General linkiness

[unixronin]

Cotton candy is a glass.

Chris Christie sets a reporter to rights for calling him confrontational (via rosencrantz23).

The SR-71 flight manual is now available online.  (Well, OK, it will be again in a couple of days after they rebuild their database, which crashed under the traffic load.)

A back-of-the-envelope estimate of the scale of the BP Deepwater Horizons well plume, based on some simple analysis and deduction, via Examiner.com.

And last but not least, the Agonist on financial crashes, "algo trading", and the financial markets.  Did you know banks could borrow money from the Fed at 0% interest, then invest it straight back into Treasury bills at 3.5%?  Do the math, and remember whose pocket that bond interest ultimately comes out of.  But wait!  It gets better!  If there's a deficit — and when isn't there a deficit these days? — the Fed has to de facto borrow the money to pay off those T-bills when they come due.  (I wonder what interest rate the Fed pays on the money...?)

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The article seems to imply only a handful of banks get that 0% rate. I don't know if that's correct.

It does put a bit of a different complexion on it if it applies only to overnight rates though. Of course, one could argue that daily churn doesn't actually cost the bank anything; they just have to make the same transaction 365 times a year.

$45 billion annual profit from the Fed isn't to be sneezed at. Unfortunately it's a drop in the bucket of current spending.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

The investorwords.com site says The Fed doesn't directly set the rate, but makes its preferences known through selective buying and selling. I'd call it analogous to being the dealer at a poker table where the players can lend to each other. If one player were getting a flat 0%, I suspect the other players would want to know why.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Also, I've only skimmed the article, because I clocked almost 55 hours this week and I'm exhausted. I did note that he was approaching hysteria regarding last week's half-hour crash, but fails to mention the automated trading holds that would have stopped all trading had the markets sunk much lower than they did.

I don't remember what the percentage-drop triggers are, but I do recall the NYSE saying it had a half-hour hold and a 4-hour hold built in to its computers, and that two half-hour holds in a day would result in all trading stopped for the day.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The "Flash Crash" was pretty interesting in a lot of ways, I think, not least because some of the stop-loss triggers apparently did not work, and because the NASDAQ selectively chose to retroactively cancel some, but not all, of the trades involved.

I have no doubt there will be more investigation.