Nothing 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 closedAuthor: Emanuel Derman
In 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,…
Comments closedNames are destiny, as I’ve observed in a previous blog. The building my son lived in recently “retained the services of Mr Jonathan Flothow, the…
Comments closedwww.edge.org…… has a proposal Can Science Help Solve The Economic Crisis? www.edge.org…… for a group of scientists and economists to collaborate in solving the economic…
Comments closedI just returned from 6 days in Florence and then 2 days in London. In Florence I saw lots. It rained every single day there,…
Comments closedWhen I was in grade school we used to build model airplanes out of kits. The frame was made out precut pieces of balsa wood,…
Comments closedI am in Florence for a few days, having taken a very convenient Delta flight from JFK to PIsa on Thanksgiving evening. On the plane…
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In 1990 when the cold war ended it was fashionable to think about the end of history and the triumph of the benign two-cheers-for-democracy capitalist…
Comments closedIn the current New Yorker, John Lanchester marks the publication of Black-Scholes as the start of modernism in finance, and then remarks: “It seems wholly…
Comments closedEverything comes in flavors these days, even things you see while waiting in drugstores that you don’t want to think or talk about, and so…
Comments closedbut a good cigar is a smoke. Rudyard Kipling understood this. Why does no one else?
Comments closedToday?s economic turmoil, it seems, is an implicit indictment of the arcane field of financial engineering ? a blend of mathematics, statistics and computing. Its…
Comments closedI agree with Paul Wilmott’s latest blog: “For several years now I have been advising that potential investors in funds really need to take their…
Comments closed? Part of the trouble with the economic crisis is that people and firms have an incentive to borrow short term to invest in long-term…
Comments closedThis is a noble proposal, but I remain a bit of a skeptic with respect to the ability of a cohort of scientists and economists…
Comments closedI found the book cover at left on the internet. According to www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3255972/Harry-Potter-fails-to-cast-spell-over-Professor-Richard-Dawkins.html… Richard Dawkins is now worried about the effect of fables on children…
Comments closedThis is a picture of a rare useful expensive-looking corporate gift. See below. ________________________________________________________ Irritants: 1. Invitations to LinkedIn and email reminders that they’re about…
Comments closedFinancial Innovation Conference Vanderbilt University October 16, 2008^ Nashville The Law of Selective Gravity By Leo Melamed There is no way to sugar coat it:…
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