A few years ago someone insisted to me in a conversation that “feelings” didn’t mean the same as “emotions”. I thought about this for a…
Comments closedAuthor: Emanuel Derman
I was on a jury in 1980. At the start the judge cautioned everyone not to discuss the case with their family or friends each…
Comments closedA few months ago I wondered why banks can pay 50% of their revenue in bonuses, and why their profits are so large. One of…
Comments closedNicholas Wade in the NY Times reviews Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, about evolution. The review is at www.nytimes.com…… Wade spends…
Comments closedPrizes are just things handed out by a bunch of people, not by God. God’s ones don’t come with announcements, are harder to identify, even…
Comments closedFrom a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most…
Comments closedEnough with the bailout and Lehman. The papers keep writing about it but they have nothing more to say. Let me rather think about consumer…
Comments closedLast night I held a panel at Columbia about the economic system and the principles that should govern it. One interesting question raised but not…
Comments closedMy first day back in NYC and at 1pm as I was about to reach CPW to go for a run in the park I…
Comments closedI like Santa Fe but ? I can’t tell the difference between a JC Penney’s and The Church of JC Latter Day Saints. Everything looks…
Comments closedEveryone is kicking the poor EMH now that it’s down, some of them quite eloquently and hard. But I’m always on the side of the…
Comments closedI am flying to area code 212 To stab a Concorde into you, To plunge a sword into the gangrene. This is a poem about…
Comments closed“So many riders in the Tour de France have been tossed out because of drugs, the overall leader is now a delivery guy from Empire…
Comments closedI went to the doctor one day last week after a few weeks of feeling ill. My doctor is a very nice man. HIs nurse…
Comments closedI used to be a fountain pen fetishist, craving pretentiously named (Dostoeyevsky, Mozart, Oscar Wilde, ?) limited editions of Mont Blancs that always ended up…
Comments closedLast week I spent a day at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. It’s a sort of institute for advanced study devoted to theoretical physics,…
Comments closedI received an interesting-looking paper which I converted to PDF and posted at www.ederman.com…… Avoiding Economic Crises via the Stochastic Money Supply Falip. O. Lor…
Comments closedNothing personal, but more people with appropriate or inappropriate names: Don Rich and Don Chance, professors and authors of various papers on options pricing. The…
Comments closedIn most schools, you can take some courses Pass/Fail rather than for a grade. If you pass, the course then it counts towards your degree,…
Comments closedEmanuel Derman expected to feel a letdown when he left particle physics for a job on Wall Street in 1985. After all, for almost 20…
Comments closedWhat follows is not in very good taste. In Dec 2006 I wrote the following entry: _____________________________ Some time in the early 1970s Nature magazine…
Comments closedSomeone pointed me to a speech by Paul Volcker in which he says: ‘A year or so ago, my daughter had seen something in the…
Comments closedOn Charlie Rose last night, Charlie played straight man to Larry Summers. “What economist has influenced you most?” Charlie asked. “Keynes,” Summers answered, trying to…
Comments closedThe interesting excerpt below is from a 1950s letter from Normal Mailer to William Styron. “I didn’t write[The] Naked [and the Dead] because I wanted…
Comments closedWhen Moses went up to Mt Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, he left his brother Aaron in charge of the children of Israel. While…
Comments closedPreface A spectre is haunting Markets ? the spectre of illiquidity, frozen credit, and the failure of financial models. Beginning with the 2007 collapse in…
Comments closedis a British historian who has written lots of reviews in the New York Review of Books, including a recent one of Niall Ferguson’s book…
Comments closedLike Paul, I have been thinking a lot about what makes a good model and what makes a bad one. In physics or even biology,…
Comments closedThe complex financial models that got us into this mess too often mask human nature behind false limitations of risk Whirring away at the center…
Comments closedI suggested in a recent blog that people in the financial supply chain be paid in PIKs, in the illiquid securities they participate in creating,…
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