Excuse me while I call my bookie, er broker...

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica: "Bookmaking is the gambling practice of determining odds and receiving and paying off bets on the outcome of sporting events (particularly horse racing), political contests, and other competitions." Bookmakers ("bookies") usually don't bet their own money, they try to create a "book" in which betters compete with each other. The bookmaker tries to build the book in such a way that regardless the outcome of the competition, the bookmaker pays out less than collected. In reality, that's easier said than done. To protect themselves, bookies limit their exposure to losses either by limiting the size of the bets or placing an offsetting bet with a larger bookmaker. The article goes on to say that several heavily capitalized bookmakers have emerged that only accept bets from other bookmakers.

This  financial arrangement can also be described as a contract between two counterparties where in exchange for a premium, the seller pays the buyer a sum of money if a specified event occurs to the reference entity. Now it turns out that if the specified event is a credit default instead of beating the spread, and the reference entity is a corporation instead of your favorite team, and you call your broker instead of your bookie to place the order, it's called a hedge. Instead of being gambler, you are an investor. And instead of placing a bet with a bookmaker or "the house," you place a trade with a financial services firm.  These  firms will give you 199 to 1 odds on your bet, er, investment. They'll sell you a contract called a Credit Default Swap for a 50 basis point spread per year. For a $5,000 investment, you can make a million. In comparison, the odds of Freddie Couples winning the Masters this year are 80 to 1.

But wether you are placing a bet at a swanky casino or investing with a bulge bracket Wall Street bank, there is one expectation above all - that the house can and will pay. Only a small time bookie wouldn't pay, right? We all know what happens to bookies who don't pay. Imagine the consequences if a casino didn't pay off a record bet they accepted. All hell would break lose. 

Most of you are probably familiar with the story of the MIT Blackjack Team. Students and former students from MIT and Harvard formed a team of highly skilled card counters. The team offered a prospectus to raise capital ("stake") and reportedly made an annualized return of more than 250%. Most of them were eventually caught and politely barred from playing anymore. Semyon Dukach, one of the members of the MIT team, wrote an interesting piece called The Real Cause of the Financial Crisis: An MIT Blackjack Team Perspective.

Car Czars

We have had vigorous debate about the government's helping of Detroit (see GM: General Mess). I have argued there is no 'saving' of GM and Chrysler except through bankrupcy, at least not through loan programs as proposed by the government. So, I'm reading a WSJ article about Obama's "Auto Task Force" describing their approach.

AIG Revisited- Good Money After Bad?

Back in September, 2008 we discussed why a collapse of AIG would be so detrimental to the entire economy. Not that it wasn't a moral hazard to save them, but rather that the ripple effects would extend well beyond Wall St. Julio recently pointed out that it would incompetent if the Fed did not perform due diligence to know the bonuses were in place. Whether they had enough time to determine that, I don't know (it all happened so fast), but they did decide to save AIG for the larger purpose of preventing an entire economic collapase via a ripple effect of evil.

Who's that greedy?

One of my favorite Internet sparring partners in the evolution debate is a Hare Krishna devotee who teaches English in South Korea¹. I debate with him on a message board for expat English teachers. Unlike most fundamentalist Christians who posit a 6,000 year old universe, Hare Krishnas seem to believe the universe is trillions of years old. What actually brings them into conflict with science is while the best evidence points to modern humans being about 130,000 years old the Hare Krishnas believe modern humans have been around for millions of years. And by modern I mean MODERN. Millions of years ago humans were zipping around the sky in TIE fighters and nuking each other with hydrogen bombs. Since both science and his religious teachings can't both be right, and science doesn't at all seem to support the truth of his religious teachings, science is a closed-minded conspiracy seeking to spread its atheistic views. Hence, it has to go.

Offshoring backlash in high tech

There's nothing like rising unemployment to stoke the debate about offshoring. This EE Times (WSJ for tech) article reports that over one million tech jobs were lost to offshoring in 2008. The question is whether this is a net benefit or cost. Generally, it is agreed that investors and consumers benefit and that dislocated jobs are forever lost. However, offshoring can also mean the difference between having a profitable business or not, or even being able to start a new one.

Are you stupid or have you known this all along?

That's a question my former boss and mentor used to ask when you really screwed up. It was asked half in jest but the staff knew it often signaled the beginning of the end for someone's career at the company. This is the first of what I hope won't be too many semi-irregular posts rhetorically asking this beautifully simple question.  First up are Liddy, Geithner, Bernanke, Frank, and Dodd.

Wal-Mart saves you more, I'll save you the math

This popped up in my Yahoo News:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090319/ts_nm/us_walmart_bonus_2

The Chinese Connection To Competitive Devaluations

For at least several months now, Chinese officials have been lobbing sharp tongued critiques toward the U.S. and its policy makers. The Chinese, who mastered proverbs long before the West, should know that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Let's back up and recap a bit. During Treasury Secretary Geithner's confirmation hearings, he said that Obama "backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists - believes that China is manipulating its currency."

The Daily Cramer

Sometimes TV really is worth watching. Case in point: Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Regardless of what you think of The Daily Show, this week has been spectacular and may just crescendo tonight. Why? What's going on that it bears mention on a financial blog? Well, Stewart began this week by taking a comedic swipe at Jim Cramer and CNBC, which summarily got right out of hand.

Dot Com Week - The Paul Allen Effect effect on post surgical recovery

There is, or was, a thing called the "Paul Allen Effect". Paul Allen is the co-founder of Microsoft and was usually cited as the third or fourth richest man in the world. Allen is barely heard of outside of the Pacific Northwest but in Seattle and Portland he was on par with Rameses II. The guy built great monuments: stadiums, museums, office complexes. Allen, as some might know, got cancer in the early days of Microsoft. He left to fight his cancer. After remission, he never really went back. He was probably only a millionaire a hundred times over back then but even back then he figured he had enough money to last a lifetime, and understood that lifetime could be foreshortened, so why punch a clock? A fan of Jimi Hendrix, he learned to play guitar. He opened a museum in Seattle devoted to rock 'n' roll (originally it was supposed to be a museum devoted to Hendrix but there was a falling out early on between Allen and the Hendrix family). He built a football stadium in downtown Seattle, despite a city plebiscite rejecting it!

Congress denies itself a raise

I'm a posting roll right now, so here is more outrage for you: a headline describing the $410 billion spending bill just passed the Senate caught my eye. Looking into some of the provisions, I see that Congress increased its own budget by 10%. Ten percent is a whopping increase. Last I checked, the number of people and employees in Congress didn't change much, let alone by 10%. You really have to wonder where that money goes.

The Citi Rally

You may have noticed the market rallied some 6.4% today. Why such a big move? An internal memo from Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit was made public. In the memo, found here, Vikram extols the solid profitability of Citigroup so far this year. In fact, he says "we are profitable through the first two months of 2009 and are having our best quarter-to-date performance since the third quarter of 2007". Well, that's good news indeed. If Citi is on the mend, then the governments fixes may be working and/or perhaps the economy is not deteriorating as fast as feared.

Dot Com Week - a personal history

If you didn't guess from Julio's post, we decided it is "dot com week" here at TLRB. Actually, we are a week early- the true top of the dot com mania was officially March 10, 2000. We used the NASDAQ's all time peak to call the date. More specifically, the index stood at 5,048.62 which is a stunning figure compared to today's 1,321 and 2,000 around Thanksgiving, 1998.

Just one word. Are you listening? Silicon.

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Silicon.”  That’s what Benjamin would have heard thirty years later. Forget about the “new economy.” Don’t worry about who’s going to win the processor wars or who will dominate the Internet and the World Wide Web. It doesn’t matter who wins as long as it drives infrastructure. The Silicon machine tool industry seemed like a pretty good place to be in 1995.  And for the most part it was, until the dot.com bubble burst and Sarbanes-Oxley came along.