Paul's Blog
Tax, Cut, Sell, Or…
First my standard disclaimer, Economics Makes My Brain Hurt. I am but a mathematician, and businessman, I suppose. And although I cannot and do not claim to know anything about running a country (which is […]
Blogs
Paul's Blog
Numbers People And Symbols People
Are you a numbers person or a symbols person? You should instinctively know the answer. Let’s step back a bit, are you a cat person or a dog person? A cat person? Like me then. […]
Paul's Blog
Society Has Finally Risen To The Level Of Its Own Incompetence
The Peter Principle (named after Dr Lawrence Peter) is the idea that people “rise to the level of their own incompetence.” Originally it was proposed in a humorous book published in 1968 but has since […]
Paul's Blog
The New Empress’s Clothes
I apologize in advance for this mini blog. But you all now expect me to get things off my chest, and I do like to tell it how I see it. Nevertheless this still pains […]
Paul's Blog
G20 End Of Term Report: B Minus, Could Do Better – See The Teacher
As I write this I have not seen details of the G20’s agreement and related events. So I’m going by soundbites and rumours that I’ve heard in the last few hours. Nevertheless, I can’t resist […]
Paul's Blog
Good Risk Management Techniques Do Already Exist
In the popular press I keep reading about how quant models need to be improved. It’s not as simple as that, but nor is it so subtle for the journalists to have to dumb down. […]
Paul's Blog
Control Reversal
There’s a well known phenomenon in aerodynamics in which a plane’s flight controls appear to do the opposite of what is intended. This can happen at high speed, for example. (I have a vague memory […]
Paul's Blog
Copulas and Cults
Felix Salmon has written an interesting piece on the copula model. Naturally the model does not come out well. He quotes me, accurately, as disapproving, to put it mildly, of models that depend on correlations […]
Paul's Blog
How Are Those Toxic Contracts Coming Along, Guys?
When it was first proposed that banks should put all their troubled or toxic assets into separate banks or vehicles I bet some of you smarter quants were jumping for joy. Up until then you’d […]
Paul's Blog
In Praise of Ponzi
Well not really, of course. But there are some people quietly sitting pretty… As it becomes generally accepted that the economy of the west is a giant Ponzi scheme, one should reflect on its positive […]