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Monthly Archives: August 2012

What, Nothing’s Wrong Here …

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Another day, another bank in trouble.  It might be easy to do little more than roll your eyes at the news that Standard Chartered of the UK is caught in a scandal, except this one is very different for many reasons.  To start with, the allegation is that they were the launderer in chief for the nation of Iran over a period of at least a decade, helping them hide $250B in money transfers around sanctions.  This is also one of the largest banks in the world, with total assets around $600B and operations around the globe.

But where this gets especially interesting is through the still developing role of the firm Deloitte & Touche.  They are one of the “Big Four” auditing firms that has been in the crosshairs of a large number of people convinced that the lack of truly independent assessment is one of the main problems in the teetering financial industry.  This scandal, different as it is, could be the one that coalesces a diverse group of detractors into a movement – even though auditing had very little to do with it directly.

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Investabots Amok!

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You are walking down the street, texting to a friend, when suddenly everything freezes. These things happen all the time, you reason, so as annoying as it is you reboot and carry on.  A desperate text a short time later comes as a call from your friend to please stop bombarding them!  What went wrong?  You have no idea.  You reboot again and keep walking.

Things like this happen to everyone these days and we’re all used to it.  Software glitches.  Bugs.  Crappy software runs amok in the hands of appliance users.

Now imagine that you are a Wall Street trading firm that handles orders for thousands of clients and this happens to you.  Except that this costs $440M in bum trades by the time anyone catches it.  That’s exactly what happened to Knight Capital, the company that used to handle 11% of all trading on Wall Street.  It’s something that was inevitable in a system that is too big to be useful – and the world is starting to realize how dangerous this is.

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Job Excitement!

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The July jobs report, and boy was it good!  163k jobs were added in July, far more than the 96k predicted (the same as last year).  The summer doldrums are apparently not hitting as hard in 2012 after all.

It’s not fantastic growth by any measure, but it means that we are still treading water – not drowning counts for something, at least.  More importantly, it got us out of the pattern where the summer slowdown sat on the economy like a mini-recession that gave us little hope for the pick-up in Autumn.

What changed?  It’s hard to say.  But we can make a few guesses.

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Swift Boating

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If there’s one irrevocable law in politics, it’s that whatever works will be done and re-done until it fails completely.  The stakes for a Presidential include the most powerful office in the world and total expenditures of $10B.  No one is going to run a campaign based on wild new ideas unless they absolutely have to.

So it should come as no surprise that 2012 is turning into a mirror of 2004.  The only thing that seems wrong with it is that the challenger’s side didn’t anticipate and devise an effective counter to this year’s equivalent of a “Swift Boating” – changing what should be your opponent’s greatest strength into their biggest liability.

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