Hmmmm?

As I understand, part of what the "quants" do is take advantage of very small short duration pricing differences. So you might buy a million shares of Ford stock at $50.00 a share, then sell them 1 second later at $50.0001 per share, for a tidy $100 profit. Repeat with different stocks every second, and suddenly you're making $360,000 an hour. The problems as I see it are twofold. First, I'm not sure what value this brings to the market. Does mankind as a whole benefit because the prices of stocks are now "more representative of actual market value" to the nanosecond? Secondly, the way to make money in this game is by spending ever-increasing amounts of money and shaving every nanosecond you can out of the decision process (to the point where traders are colocating inside the exchanges to get their packets physically closer to the servers). In electrical terms, you're cranking up the gain and the bandwidth in the feedback loop. If you keep doing this, the system will spontaneously burst into high-amplitude, high-frequency oscillation. If your PA amp does this, you blow a tweeter. When your stock market does this, your economy crashes. So I don't see the advantage of continuing this race to the bottom.

You're applying a 30-year old experience to present day prediction and it's= not going to work out real well. Dept Labor projects a full 30% decline in= semiconductor industry related employment in the US over the next 10 years= , and that is probably optimistic. The people of today graduating with rese= arch scientist grade of education are ending up hacking away in relatively = obscure applications programming positions. You can also expect major cuts = in the usual government funded waste-holes. This country is about to get a = real rude reality check quite soon.

Maybe , but you notice that Ann Arbor is the /only/ area in the state of Michigan not plagued by 30% or more unemployemnt and a 12 year running major recession.

And you know this how?

We don't particularly have a productivity problem. Actual productive capacity is very seldom the constraint these days...

Financialization might be a problem, but if it is, it's hard to unknot.

Are you sure about that?

-- Les Cargill

Right.

I think it puts more "signal" into it. I suspect, anyway.

If it works better, these guys win. If these guys win, the thing becomes more general and returns go up.

Right. Something similar happened when telegraphy began, and again when TTY and that sort of thing came online.

If I had to guess, it's more like negative feedback - this sort of thing would tend to damp oscillations more than increase them.

I don't hold with the "race to the bottom" thing, so...

My concern would be that it is in effect "numerological", but in that case, it'll go away on its own...

-- Les Cargill

Just how does one 'skim' a voluntary transaction and how did you decide the money 'belongs' to 'other people'?

Someone obviously thinks it's of value or else they wouldn't pay them.

Speaking of parasites...

I trust government 'economic engineering' even less than 'parasites'.

They do nothing but buy and sell in millisecond time frames. What they make is a constant drain on the exconomy and on traditional investing, where people bought shares in companies that produced something.

Government has got to tax something... it always has. Tax policies can help the economy, or can hurt it. Tax policy steers behavior. The US now has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and lets money brokers off very easy. So we have less manufacturing, less industry, and more money brokers.

We should have tax policies that encourage true investment and job creation. We have, mostly, the opposite.

Dream on old man.

One of the highest nominal corporate tax rates, and loads of loopholes, which turns it into one of the lower actual corporate tax rates in terms of money actually collected.

Not exactly. Your fundamental tax policy is to let the very rich and politically powerful pay less tax (per dollar of income) than those less well-connected. That's not spelled out anywhere in your antiquated constitution, but that's the way it works in practice.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ah, kindly old Thompson is concerned about other people being insufficiently nice. After recently bragging that he always gets even, and worked 15 years to destroy someone's career.

Brietbart was cool, funny, honest, and had integrity. Those are rare qualities these days.

and it's not going to work out real well. Dept Labor projects a full 30% decline in semiconductor industry related employment in the US over the next 10 years, and that is probably optimistic. The people of today graduating with research scientist grade of education are ending up hacking away in relatively obscure applications programming positions. You can also expect major cuts in the usual government funded waste-holes. This country is about to get a real rude reality check quite soon.

My gut feeling is the glory days of semiconductors is over. Thank god I was corporate when the stock options were sinfully good. Today the market doesn't care much about semis. I won't even waste my time in another start-up unless the intent is simply to form a company and pay the insiders, much like a law firm. Semiconductors is like printing money if you do it right, but the market doesn't care. There is something to be said if you can get royalties on the chips, must like Arm.

What I don't agree with is the "government funded waste-holes" comment. Basic research is not a waste. Hell, I still think Solyndra was a good deal if someone else takes over the plant, or we ditch Bush's MFN approach to China and charge import duties to protect our domestic market.

These idiots on Fox (yes that is redundant) don't realize that Solyndra was thin film, not silicon solar cells. In terms of payback in regards to energy to produce the device, thin film produces the energy required to manufacture it much faster than silicon solar cells. In fact, China buys the raw wafers from the US just so that the energy intensive proportion of the business is done elsewhere.

Here's the deal. Anyone who works in a real manufacturing environment knows that the value of the company is not changing in microsecond time. So it is not like some analyst (whom I believe are pretty stupid anyway, just using Rambus as an example) is predicting the future of the company on a microsecond by microsecond basis.

That is an op-ed piece. I assume the Adam Smith center is a UK teabagger outfit.

The deal is once you put the tax in place, the transactions would decrease, which in turn reduces the revenue from the tax. Still I think it is a good thing, and the tax is not unprecedented since such a tax was in place for many years.

Starting with zero tax revenue, how do you reduce that?

=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

Shirley Sherrod might not agree the about "funny" and "honest" and probably doesn't think that he "had integrity". Brietbart's dishonestly edited version of her speech got her fired - unjustly.

Brietbart's defence - that he was dishonestly libelling the NAACP rather than Sherrod - doesn't exactly strike me as cool, but I'm probably not the right kind of racist to appreciate whatever subtle humour might have been involved.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It is. It dates back to the Thatcher period, and heartily endorsed Thatcher's demented poll tax.

I think you missed a step in the argument - first you introduce the Tobin Tax (which makes money) then the stock market traders realise that churning shares causes them to pay a lot of Tobin Tax, and in due course the amount of churning - and the tax generated - will go down. Since you seem to favour the tax because it will discourage churning, you should have been able to follow the sequence.

It's all pretty obvious if you think about it. You may be able to get lessons on thinking from your local university - Tulane should have taught you about that, but you were too busy learning about how to make money to waste time on learning how to think.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

not going to work out real well. Dept Labor projects a full 30% decline in semiconductor industry related employment in the US over the next 10 years, and that is probably optimistic. The people of today graduating with research scientist grade of education are ending up hacking away in relatively obscure applications programming positions. You can also expect major cuts in the usual government funded waste-holes. This country is about to get a real rude reality check quite soon.

Did you have a bad day, Fred? Who said anytihng about semiconductors?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Who taught you to be such a tedious fathead?