Bring a problem parties - speed therapy

Sometimes, when you are talking to someone, you come on an idea that makes so much sense you are surprised that it has not been thought of before. Often these ideas are not anyone's in particular: they emerge somehow in the conversation. Bring a problem parties are an idea like that.

To begin with, three observations. First, a pint is about the right length to talk over many problems. A pint shared lasts half an hour. With a good interlocutor, there is not much that you can't get some helpful insight on in half an hour. Second, independent advice on problems - be they emotional, practical or technical - is often useful. OK, I wouldn't ask the check out person in my local supermarket for advice on solving a high dimensional PDE, but often a random stranger can be helpful. Third, speed dating proves that if an experience is potentially interesting and short enough that a bad encounter is soon forgotten, then (some) people will sign up.

So, bring a problem parties. A selection of people, each with a problem. They are randomly matched into pairs, with one person selected as the solver, the other as the questioner. The questioner buys the drinks and presents his or her problem. The solver tries to help. After half an hour, a bell rings, and another round begins, with solvers as questioners and vice versa. Four rounds would be two hours, and you would be guaranteed two perspectives on your problem. It would also make for a more interesting evening than most. If you franchise it, cut me in please.

Inefficient Units of Currency

By Joseph Streckert, from the Canadian literary magazine McSweeney's:

• Children
  
• Millstones
  
• Imaginary euros*
  
• Copies of Now That's What I Call Music! Vol. 7**
  
• Pieces of long-grain rice that are not actually very long
  
• Unicorn heads
  
• Canadian dollars

*Arguably, the ECU (which worked perfectly well as a currency) was imaginary.

**Vol. 7 is I suspect now a collector's item. The current volume is 73.

Creativity

A lovely rant from Jenny Diski on the LRB blog:

... I’m left wondering what the word ‘creative’ means to people who can overcome difficulty by just being creative. It seems to be like an ingredient that’s available down the shops. If it’s necessary, you’ll get some and use it. Need to produce something? ‘Oh, just think creatively.’ I want to say, how do you think creatively? What is thinking creatively? But I don’t want to let on that I’m ignorant of a process everyone else seems to understand perfectly.

It’s a word I’ve never been able to use because I don’t know what it means really. Creative writing? As opposed to? Does it mean imaginative? OK, now imagination is called for. Right, there you go. How confident everyone seems to be about having the ability to be creative, and knowing what to do with it, and how very little effect it seems to have on the vast majority of products it is sprinkled on.

I especially like `Creative writing? As opposed to?'

Goldman humour

From John Kemp via Felix Salmon:

Titled Coffee

This blog was named partly in honour of a system that does actually work well, coffee in Italy. It's good, it's cheap, it enhances many people's lives, and there is a modest living to be made in it. Given my proclivities, I should probably have used Deus ex presso instead, but I liked the partial homophony of macchiato better. Anyway, here's your link of the morning -- high does of coffee have some preventative effect against Alzheimer's. Apparently. Of course like most people I prefer to pay attention to those articles which laud the benefits of things I like (red wine, coffee, ...) and ignore those that mention how harmful they are.

Entrepreneurship

From Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, via the LRB blog.

These individuals were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review by some bright young person from the London Review of Books but by a lack of custom and a prompt foreclosure.

I have no comment, really, I just like his turn of phrase.

Goat backed securities

And other goat derivatives. I'm not joking. The BBC is, though. (This link may not work if you are outside the UK - I'm not entirely sure, but my apologies if it doesn't.)

Being Boring

I saw the Severn Bore over the Bank Holiday. It wasn't a particularly big bore, as these things go, but it was still impressive. The oddest thing of all, though, was that the cows in the field we were in all lined up to look at it.

Strained, but not entirely silly banking system metaphor no. 152

Happy Easter to all. Deus Ex will return on Monday or thereabouts.

Strained, but not entirely silly banking system metaphor no. 151

Support the government

While we cannot of course in any way support Jacqui Smith in the current expenses row, honestly if you were married to the Home Secretary, wouldn't you need a lot more than a few minutes watching Jodie Marsh, or whoever, to get you through the day?

Gearing up for trouble

Even by the intolerably low standards of this blog, this one is going to be obscure...

I want to talk about gears. Bicycle gears. For ordinary people, rather than, say, drug crazed Americans who have recently broken their collar bones. So, what does a reasonable rider want from his or her gears?

• A bottom gear that is low enough to get up most hills. In practice unless you are really fit that means a gear of 42* or lower.
  
• A top gear that is high enough that you can pedal going down moderate hills. 100 is plenty.
  
• A fine spacing of gears in between.
  
• And in particular a relatively gentle change from the little to the big ring at the front.

It doesn't sound like much, does it? Yet pretty much all standard gear set-ups from the large manufacturers fail on one or more of these criteria. 39/53 or 39/52 at the front gives far too big a change. You want at most a difference of ten cogs, I would suggest, or the change up is too jarring.

To get a bottom gear of 40 with a front ring of 42, you need a big cog on the back of more than 27. You can't buy one. So that means that 42/52 at the front doesn't work either.

By this point we have eliminated all of the standard front gears available. What does work is 38/48 on the front, and 13/25 or 13/27 at the back. This gives a top gear of a shade under 100, a bottom gear around 40, and a relatively gentle change between rings. But that requires custom front rings. Why does it have to be so hard?

* The gear in inches is given by dividing the number of teeth at the front by the number at the back and multiplying by the wheel size (usually 27) in inches. The biggest gear is therefore the largest ring at the front through the smallest at the back: the lowest is the small ring at the front through the big ring at the back.

Strained, but not entirely silly banking system metaphor no. 150

Sunday Competition

Is it a Barclays tax structurer or is it a carnivorous plant? A tricky one I know so take your time.

A little light relief

"Knock knock"

"Who's there?"

"Maybe it's a big horse*."

"Maybe it's a big horse who?"

"Maybe it's a big horse I'm a Londoner that I love London town**."

[Hat tip the Guardian Diary.]

* Gratuitous Mark Wallinger reference.

** Classic footage here.

A warning from Bishopsgate

More solid, responsible journalism from the Daily Mash:

The Royal Bank of Scotland is just days away from imploding like that house in Poltergeist, it was claimed said last night.

As the bank's share price plummeted, experts said it was now time to bring in a scary-voiced midget to expel the remaining demons before the entire structure is then devoured by a tiny black hole.

Economist Tom Logan said: "In Poltergeist terms, the chairs have been stacked, the little girl has been sucked into the TV and the Beast has been exorcised without his annual bonus."

He added: "This once again demonstrates the folly of building a major financial institution on top of an old Indian burial ground."

Quite right too: I just wish Robert Peston could be this sensible. Now if only we can get extensive exorcism into the FED's armoury of facilities, perhaps we can beat this thing. All together now: Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus decoctor, ...

Update. While we are talking about RBS, I must mention Simon Hattenstone's wonderful and entirely appropriate attempts to get Fred the Red to say sorry, detailed in the Guardian. It harms all of us in finance that `managers' like Goodwin (I use the term broadly) are not willing to admit their mistakes and say a simple `I'm sorry'. It's not just that he screwed up. It's that he screwed up so royally that it is detracting from the public opinion of my business. And that annoys me.

Three jokes and a purchase

My three favourites from an extensive list at the National Post:

"Get my broker, Miss Jones."
"Yes sir. Stock, or Pawn?"

The problem with investment bank balance sheets is that on the left side nothing is right and on the right side nothing is left.

There's a surgeon, an architect and an economist. The surgeon said, 'Look, we're the most important. God's a surgeon because the very first thing God did was to extract Eve from Adam's rib.' The architect said, 'No, wait a minute, God is an architect. God made the world in seven days out of chaos.' The economist smiled, 'And who made the chaos?'

Normal levels of seriousness will be restored shortly. But in the meantime did I hear correctly that the Munchkins have bought Indymac? Perhaps that is the true route to financial stability: only short blue people who are entirely fictional should be allowed to own banks.

New Year Resolutions

Marina Hyde has a nice column in the Guardian today about new year resolutions. First she makes a good point:

The crucial thing is not to set goals too high. Resolutions should always be incredibly realistic and achievable, so you can despise yourself even more when you fail to live up to them. By way of an example, a friend tells me he "might try and eat slightly healthier snacks when watching sport". See? There is simply no point kidding yourself about thrice-weekly gym visits, but piously denying yourself the fourth tube of Pringles before half-time is a possibility.

She then makes some resolutions for other people:

The rampaging armies of middle-class thrift bores currently laying waste to features sections should resolve to expand their ingenious brainwaves into the sports pages. We've already had our Christmases revolutionised by their suggestions for making our own presents ("Why not melt down 250g of really good quality white chocolate and stir in some nuts and rose petals?" Because it still costs a tenner, you tedious creature.) Now let's see them work their alchemy in the transfer window, starting with solving Arsène Wenger's midfield problems using only a ball of yarn and some really good quality white chocolate.

Hmmm, Frank Lampard in white chocolate? I see him more as a cheaply flavoured soft centre myself, but that could just be me...

Anyway, here are a few more for finance.

• Bankers should resolve to accept that the world has changed now that many banks have significant state ownership. A little humility - just a touch - might be in order.
• Ditto hedgies after Made-off. The regulators are coming: you know it, I know it, and the whole process will be a little less tedious if you could avoid foolish rants about the constraint of free enterprise while it is happening.
• Chicago school economists. The game is up. Please retire somewhere far away and never darken our media again.
• Finance ministers. Just once, for a change, why not actually spend some money on something the country needs. You know, like infrastructure. You might be able to build a credible midfielder from white chocolate, but it works less well for railways.

Holidays in Financial Capitals

With apologies to the Dead Kennedys:

So you been at the bank
For a year or two
And you know you've seen it all
In a company car
Thinkin' you'll go far
Back east your type don't crawl

Play ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin' that you know
How the niggers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul

It's time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear:

It's crunch time in London
It's tough, kid, but it's life
It's crunch time in London
Don't forget crime is rife

You're a star-belly sneech
You suck like a leach
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you

Well you'll work harder
When your group is downsized
For a hundred a day
Slave for bankers
Till you go mad
Then your head is skewered on a stake

Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son:

It's crunch time in London
Money the banks do lack
It's crunch time in London
Where you'll kiss ass or crack

Gor-don Gor-don Gor-don

And it's crunch time in London
Where you'll do what you're told
It's crunch time in London
Where the dole's got so much soul

Warning signs

From Long or Short Capital, apropos Madoff:

If your investment manager is not charging fees, and is “making it up on volume” (more or less), step back and think about that for a second. If you were in Brazil and a whore said she wanted to give you a free sex because she was making it up on volume, what she really means is that you will wake up down a kidney or two. No different with an investment manager.