NYSE & Shorting

The NYSE once had a designated area for the "loan crowd", those wanting to short-sale, with the WSJ publishing loan rates and stock (back when they were a financial publication). The years following Black Tuesday saw the loan crowd's mysterious disappearance from the floor, presumably to stave off Federal prohibition as many blamed shorting for the '29 crash¹. What emerged is the decentralized market for short stock we know today.

The rumor I actually heard was that NYSE officials disallowed the gathering under threat of FBI harassment; however, in seeking to verify this that doesn't seem to be the case.

Apparently there's also a seedier underbelly of investing. Demand has included not merely monetary exchange, but drugs and sex as well.

What Was Your Resolution?

He had another a few weeks ago I really liked too.

Happy New Year everybody. The sky is black outside, the weather is bone chilly.

Quasi-Followup to the Hind's Post

James KA Smith posted an excellent article by surprisingly Mark Lilla: "The President and the Passions".

Of course engaging emotions is something easier said than done. But as Smith points out:

The proper response to this is not to lapse into the rationalist whine about people being governed by their passions and keep hoping they'll be be "rational" like us (we're not). Rather, the point is to harness, direct, and channel the passions. Indeed, if you just paint the passions as "irrational," you've already lost.

Geek Out with the Engineer Guy

last question before q & a from Hind's talk on Return of the Public

Matthew Taylor: A kinda counter-proposal if you like or a different way of looking at this, which is that the one thing that has grown to fill the gap in newspapers left by the decline in investigative journalism has been opinion. There's been a massive growth in opinion: opinion in mainstream media, opinion on the internet of course, and so for me the worry about your proposal is that yes stuff will be commissioned, but it will be commissioned on the same basis it seems that most journalism works, perhaps the way journalism always works, which is I'll start from the story and the story has got to be one which polarizes the matter cause a non-polarizing story is not an interesting story. So journalism has an inherent polarizing quality to it because there is no real disagreement or the people or the supermarket or the government is generally trying to do the right thing is not a story. And so what you lead to is a slightly greater hubbub of people whose interests lies in polarizing disagreements. Now for me the problem is, in terms of public engagement, is less about a lack of information or even less about a diversity of information, it is the construct of most debates is of this form. It is of the form where I saw "I stand for fairness, and Dan stands for unfairness" to which Dan replies, "No, Matthew stands for unfairness; I stand for fairness". And I would say, this is not an exaggeration, 95% of disputation as presented as in the media and politics has that form. What that means is that if you're a member of the public and you're very busy, it's entirely opaque. So you therefore have to rely upon other ways of adjudicating, which maybe comes down to emotions. Who's face do we like most? Who's most like us? Whatever kinda emotional link we can make, and of course we have lots and lots of evidence that people make most of their personal judgments on the this kind of emotional basis. So for me the challenge is not this lack of information, lack of opinion, it is how can you try to structure debates in order that as it were the sides are encouraged to agree about what they disagree about. In order that the public can say "Well in this battle between Tesco and the local community", rather than listening to these attempts to disparage each other and claim some of the things for each other's case, actually both sides are gonna work together to say actually these are genuinely the things we disagree about and therefore the public is in the position to make an informed choice on the basis of a consensus about what it is that is actually at the heart of the matter. Now for me that would be potentially a much more liberating kind of experience than having Tescos are all evil, ministers are all evil, whatever. There's no shortage of that I don't think.

Dan Hind: What you described is in a sense a rejection of pluralism. I mean you're saying that what we don't want is a situation people come as advocates for a position and use all means fair or foul.

Matthew Taylor: I think pluralism needed to be based upon probably a kind of shared set of values and upon a certain kind of paternalism which has disappeared in society.

Dan Hind: Well that's a maybe, and I think you're historically actually right. But the notion that outs a contending public debate where people come in a gladiatorial way with a point of view and seek, as I say, by any means to fool their opponent and then a public decides on the basis of which argument is still standing. Here it seems to me a perfectly adequate approach to matters of public concern where I think as you say the kind of paternalistic model of pluralism falls down is that it says, "You know what we're gonna have a very exciting debate, but we've chosen who the speakers are". So there's someone in the background usually a public servant of some description who's saying "Matthew represents a legitimate point of view and differs with Dan who represents a legitimate point of view" and somewhere in the wings there's a bunch of people saying, "Yea, but they're talking beside the point." Now I'm more in favor of plural debate, more in favor of a clash of competing ideas, and more in favor as it were where the journalists, the researchers are gonna be interested. They're gonna have a dog in the fight. They're wanna get their next commission, they're gonna wanna build their career. But it gives us an opportunity I think to have a pluralist debate which isn't in any way rigged before hand. You remove as it were the impresario who puts on the show. And that's where I think I differ from kinda traditional pluralism. Because at the moment I think our notions of balance are to some extent managed, and I think our notions of what constitutes legitimate debate are subject to prior restraint if you like, and I think that's a major problem. Very quickly to go about your point the proliferation of opinion. Opinion proliferates I think cause it's cheap. We can go home after a long day and we can do an opinion piece on our blog or we can forward something on our twitter feed. It's quick to do. But finding stuff out is more expensive, and again I have faith that people if they have the power to do it will pay people to find stuff out. So we won't pay for opinion so much, but we'll pay for fact.

Source.

Ron Paul on WikiLeaks

If You're Gonna Get a Pet...