I called Rafael Corazza, director of the Competition Commission, to ask what he was thinking. “It’s not normal for one market to have special regulations,” he explained. “It was a cartel. The German and Swiss booksellers said it was for a good purpose — they made a cultural argument, but we are an economic commission. They said the system fosters a broader, deeper market for books, that discounting will hurt the small booksellers who support the small publishers, and then you will have fewer books and more focus on best sellers.”
Are they right? I asked.
“I’m not quite sure they’re completely wrong,” he said. “Nobody knows for sure yet. But nobody can read one million titles, so the question is, is it better that more people read fewer books or that fewer people read a lot of different books?”
Flash website :argh: so I won’t quote from it, but the gist is:
The skulls belong all to us. I wanted to bring a catacomb from the near future to the present, to show people that the tragedy of pollution is happening right now. I try to remind people of things they are trying to forget.
CDOs had functioned as the collateral on the quants’ short positions. When the subprime crunch squeezed the financial markets, the value of those CDOs declined, forcing quants to increase the collateral in margin accounts, buy back the shorted stocks, or both. But in either case, in order to supplement their shrinking collateral, quant funds were forced to sell strong blue-chip stocks, whose prices consequently fell. At the same time, as quants bought back shorted stocks, the prices of those stocks increased, demanding the posting of yet more collateral to margin accounts at the very time that the value of CDOs was suffering. That the quants were, apparently, long on the same strong stocks and short on the same weak stocks was a result of a number of strategies, pairs trading among them.
A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.
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