What good is Wall Street?

Is the title of this new very long article by John Cassidy of New Yorker. It is a balanced article. It shows how Wall Street which started for a useful purpose of channelising savings of surplus units to deficit units has become just a trading and speculating street. Earlier bulk of revenues and profits came from first activity and now from second activity.

He interviews practitioners, policymakers and economists on their view of finance and its usefulness. He discusses many issues related to financial sector- compensation issues, lobbying, economic research etc..

To sum up, Wall Street is obviously useful but has become too big and is mostly doing useless activities now. A very nice weekend reading.

Is Ireland solvent?

In most probability the answer is yes. Here is Wolfgang Münchau and Raphael Cottin on eurointelligence drawing 4 scenarios for the Irish economy.

A note on European Financial Stability Facility

This is a very interesting topic and have missed writing on this despite the hype. I covered it in May 2010 but not after that.

As Greece crisis shaped up and Europeans threw the bailout towel after months of denial, European Financial Stability Facility was set up. EFSF was agreed on 9 May 2010 and incorporated in Luxembourg on 7 June 2010.

 The facility is a SPV structure.  The funding structure is like this:

Nokia’s nudge to save power

I was charging my Nokia mobile phone. I noticed this message as phone was fully charged:

Battery Full.  Save Energy and remove charger from wall socket.

Interesting nudge to save power. Most of the time we forget to take the charger off from the socket.

In many places you just have these sockets to plug the charger and there is no switch. So the default setting is just plug in and charge the phone. Hence, once the mobile is charged, people forget to take off the charger (atleast I do).

Just a few days ago this blog pointed Reliance Communications is nudging! And now Nokia. Simple nudges make a difference.