interest and profit; and the second model, where money represents a receipt for goods and services - the "something" - produced by a state's people - the "someone" - who through the agency of their state issue that money to themselves, debt free.
The problem of money is thus not even the what nor the how much, but the who, i.e., the who behind its issuance. The first model is a kind of "false alchemy" or a technology of black magic, for it is ultimately a technology to gain the mastery over the will, genius, and productive activity of a people, and ultimately, over the physical medium itself. And it is all based, as we shall now see, on a breathtaking series of historical, conceptual, and physical deceptions, and these can only exist so long as there are those unwilling to unmask the deception, or so long as there are those who acquiesce to that system and are unwilling to free themselves from its chains.
-Farrell
6/17/10
6/10/10
RAINY DAY HOBBY
"Outwardly, however, in our 'official' utterances, we shall adopt an opposite procedure, and always do our best to appear honourable and co-operative. A statesman's words do not have to agree with his acts. If we pursue these principles, the Governments and peoples which we have thus prepared will take our I.O.U.'s for cash. One day they will accept us as benefactors and saviours of the human race. If any State dared to resist us, if its neighbours make common cause with it against us, we will unleash a world war...
"By all these methods we shall so wear down the nations that they will be forced to offer us world domination. We shall stretch out our arms like pincers in all directions, and introduce an order of such violence that all peoples will bow to our domination."
-Translation from "The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion" by Ralph Manheim and Victor Gollancz, 1944.
6/3/10
NO UPHEAVAL AS OF YET
A distinguished British scholar John M. Allegro has written a sensational book that is certain to cause the greatest upheaval in orthodox Christian thinking since Charles Darwin said Man was descended from the ape.
Such a claim, such a challenge, to orthodox belief, coming as it does from one of the country’s leading experts in his field, is something of a religious H-bomb—threatening a shattering fall-out.
The controversy it will arouse must certainly lead to furious and acrimonious debates and schisms that will divide, not only Christians but Jews, Mohammedans and others whose religions have their origins in the areas covered by Mr. Allegro’s researches.
It is a fundamental challenge. To many it might suggest not only that there was no Christ or Moses.
“When I left the Royal Navy in 1947 I began to train for the Methodist Ministry as a theological student at
“Then came my appointment as the first British representative on the Dead Sea Scrolls editing team in
From my work on these texts, the next step was a re-examination of New Testament names and titles, and to the realization that more lay behind them than was generally appreciated.
“And so I probed deeper—to the very beginnings of civilization. To Sumeria.-Sunday Mirror
April 5th, 1970
